Jesses and Other Means of Control [REWRITE; HIATUS]

Senju Butsuma was a driven man. It was the sort of compliment paid when people had nothing else to fall back on – it was the least you could say about him. Senju Butsuma was driven.

He woke up at 05:00 on the dot every morning; jogged, listened to the news on a slick black earpiece; showered and had breakfast before 06:00, and was in his office by 06:30. There were meetings with shareholders, meetings with subsidiary reps, portfolios updating client projects, emails, phone calls, and faxes until 10:00; short break to go do a “gemba” or a “kaizen” or whatever new social activity his business strategy advisors recommended until 10:30; follow-up on the morning’s meetings until 13:00, when he took lunch – salad, chopped arugula with pine nuts, no dressing – and back into meetings until the close of the workday at 17:00.

His activities outside of work, in the nebulous hours as dusk crawled through the gaps between the bright city lights, were as myriad as they were dull. Sometimes he went golfing. Sometimes he went to a bar, the kind where other men in expensive suits and expensive shoes sip expensive liquor and talk about their expensive cars. Sometimes he stayed home and watched the news on the 4k HD TV in his living room. Sometimes he even watched baseball.

Butsuma’s schedule was rigid in all respects. The only interruption that was permitted was the occasional intrusion of his sons – pale manila folders, stammering recitations of numbers that Butsuma already had in triplicate from the eggheads on floor 23, excuses and explanations and progress that went nowhere. But then, these interruptions were scheduled too, weren’t they?

43-Gamma was young. It was tender, and new. Its roots were pale slivers; its leaves were a soft green. It sat in foreign soil, shivered in the foreign air, drank in the warmth from the strange lights above. 43-Gamma was doomed for failure. It couldn’t remember the water-plain; it couldn’t remember the mad rush of exhilaration as it cleared the line and split the sky with branching boughs.

“No,” Hashirama said, breaking contact with the pot. His pulse was hammering in his throat. “Not this one. Next.”

Izuna had two hard drives plugged into the front of his computer. There was a file transfer in progress – a poisonous green bar slowly inching its way across the small pop-up window. Izuna was on the other side of the room, pulling an old shirt over his head with uncharacteristic haste. A laptop and a charger were thrown on top of his unmade bed. His phone was on the dresser; it pinged at him every once in a while, a momentary flash of light and noise in the otherwise oppressive dark of the room.

Butsuma was the sort of man to judge things by their cost. He had to be – he was, after all, a CEO. Making decisions based on appreciative or depreciative value was literally in his job description. So when Butsuma thought on his beloved oldest son, his disagreeable progeny, the first thing that sprang to mind was the cost of the tuition; the cost of the dorm room that Hashirama had insisted he stay in; the cost of the hospital bed; the cost of the lawyers, the bankers, the media; the cost of the monitoring facilities, the personnel, the training fees, the equipment, the data processors, the hardware – there were a lot of costs that had to be processed before Senju Butsuma could remind himself that he loved his son.

He did, of course. What father didn’t? Hashirama was just young. Headstrong. He’d grow out of it.

Twisting, threading growth – the vines trailed up his wrists, grasping, seeking, the threads in the hollows of their stalks brushing the hair on his fingers. The roots stretched, writhed in the dark earth, greedily drinking in the phosphorus and potassium of the enriched soil. Warmth, heat, the beating pulse of sap in the varicose veins as the leaves unfurled, baring their dappled skin to the sterile air. There was a heavy, hard-shelled bud, thick with purple scale. The vines twisted in the earth around it, trailing like eddies in a tidepool.

Hashirama leaned closer – there was a ringing in his ears, like a struck tuning fork, like an alarm bell heard a building away – the vines clung to the edges of the pot, curling against the cool plastic, snaking along the metal tray. The plant shuddered under his touch as Hashirama breathed.

Butsuma let the driver fly, sending the golf ball sailing over the long stretch of green. Yamanaka Masahiro covered his eyes and whistled sharply in appreciation.

Izuna was having a crisis. He was standing just inside the ancient metal door to the estate; he set his backpack on the ground, then picked it back up; slung it over his shoulder; let it slide again to the floor. Fuck, he needed to just fucking break down and buy a fucking car one of these days – he was typing on his phone, then erasing the message; switching the screen over to the ride-hailing app, then punching in an address. Izuna stooped, collected the fallen backpack, wrenched open the heavy doors, then slipped out into unfamiliar sunshine.

Senju Butsuma was a forgiving man. He was! Tobirama came and begged forgiveness every two weeks – not out loud, obviously, but why else would he even bother to show up to their little meetings, if not to prostrate himself before Butsuma’s beneficence? And Butsuma, magnanimous patriarch that he was, had forgiven him every time. If Tobirama had been any other employee he’d have been terminated after the first three sessions for all the results this project had gotten. Butsuma had clients chomping at the bit for this product, and it remained just out of reach – every day, the temptation to just throw Hashirama in a pressurized cell with an actual team of scientists intensified. Let them work on him without interruptions – let them pry the secret of the mokuton from his flesh and be done with it.

But, no. No, no, Butsuma loved his son – so he let Tobirama waste his money, his time, and his patience, as Hashirama flitted around his flower shop, barely taking in enough revenue to justify the overhead.

And there were other ways of getting what he wanted.

“Your pupils are dilated,” Tobirama said from behind the lamp. He turned it off with a frown, angling the steel frame back down towards the desk. “Do you feel alright?”

On the other side of the basement, trailing vines still moved sluggishly behind plexiglass. Hashirama blinked and tried at focus his eyes on the sealed case, but only succeeded in worsening his headache.

“I feel fine,” he said.

It was due to Butsuma’s warm, soft heart that he’d let this little endeavor go on as long as he had. Butsuma was a good parent. Children had to be disciplined in order to learn right from wrong. That was probably where he’d gone wrong with Hashirama – not enough discipline, early on. Let his mother coddle him.

Izuna slid into the backseat of the hatchback idling outside the Uchiha Compound. “It’s probably a house,” he told the driver. “So just drop me off at the corner of the street, that’ll be fine –”

Butsuma was a patient man – but even patient men had a limit to how long they were willing to wait. It was a matter of good business, after all, and if Hashirama was going to take over this company someday he had to learn what it meant to manage a deadline. If only Hashirama could just man up and make the damn plant already. There were consequences in business, after all. String your clients along for too long and they’ll start looking for their product elsewhere.

“I said I was fine,” Hashirama grumbled from the kitchen table.

“You overexerted yourself,” Tobirama said crisply, refilling the coffee pot with fresh grounds.

The stark whiteness of the kitchen, the gleam of the tile in the late morning sun, was blinding to Hashirama. He rested his eyes on the heels of his palms and said, “Can I borrow some sunglasses?”

Maybe once Hashirama actually produced a working specimen, he’d just take away the flower shop; send Hashirama to manage one of the subsidiaries for a few years. Get him some hands-on experience while the patents were drafted for the gas. File that into Plan B; save it as the best-case scenario.

Plan A, of course, was the worst-case scenario; it was also the most likely. Let it not be said that Senju Butsuma had ever fallen prey to the moral failing known as optimism.

Izuna stood on the sidewalk, soaking in the bland dystopia of the suburb in which he found himself. The hatchback made a three-point turn and sped on to its next customer; Izuna cupped his hand around his phone so he could see the screen through the sunshine. His destination was halfway down the block. He walked past trimmed hedges and neat, square lawns; rows of identical, freshly-built houses with clean vinyl sides and gleaming, double-paned, insulated windows.

The house he was looking for was pale blue; roughly 1,000 square feet, split between one and a half levels; paved driveway, hydrangeas out front.

“We’re so close,” Hashirama said. “The fever’s already gone down, Tobirama – let’s just go back downstairs and –”

“Your eyes are still dilated,” Tobirama said over the rim of his coffee mug. “We’ve made plenty of progress today, as is.”

“The end of the month –”

“– Isn’t worth you risking your health unnecessarily.” Tobirama forced Hashirama back into the chair. “We’ve been at this since six this morning. There’s still ten days left, we can –”

“We don’t even know that I am risking my health,” Hashirama said. He waved at the sunglasses. “This might not even be the mokuton’s doing!”

Tobirama frowned skeptically. “What else could have caused it?”

Hashirama shrugged expansively. “Drugs?”

Tobirama paused, squinting. “Are you on drugs right now?”

“Well, no, but –”

There was a knock at the front door.

Izuna took in a deep breath; then another. It was fine. He was here to gather information – maybe to apologize? Yeah, he was here to apologize. Should probably do that before the information-gathering.

The door opened – it was Tobirama, blinking in the morning sun, peeved expression falling for one of surprise that was masked immediately with cool, polite curiosity. “Izuna,” he said.

“Hi,” Izuna said, hoisting his backpack higher on his shoulder. “Can I come in?”

Tobirama cast a glance behind him, licked his lips, hesitated – then he held the door open and stepped aside.

Izuna ducked into the air conditioned stillness of the house with an uncharacteristic solemnity, toeing his shoes off near the front door and saying, “Sorry for the short notice. I have some information I would like to discuss with you.”

Tobirama didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. They moved from his folded arms to his hips, and then to his pockets. “About the class project?”

Izuna stopped, stared at him like Tobirama’d suddenly started speaking another language. He squinted. “The – oh.” He laughed awkwardly. “No.” He hoisted the backpack higher on his shoulder. “It’s about – uh, your brother.”

It was at this moment that Hashirama appeared in the doorway at the far end of the hall, a dark silhouette against the warm glow of the kitchen in chunky black plastic sunglasses. “Oh,” he said. “… Hello, Izuna.”

Izuna stared, frozen like a rabbit caught in a trap. “Oh,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were here.”

Hashirama looked terrible. There was a faint sheen of sweat around his temples; he was half-leaning on the door frame, as if his legs were threatening to give out at any moment. “How’s –” he started abortively, then cleared his throat. “How are you?”

“You were shot,” Izuna said bluntly.

The hall went silent.

Izuna’s head felt like an overfilled balloon. He opened his mouth again. “You were shot in the chest,” he clarified loudly, adjusting his grip on the bag.

Tobirama shut the door behind Izuna with a click. “Are you going somewhere with this, Izuna?”

Izuna unblinking eyes were fixed on Hashirama’s silhouette.

Hashirama stirred. Hand still resting on the doorframe, he straightened; said, “Did Madara tell you?”

I saw bits of his fucking ribs hit the walls of our dorm room snarled through Izuna’s mind. “Tobirama lent me his file. There’s –” Just say it. “There are a few inconsistencies.”

A jerk of the head; a clenched fist around a smooth brass doorknob. “Anija,” Tobirama started.

“It’s fine,” Hashirama said. He tipped his head back towards the kitchen. “We should probably talk.”