A Darker Reality
Iruka was woken up by an alarm in the middle of the night. Chae-Seon ran in, told him to stay put, and then jettisoned herself out her window, joining what was quickly becoming chaos in the streets below.
Iruka had felt it while he stayed there – the underlying tension that betrayed the somewhat peaceful (if rough and casually violent) air that was on the streets. There were some merchants who looked at shinobi with caution, some that looked specifically at him. Those ones looked on with disdain, muttering about ‘filthy foreign nin’ and ‘privileged little shits’. Kirigakure tried very hard to give off the impression of stability. Its shinobi patrolled the city just as much as they did from the outposts, the Mizukage made appearances occasionally to boost morale, and the merchants and civilians were doing their damnedest to pretend there wasn’t still damage left from the civil war.
But not everyone was content. Chae-Seon, a student of his that was ten years younger than him, had tried to shield him from it, and she had done a good job. He had actually fallen for the illusion after settling in within Kirigakure.
He really was privileged, then. He was a shinobi, he knew to look underneath the underneath, but he still hadn’t expected this. Still hadn’t
He was stuck inside throughout the riots. There was shouting and screaming, and when Chae-Seon walked in, her jounin team behind her, they weren’t speaking. They had blood on them. Chae-Seon had it in her clothing, on her skin, matted into her hair.
“What happened?”
The four of them looked at him. For the first time, some of that disdain he was used to from cynical civilians was present in them, in their eyes. He was naïve, and while he had seen some of the horror that shinobi faced, he had never had to fight his own people. People he saw every day on the streets.
All he could do as the four of them rotated the shower and went to sleep was consider that he never wanted to see a civil war reach Konoha. It had done damage in Kirigakure that was still too stubborn to heal properly.
He closed the door to the apartment, locking it before he laid down.
He stayed in the room that night, but he didn’t get any sleep.
The riots had happened before. There hadn’t been one in months, but there was still the expectation of one about to happen, and that had been enough for Mei to have a standing watch throughout the village, particularly once the sun went down.
She was glad of that now, even if the streets were once more coated in blood.
“We need to keep this from our allies.”
Ao scoffed. “You say that like we have concrete alliances.”
“You know what I mean. We had to kill our own people. We can’t have that get back to Konoha.” Mei turned back to her desk, looking at the paperwork. “I know you think it’s a bad idea, but I want the elected civilian bodies fast-tracked.”
“Why? They riot when we piss them off, why reward that?”
“If we give a little, we can gain a lot. Give them a body, let them control civilian curriculums, let them control their taxes, the merchant laws. I have to sign off on all of it anyway, so there’s no concern of an overreach.
“If we don’t give them some form of control, or at least the illusion of it, then we risk this happening again.”
Ao looked long and hard at her before turning to Zabuza. “You’re on her side, aren’t you?”
“I just don’t want us to follow the last two regimes.”
Mei glanced between the two of them before drafting the memo, a note at the top to take it to the civilian council. Elections would be in three months. “If I have anything to say about it, we won’t.”
Jae-Un had seen riots before. They weren’t uncommon at the end of the war, and she had been forced to fight. It still left a bad taste in her mouth, killing or injuring her own people.
Tossing over in her sleeping bag, she glanced at Mi-Na. She was staring blankly at the ceiling, not even pretending or trying to sleep, her arms spread out.
“You okay?”
Mi-Na shrugged. “I don’t know.”
The feeling was mutual.
“Does it ever get easier, you think?”
Mi-Na turned her head towards Jae-Un.
“They say it does.” Ji-Su sat up from where her sleeping bag was. They all shared a room in a small apartment with an elderly woman that allowed them to pay a lower rent than was probably fair. Ji-Su looked at the window after hearing a small crash and shriek. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing, though.”
Jae-Un joined her in sitting upright, bunching her knees toward her chest. “I don’t know. I’ve heard seonsaengnim never really got desensitized like some of the older shinobi, and she’s a jounin and Swordsman.”
“Yeah, but she says she hated killing to begin with.”
“But she’s a jounin. Even if she doesn’t like it, she should be desensitized. That’s what Suigetsu always says.”
Jae-Un looked back to the wall. “Do we really want to get to a point it doesn’t bug us though? Killing and hurting people, I mean. What does it say about us, if we can kill as many people as she has and we don’t feel it?”
None of them had an answer for that one.
None of them slept that night, either.
*
Jiraiya’s spies weren’t talking. Something had happened in Kirigakure, but they got cagey about the details. It wasn’t until he greased one of them with some booze that anything started coming forward.
“It was…” The man sighed. “That woman… There’s a reason they call her the Bloody Flower. And those other three…”
“What happened?”
Bloody Flower. This couldn’t be good. Jiraiya poured the many more sake.
“There were some people, got real violent late at night. There was… There were some younger shinobi. They were…”
The man shut down.
“Look, she was following orders. I get that. But… That girl is terrifying. No two ways about it.”
Knowing what he knew about Nara Riko, he thought that an apt descriptor. Of her capabilities, at the very least. And if that was a first impression?
Yeah, she wasn’t going to make many friends that way.
“Thanks, kid.”
“I’m 30.”
“And I was a jounin by the time you were born. You’re a kid.”
His informant scowled as he downed the rest of his drink. He stood and left. Jiraiya watched him go and looked down at his notes. A riot in the capital of the Land of Water? That was nothing new. Nothing to tell people much about.
Jae-Suk looked at the gate. He always waited a couple minutes after classes let out. Sometimes Shikamaru would pick him up and they would do their lessons somewhere in Konoha – a restaurant, an event. It was always fun.
Sighing, he started kicking a stone down the road. There wasn’t much room in the nicer parts of Konoha for a kid that spoke with an accent as thick as his was, so unless he had Shikamaru it often wasn’t worth his time to try and find something to do. Some parents even said that they worried he would hurt their childrens’ chances if he spoke too much around them. They would ‘learn to speak wrong’.
It didn’t hurt. That’s what he told himself. Mom would do anything to protect me. That’s what these people are doing for their kids.
But he was sick of giving Konoha the benefit of the doubt. He was sick of being second-class just because his family couldn’t afford to stay and fight. So, instead of trying, he ducked into the front of the refugee neighborhood. It was gated off, but it was a nicer place, in his opinion. The humidity from steaming foods and people using water chakra felt like home, and the trees around him shaded him from the light of the sun. When the shade was just right and the people were at their most carefree he could pretend they never left and that his sister would be in the apartment with the rest of the family.
Slamming the door behind him, he did a quick check. No one was home. All the better for getting his homework done, if he was honest.
Sitting down, he got to work. This was going to take a while without Shikamaru to help him.