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lostinthesasuke · 7 months

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do you think sasuke is religious or upholds his clan's religious practices? i was rereading and in the part where they go to resucitate the hokages orochimaru says "there's nothing left of the uchiha's nakano shrine", to which sasuke answers "the exterior doesn't matter" and it got me wondering

HI YES thank you so much for sending this ask. it's very close to me. elaborated a Lot under the cut but tl;dr - yes.

he is religious in the only way he remembers how to be. preserving Uchiha tradition and culture is deeply important to him. when he said the exterior of Nakano shrine didn't matter, sure he was referring to the fact that there was a hidden underground level... but it meant much more than that.

genocide doesn't just claim lives, it claims languages and religions and every facet of culture. konoha has been known to participate in the censorship and eradication of culture. this assimilation functions as an extension of genocide.

by virtue of being a survivor, i think sasuke feels an obligation to "carry the torch". since he was so young when the massacre occurred, it's likely a lot of practice and customs have been lost altogether. this is distressing to him. even during his character introduction at 12 years old, his clans "restoration" was first and foremost in his mind. to me this statement was never about re-population as many people interpret, but about justice, pride, and culture.

he feels as though the Uchiha name has been "tainted" and it is his responsibility to "purify" it. but what that means to him shifts over time.

the Uchiha clan's religion is obviously based on and deeply tied to the Shinto religion, just like the clan's jutsu and kekkei genkai. many Uchiha jutsu are named after Shinto deities.

this part i am not going to delve into too much yet because one day i will probably write a paper about it, but one of the tenets of Shinto belief is the importance of purity. Shinto practice and customs are regionally variant but the practice of purification is central. death is considered to be extremely impure. this context is deeply relevant to Sasuke's belief system and the way he thinks about himself and his clan.

it is likely that the uchiha religion is closed, evidenced by nakano shrine being kept a secret. sasuke not only has to contend with the fact that the remaining pieces of his culture are guarded and hidden, requiring the use of high-level dojutsu to decipher, but also that any of it may have been altered. the revelation that the stone tablet was altered in order to facilitate madara's manipulation and further subjugation of the uchiha was destabilizing. sasuke has to put the pieces of his religion back together with mostly his memories to rely on.

many parallels can be drawn between sasuke and the sun goddess Amaterasu. when she is betrayed by her brother Susanoo, she withdraws into a cave and plunges the world into darkness. Susanoo conspires to manipulate her into leaving the cave, and then binds her.

this gender reversal is sort of fascinating. Amaterasu and Susanoo contradict the popular notions about the sun and moon and the masculine and feminine. of course this reminds me of sasuke as well, because everything does.

sasuke is typically associated with the waning crescent, the phase just before a new moon, and itachi with a full moon. since sasuke is associated with the moon, the yin, and the feminine, it would logically follow that he would be passive like water; low like a valley. however, he subverts this expectation.

i believe this is a big part of why he makes so many people uncomfortable. he is fire and lightning and he is not a perfect victim.

after speaking to the kage and revealing the secrets of Nakano shrine, he resolves himself to burn the world down and be reborn like a phoenix. like the waning crescent before a new moon.

he is not "pure" the way itachi expects, kishimoto states, or many fans anticipate. he has strong convictions and he is confident. he is not apologetic and he is impossible to ignore.

the first time we ever see sasuke associated with the sun is after he learns the truth about the massacre. he leaves his cave. he sheds hebi and becomes taka, predator instead of prey. he is ready to spill as much blood as it takes.

i have many ideas about what Uchiha religious customs might look like, and many of them concern fire. the uchiwa fan that stokes the flames is their crest. they are seen as fully fledged members of the clan once they can perform katon jutsu. the shrine that houses the Uchiha's patron deity has eternal flames lit.

drawing from my own religion, one of my favorite metas draws a parallel between the Uchiha fire affinity and

אש תמיד (Aish tamid)

which means eternal flame. (sorry for line break, tumblr hates right to left languages). Aish tamid refers to the flame in the temple of Jerusalem that was always kept alight before its desecration by the greeks. just like the torches located in Nakano shrine.

the greeks attempted to hellenize and extinguish Jewish culture. they outlawed observance of Shabbat and circumcision, spat in the face of kashrut by sacrificing pigs in the temple, and even built statues of their gods within. the Jewish people rebelled against them and the flame was rekindled.

rebellion, justice, and pride in culture is in the spirit of fire. unending, always enduring. Sasuke and the Uchiha clan embody this, their crests always emblazoned on their clothes even at the cost of armor. from Madara's rage, to the coup, to Sasuke's revenge, justice is an integral component to the Uchiha ethos.

to me this is a really interesting contrast to the will of fire. the will of fire is the ideal of nationalism-- putting the state before the self. this idea is lauded as heroism. it was originated by the senju, no wonder.

meanwhile, the uchiha clan with their fire affinity and deeply spiritual connection to flame are seen as transgressors. they are seen as disruptive to the ideal of the "will of fire" due to their strong cultural identity. they refuse to assimilate into the dominant culture. they prioritize their love and familial bonds with each other over konoha's interests.

naruto wiki im going to kill you

they are labeled with the opposing "curse of hatred".

it is no surprise then that itachi was praised for his strong "will of fire" for carrying out the massacre-- putting the well-being of the state over the lives of his family. groomed into following the senju doctrine and abandoning his own culture. assimilated and outcast.

in modern culture Aish tamid is kept alight by the continuation of religious practice- praying and studying Torah keep the flame burning. "The exterior doesn't matter". the flame is already burning within Sasuke.

sasuke carries on whatever pieces of his culture he remembers, and he prays in the dark, and he thinks of his mother with her hands clasped at the kamidana, and he visits shrines often on his journey. he lights incense and he burns brightly. and he walks on.

#naruto meta #uchiha sasuke #txt #ok whatever sorry this is 10 million words i couldn't figure out how to trim it down more #thanks for sending me this hope it is interesting #ask

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mixelation · 8 months

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i wrote more reborn au. it is the situation described previously when tori has a non-team 4 mission go awry

i might change the timeline a little, but for now: tori is 16, and she has an official position in R&D so she takes fewer out of village missions. i might change it later but she gives her rank as tokubetsu jounin, because my interpretation of this rank is that you have some sort of high-value jounin-level skill (like fuinjutsu) but your OVERALL skills aren't really jounin level. so she got promoted hella fast after making chunin, but she gets stuck at this rank a while whereas itachi and deidara get to full jounin like immediately lmao. also she and itachi have been fake-dating a few months, but that's not relevant to the following

uuh also this has some stuff that i feel like doesn't punch as hard as it should without context to foreshadow it, so apologizes if some details seem to come out of nowhere???

The mission started off uncomfortable and it didn’t get much better.

The premise was this: a research team had tracked some rare scrolls all the way into the boonies of a tiny jungle territory between Fire Country and Water Country, which had historically been traded back and forth between both countries but was currently maintaining its status as an independent state after the fallout of the Third Shinobi War. It had no native ninja clans, but enough powers had occupied it that both Kiri and Konoha occasionally sent in probes to figure out if there were any leftover ninja-related valuables.

The idea was that a ninja village had the rights to ninja materials, even if they’d both technically agreed not to interfere with the tiny nation. Tori understood everyone in her life just accepted this as a morally neutral fact of the world and elected not to analyze it further for her own sanity. It wasn’t like she wasn’t ready and willing to forego her own ethical framework when it was convenient.

So the research team had followed some local leads to unearth an ancient and abandoned shinobi stronghold of unknown origin, but had been blocked from accessing it because the fuuinjutsu protecting it was so old no one on the team could figure out how to break it. This was how Tori was chosen for the back-up team Minato was sending in: if you wanted someone to disentangle an unknown and strange set of seals quickly and without damaging the surrounding structure, Tori was your girl. There simply wasn’t anyone else as good except Kushina herself, and Kushina had way more in-village responsibilities.

The risk of spending a long time at this location was that Kiri would inevitably notice and send their own team in, and then even if they avoided an outright conflict, Konoha risked Kiri running off with the scrolls or whatever other treasures happened to be in the stronghold, if any. This was how the rest of the Tori’s team was picked: combat ninja for back-up.

“Oh, this is the most fun part about being a fuinjutsu specialist, you know,” Kushina had told her, when she’d gone over to pick up fuinjutsu supplies from her office. “You get sent on all sorts of weird missions to all sorts of places, and work with all sorts of people!”

Kushina was… maybe more social and likable than Tori. Kushina could make friends with a rock. Tori, in contrast, somehow started a feud with half the people she met.

It started with some weird comments. Tori pulled a bottle of insect repellant out of a storage seal during one of their breaks on the first day, and her teammate made a snide remark about Tori living a life of luxury.

“...do you want some?” Tori offered.

She was literally just using a store-bought spray in a standard-design storage scroll. Kushina had told her off more than once for over-relying on storage scrolls which could be easily stolen or destroyed or lost, but she’d seen other shinobi do this. She’d seen their captain do this, earlier. This was normal behavior.

The weird comments continued from the same teammate, who was a rank-and-file jounin with no additional titles. Mostly they were jabs at her main designation being R&D: surprise she could clean fish, condescendingly assuring her she wouldn’t have to fight and risk chipping a nail. The comments got an occasional snicker from other ninja, but they weren’t overtly hostile and definitely not as mean as whatever the fuck Itachi might say just in friendly conversation. She gritted her teeth and beared it.

The guy was only like nineteen or twenty. Tori wasn’t sure what his problem with her was, since he was pretty young for a jounin and couldn’t be so untalented that it would make sense for him to have a chip on his shoulder, but also he was young enough that maybe he just hadn’t matured very much yet. Or maybe it was just that she was even younger and already a tokubetsu jounin and– gasp!– a woman. People generally highly praised Deidara and Itachi for making jounin so young, but their talents were generally more obvious, and also they were men. Shinobi were less sexist than the surrounding civilian attitudes toward women, but the misogyny still crept into their culture. Sometimes some men just got upset when women were smarter or stronger or higher ranked than them. Even Kushina occasionally got pushback.

(Not that no one ever acted jealous or insane to Itachi or Deidara– it was just that they got it less often, and people rarely acted like that twice, because both boys were nightmare people.)

So she ignored her teammate and didn’t think much of it. Sometimes people were just assholes. In Oto or in Akatsuki, this might have led to him doing something unspeakably horrible to her, but this was Konoha. Konoha ninja could be petty and mean and jaded, but they didn’t do that.

Tori hadn’t gotten to go into the jungles of this world often, and her mood did brighten even as the weather got hotter and more humid and they had to slow down as the foliage got denser. She liked seeing the shift in trees from Hashirama trees to broad-leafed jungle trees, seeing strangler figs and hearing tree frogs and finding the prints of a large cat. She even found delight in the presence of native giant leeches they also imported to their Forest of Death.

“The anticoagulants they excrete actually have a lot of medical applications,” she said cheerfully, poking one gently with a stick. They could also kill you if you let one attach for too long.

“Uh, okay,” said their captain. “Keep on task.”

“When you let a researcher out of the lab,” another teammate joked to the one who kept ragging on her. Tori rolled her eyes.

It took almost an entire week to get to the stronghold. During this time, the teammate that was ragging on her got both the other ninja with them to also start on the same sort of stupid jokes. Tori pulled a branch off a squat little tree and offered it to the teammate who’d started it all.

“Here, it’s an insect repellent,” she said, smiling as sweetly as she could. “Since you forgot to bring yours.”

For some reason, this just made the teammate meaner. By the time they researched the stronghold, she was getting accusations that she was only here due to favoritism from the fucking Hokage.

“On task,” the captain sighed, having also laughed at a couple of the jokes.

Whatever, Tori thought.

The lead of the research team, at least, didn’t even blink when he saw her. He was technically part of R&D. She had a reputation there.

The stronghold was a small, stone building overgrown with strangler figs. The research team had already removed the foliage from the entrance and revealed the seal protecting it, which probably saved at least half a day’s work. Still, the fuinjutsu on it was a mess, and it took Tori a couple hours to disentangle what was even going on.

The research leader bounced his knee in anticipation the entire time. Apparently they’d found evidence the night before of other shinobi in the area, and they were afraid Kiri could show up at any moment.

“Can’t you do that faster?” Tori’s captain asked as she made notes on her own scroll.

“Not unless you want me to risk blowing it up,” Tori replied.

“Well, try harder,” he said.

She wondered, vaguely, if he would have this attitude towards her if he hadn’t spent a whole week listening to someone make demeaning comments about her. Maybe she should have tried to nip that in the bud sooner? Usually she’d prefer an opponent underestimating her, but these were people she needed to trust her skills… she’d promised herself to stop thinking of everyone she met as an enemy until proven otherwise.

Well, whatever. The nice thing about her boss being a fuinjutsu master was that if this captain tried to report on her being too slow, Minato would put him straight immediately.

She got the seal off in record time. Instead of opening into the little building, the door led to a staircase that went straight down into the earth. Tori held back a comment about Oto also being arranged like this. She didn’t need to remind her asshole teammate that she was a foreigner on top of whatever he didn’t like about her.

“Great,” the research lead sighed.

The next several days were spent exploring the tunnels that turned out to be underneath the building. They were carved out by an underground river, which still flowed through the main passages. The remains of wooden walkways over it were still apparent, but the structure had largely rotted away and they were forced to walk on the walls or the river itself. There were more fuinjutsu-covered doors leading to narrow rooms and more fucking stairways down, in a confusing labyrinth of passages that mostly held nothing of value.

The combat team was roped into searching the tunnels in order to cover more area quickly, since there was the ongoing anxiety that Kiri could show up any minute. They all seemed bored by the slow progress of Tori opening up new passageways only for no one to find anything but rotting wood furniture and, once, some old and useless cookware. Tori was having fun, at least. Whoever had set up the security seals must have been high when they did it.

Then everything went to shit all at once.

Tori was taking her lunch break, squatting in the corner of an empty room and eating a protein bar, when her asshole teammate showed up to report he’d found another fuinjutsu-covered door. Many of the rooms had puddles from the river leaking through cracks, and the jounin rushed in so quickly he didn’t even bother water-walking over them.

The door he’d found was different from the rest, with an ornately carved stone door frame. It also wasn’t wood like the rest had been, held together against time by fuinjutsu. This door was a solid block of rock, a giant disc on the side of the door frame.

“I bet Hokage-sama will give us a bonus if we’re the ones who find the scrolls,” he said, his excitement obvious as Tori poked at the door. “They do that for object recovery, right?”

“I think that’s only if you find something that wasn’t a part of the mission parameters,” Tori replied, taking a step back to squint at the full seal. There wasn’t a universal pattern to them, but she was getting pretty quick about identifying and then dismantling the relevant parts.

“Pft, what do you know,” her teammate replied, kicking at a puddle.

“No offense,” Tori started, pulling out her brush and a jar of ink, “but what is your problem with me?”

Her teammate didn’t answer, watching her paint very carefully over the seal. The stone wheel that made up the door groaned and slowly rolled aside.

The room inside was definitely different from the rest. The back wall was nothing but running water, held in place by more fuinjutsu that formed a gently glowing web of chakra over it. There was also actual decoration on the exposed stone walls, carved and then painted in. In the center of the room was a stone pedestal with an obvious scroll box.

Tori’s teammate was obnoxious, but he was still a jounin and not an idiot. He waited for Tori to flick chakra-infused ink into the room and then perform a jutsu to check for traps.

The room itself was safe. The problem was that the pedestal was obviously boobytrapped.

“Can you undo it?” her teammate asked, peering at the box. It matched the description the research team had.

It was hard to reveal the seals on the pedestal and take a look. They were, in fact, more insane than what was on all the doors. Unlike the doors, these were meant to be somewhat permanent, not meant for anyone but the sealmaster who made them to take off.

“It’s… going to take some time,” Tori said cautiously. “But, shit, this array itself is probably valuable.”

She pointed to how it scattered down the pedestal to the river wall and then up and across the ceiling in a nonstandard shape. If it were disrupted, the seal holding the water back would break, immediately flooding the room. At the same time, the bit on the ceiling would collapse… something. Either the ceiling itself or wall with the exit.

There was a mechanism also holding the box in place and locked shut, so no random person would be able to move it or open it and then accidentally set off the trap. Breaking that part of the seal wouldn’t be any more difficult than the doors, but Tori would need some time to figure out how to disentangle this mechanism from the deathtrap so they didn’t set it off and could remove the scrolls safely.

“Alright,” the jounin said at length. “But you have to make it clear I’m the one who found it.”

Tori really, really didn’t think this mattered, but before they could decide what exactly to do, two strangers walked into the room. They were both wearing Kiri headbands.

“Are you kidding me?” the jounin said, stepping between Tori and the Kiri-nin and drawing a kunai.

She hadn’t noticed it over the rush of the river in front of them, but now that Tori was concentrating, she could hear the shouts of a fight outside.

“Oh nice, you found it for us,” one of the Kiri said. Both had swords drawn. Tori drew her own kunai and shifted into a fight-ready stance.

“Surely there’s a diplomatic solution to this,” she tried.

“Oops, too late,” the other Kiri-nin answered, flashing teeth at her.

Tori’s jounin teammate took a step back and whispered out of the corner of his mouth: “I’ll engage them. Get the box off.”

“But–” Tori started.

Behind his back, he signed that they’d flash step out. Tori nodded slowly. It was risky, and she wasn’t sure she could flash step quickly enough to not get caught in the trap, but a really good jounin could.

This was the best part of Konoha, she thought. Even assholes had your back.

One of the Kiri-nin chucked a handful of kunai at them, and Tori fully turned to back to face the seal on the pedestal. She heard the clink of her teammate batting the blades out of the air with his sword. Yes, even this guy had her back, no questions asked.

She barely watched the fight as she concentrated on her own work. Her teammate was a good fighter, and he managed to counter both ninja while also keeping any attacks from hitting her. It only took a few minutes for him to kill one of the Kiri-nin, after which the second backed off and tried more mid-range attacks.

“Got it,” Tori finally announced. Her teammate pounced on the Kiri-nin, plunging the sword into her.

“Do it,” he told Tori, turning to her with the wild eyes of man high on his own bloodlust.

“As soon as I release it, the seal–” Tori started to warn.

The Kiri-nin he’d left crumpled in the corner groaned and rolled onto her feet unsteadily, still alive.

“It’s okay, I got you,” her teammate said, wrapping an arm around her waist. “The faster we move, the faster we can back-up our teammates.”

“Right,” Tori agreed, poising her paintbrush. “On the count of three.”

What happened next was such a slimy move that it completely blindsided Tori, even if it shouldn’t have. Training herself to no longer assume that people were just going to screw her over for no reason had been a bad idea, it turned out.

She called one as she made the last of her brush strokes. Her mouth started on the syllable, and the jounin adjusted his grip on her so his hand was around the supply pack at the small of her back. He leaned over and put his hand over the box, his grip adjusted wide enough to wrap the last joints of his fingers over the top. This would be a weird as fuck hold for a joint flash step, but Tori didn’t give it a second thought. He just moved to put his hand on the box. That was their mission.

And then he flash stepped through the rubble suddenly raining down on them, taking the box and Tori’s pack with him, leaving Tori behind to be knocked over by the sudden wave of water.

The first few moments of the room flooding were chaos. Part of the ceiling and the entire wall collapsed, and debris hit her shoulder and legs as the water battered her around.

It calmed eventually, with the water only waist deep. Tori spat out water and fumbled for one of the glow sticks in her weapons pack.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” the wounded Kiri-nin asked when Tori lit up the room. “Holy shit, did he leave you on purpose?”

Tori bit her lip. Yes, he totally had. What the fuck. Konoha ninja weren’t supposed to be like this.

When Tori didn’t respond, the Kiri-nin wrote her off and started yelling at the collapsed wall for help. There was no evidence anyone heard her at all.

The good news was that the river wasn’t rushing in. Its source must have also partially collapsed, leaving the river at a small trickle.

“The water had a way out,” Tori announced, wading toward the back wall. “Maybe we can…”

She tried diving. When she found nothing, the Kiri-nin also tried. The exit the water had been taking before was completely sealed off.

“Oooh, we’re fucked,” the Kiri-nin sighed. “What the fuck was your friend’s plan?”

“I don’t…” Tori started. He should have taken her with him. It was well within his abilities. He’d told her.

He’d also taken her travel pack with all her fuinjutsu supplies. She still had some kunai and shuriken and a flare and a couple glow sticks in her weapons pack, but those would hardly help. She had a few scrolls still on her, but none of those were going to get her out.

The water was getting higher. Tori found she was shaking. Konoha ninja weren’t supposed to do this.

Old Tori had been physically weaker, but she hadn’t been this gullible, this stupid. She hadn’t been able to afford it.

“I-I can stop the water,” Tori told the Kiri-nin, embarrassed that her voice sounded like she was on the brink of tears.

The Kiri-nin eyed her with something that was either pity or disgust or both.

“Is this your first life or death mission, little girl?” she asked.

Tori let out a hysterical laugh. No, actually, she should have anticipated this happening from the first weird comment. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“I’m sixteen,” Tori said. “They’ve sent me into worse.”

She said this more to remind herself. She’d survived worse. She’d just been an idiot, thinking she’d finally been in a position to trust people.

The Kiri-nin snorted.

“Whatever, Konoha. Don’t stop the water yet. That might be the only way out.”

The Kiri-nin performed a series of water jutsu, meant to scope out the walls and floor and ceiling and find any gaps they could take advantage of, either to drain the water or send a message for help or get out. It would make sense if the person who set up the trap also left a way to get out, rather, let themselves back in to retrieve their scrolls.

Tori wondered if the Kiri-nin would actually help her if she identified a way out, or if she’d also spitefully leave her for dead. How sad would it be, if she was betrayed by her own comrade and saved by a random Kiri-nin?

Tori didn’t get to find out the answer to the question, because the Kiri-nin didn’t find anything. If there was a way back in, it wasn’t accessible from the inside. The Kiri-nin leaned back against a wall, panting with exertion and holding her side where Tori’s teammate had stabbed her.

“I’m a medic,” Tori offered. Her medical supplies were off with her treasonous teammate, but she could still do some chakra-based stuff.

“Shut up,” the Kiri-nin groaned. “Okay, I’m going to dive again and try to get out through the river’s entrance.”

“You sure you don’t want me to at least stop the bleeding–”

“Shut up.”

The Kiri-nin dived. When she didn’t come back for a very long time, Tori waded over to the river’s entrance and attempted diving herself.

There wasn’t an opening big enough to fit her body through. Instead, she found the Kiri-nin’s body with her arm wedged into a crevice that must have collapsed further when she stuck her arm in. Tori couldn’t dislodge it to try and drag the woman back to the surface. She was dead, anyway.

Tori pulled one of her remaining scrolls from her vest and set up a barrier to block the influx of water. It was now up to her chest.

Then she pulled herself up to sit on top of the water and very quietly freaked out.

It wasn’t being trapped in a sealed room with two dead Kiri-nin that freaked her out, exactly. It wasn’t even that she had no idea if any of her teammates outside were alive or aware she needed help. It wasn’t even necessarily that her teammate had seemingly turned on her for stupid reasons.

It was that she had gone out of her way to assume an asshole was just an asshole, that Konoha ninja were the exception to the rule she’d learned through both her shitty lives, like an idiot. It stung, worse than she would have thought it would.

Her barrier eventually ran out of chakra, and as she watched it flicker and die, a horrible thought struck Tori.

No one was going to come help her, because her teammate was not going to report her as alive but trapped. He was going to report her as definitively dead, because there was no way he’d let her be seen alive to tell her side of the story.

Maybe, once they got back to Konoha and formally reported her KIA, Minato would send someone for her body. They usually only did that for people with stealable bloodline limits, but Kushina would probably push for it. Or maybe, if the rest of the team was all killed by Kiri or otherwise too injured to go back themselves, Minato would eventually send someone to check up on them. Neither scenario was a timeline where Tori would still be alive if she stayed in here.

In the best case scenario, her team beat off the Kiri-nin, and then someone came looking for her. The asshole teammate would protest, would insist she was dead in a collapsed and inaccessible room, but maybe someone would insist on retrieving her body.

It seemed unlikely. She’d already been too charitable with her assessment of this team. None of them were coming for her.

She had two more scrolls with barriers to hold back the water slowly seeping in. Neither of them had enough chakra to last more than a couple hours, but she could recharge them a few times with her own chakra, although without food, chakra would become a finite resource. She had maybe a day before she drowned using just these tools.

She could make a seal, of course. Her teammate had taken her supplies, and the ink and brush she’d had out before we lost in the flood, but she still had a body full of blood and plenty of surfaces to draw on. It wouldn’t be easy or neat, since blood required different calculations and wet, uneven rocks would be hard to draw on, but she could do it.

Her first idea was to tap into one of her storage dimensions. She had some food squirreled away in one, and some fuinjutsu supplies in another. The one she’d stuck a bunch of spare camping supplies in probably even had a better light source.

Okay, Tori decided, standing on the water, here I go.

xXx

Two days passed, and no one came for her. With food and fuinjutsu supplies, she’d been able to wrap a double barrier around the main source of water, but it must have been slowly seeping in from somewhere else too because the water level was still slowly rising. She could no longer stand fully on the water surface, and she’d had no good way to sleep.

She tried a controlled explosion on the wall she knew led to an open passage, but instead she’d just collapsed more of the room. There must not have been anything above her but more earth.

The explosion had also shaken the Kiri-nin’s body loose, and Tori didn’t really have anywhere to put it, so she was just… floating.

Tori’s new plan was to get a message to Konoha. Maybe a regular team wouldn’t get to her in time, but Minato could. She wasn’t sure he would, but…

She struggled to cling to this hope, even though it turned out trust was a lie and Konoha-nin were the types to just fuck you over for no reason.

Tori didn’t really have a good way to send a message herself. Between Itachi’s crows and Deidara’s animated clay, they’d always taken care of it when she’d been on a regular team. She’d never had a need to invent her own way. She stuck some messages into storage dimensions she knew Kushina also had the key to, but she wasn’t sure why Kushina would check them unless she knew Tori was in danger.

Which she wouldn’t know, because Tori’s teammate was an asshole.

She did know a couple time-space jutsu, but those were notoriously difficult, and she didn’t know any that wouldn’t require another person. She wasn’t even sure any solo ones existed, besides the Hiraishin, because usually you at least needed a receiver.

Tori ran option after option through her brain. She didn’t know shit about summoning jutsu, which would be super useful in this situation if not just for the ability to reverse summon. Could she logic her way through how they must work and then reverse engineer it…?

No, she’d have better luck reverse engineering the Hiraishin. At least she knew some of the theory behind that one.

Sitting on the water, the top of her head brushed the ceiling. Or maybe she should focus on making a full-wall seal to keep the water out. That she was at least positive she could do. But that would take so much time…

Tori stuck her head between her knees and willed herself not to cry. She still felt so fucking stupid, and the lack of sleep and floating corpse weren’t helping. Of course she shouldn't have trusted the guy who was making fun of her the whole time. Of course, of course, stupid, stupid, stupid.

She mentally flipped through everything she knew about time-space jutsu, feeling hysterical. She’d tried the Hiraishin before, and nothing had even happened because only two people in the world had ever managed it. Even with entire villages trying to beat it during the war, no one had even come close. It would be deeply stupid and arrogant of her to push forward assuming she could accomplish what entire teams of more experienced shinobi had failed to do.

She was developing a crick in her neck from being bent forward as she approached the ceiling, so she laid down on her back. All her clothes were already wet regardless.

Except, she had spent a lot of time thinking deep thoughts about the Hiraishin, because, well, it didn’t make sense no one had been able to copy it. Minato had left seals all over the place. No one had even been able to figure out how to undo them without removing the entire object the seal was on; it was why Iwa had been so terrified of them sneaking even one in.

The markers are only a guide for the actual jutsu, Minato had said when she’d asked, and then when she’d asked again and again, Only I can use them, because only I have my chakra.

But why couldn’t someone else use his chakra? She just couldn’t shove this explanation into her understanding of how space-time jutsu worked. Most of them worked using another user as a receiver on the other end, or else by using multiple people to throw something to a receiving array, and none of them worried about chakra incompatibilities. Tori had been considering using a fucking tree as a receiver, if she’d had the foresight to set up a tree-powered seal to be her receiver. And why the fuck hadn’t she done that, if she’d thought about it so much? How had she never anticipated being trapped with no hope of back-up? Old Tori would have never. Stupid, stupid, stupid–

Actually, Tori thought, sitting up on her elbows. Hiraishin wasn’t receiver-less, was it? Minato just did both jutsu on one end but somehow the marker anchored the receiving jutsu, somehow slingshotting him through space. Or at least that was the only way Tori could conceptualize it possibly working. You could, in theory, use an already active seal as an unmanned receiver; it was just that you needed to be really, insanely good to make a seal that complex that could stay active for long periods of time. That was why Tori’s idea had used a tree’s chakra to power the receiving end. But if you just had, like, some sort of tiny, self-sustaining guide for your receiver jutsu….? That was probably why it had to be Minato’s own chakra.

Tori had no idea how to simultaneously do two jutsu and also do them so lightning fast it was basically instantaneous from having the thought to teleporting, the way Minato did. But why couldn’t she include both in a seal, with one of his markers as the anchor? At the end of the day, Tori had taught herself to use fuinjutsu almost entirely with other people’s chakra. Her original concept she’d been working on (but never tested, like an idiot) had been based around a goddamn tree. She’d done extensive testing on how chakra from different sources varied and how to optimize jutsu to it. She could totally hijack one of Minato’s seals.

She was worryingly close to the ceiling now, even flat on her back. She drew a copy of a Hiraishin marker and then got to work painting a combination send-and-receive transport seal around it.

xXx

Tori found herself on a dark forest floor, gasping for breath. She had no idea where she was, but at least she was no longer under fucking water. Pine needles poked into her back as she collapsed, staring up into the canopy. The trees had spindly arms and the full moon peeked through.

The forest was still and quiet. Tori was working very hard on not hyperventilating.

I’m alive, she promised herself. I��m breathing.

Her body was shaking from adrenaline. She’d gotten a working seal painted in time, even if she’d had a hell of a time activating it. She was fine. She was alive.

She got about three seconds of time to lay there and breathe before Minato was suddenly on top of her, a rasengan waving in her face. Tori shrieked.

“It’s me, it’s me!” she screeched. The rasengan, being made mostly of chakra, gave off its own weak light, and Minato’s face was dead-serious as he commanded that she give various identifying codes to confirm her identity. Tori’s brain was already scattered and panicked from barely escaping drowning, and her answers came out garbled. Finally she yammered, “Who else would be hijacking your seals?”

Minato was quiet for a few moments, and then he released the rasengan. Rather than reabsorb the chakra, he let it spiral out in a gust of wind that made Tori shiver.

Minato stood. He was in his pajamas, and one knee was damp from where he’d been kneeling on her stomach. He offered her a hand. In the moonlight, his face looked weary.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked, sounding exhausted. “Report.”

The phrasing of the command meant that even if he was in his pajamas, he was talking to her as Hokage right now. Tori did her best to straighten up and explain herself like she would for a mission or a lab experiment gone wrong, but her story quickly turned into an upset ramble.

She didn’t know if her team was alive. She wasn’t even sure how much time had passed. Her teammate had been an asshole to her and she’d ignored it but she shouldn’t have because that was her clue she shouldn’t have trusted him with shit–

“How did you get here?” MInato cut her off. His voice was barely restrained emotion, stress and anger. Tori felt almost taken aback. She’d thought he’d care more than she nearly died.

She felt stupid that she was this upset over a bunch of nobodies leaving her for dead, about being this incoherent over almost dying. Wasn’t she tougher than this? Why did Minato being mad at her make her want to cry?

She walked him through the logic of her escape efforts. If Minato had any personal thoughts on her initial attempts or her aside that the Kiri-nin’s body had just been hanging out, he didn’t show them. His eyebrows did raise higher and higher as she described her eventual solution to her predicament.

“You just came up with that?” he asked. She couldn’t tell if he was dumbfounded or furious.

Maybe this will be when they decide I’m too dangerous and kill me, Tori thought. She’d thought she’d been safe from this inevitability, but maybe not.

“Well,” Tori replied slowly. The fact that no one could hijack his seals had been bugging her for years. He knew this, because his and Kushina’s own dismissive attitudes were why she’d been stuck on it. He knew this about her. She shouldn’t have to lie and back off. “I’ve been mulling it over, and I thrive under stress.”

Minato sighed loudly. He still seemed tense, but he wasn’t exactly angry, she didn’t think.

“We need to destroy it, even if you think the passage is inaccessible,” Minato told her. “Tori, I cannot stress how dangerous it is to leave evidence–” He cut himself off, frowning. “Shit, I can access it.”

And then he was gone. Tori shifted awkwardly, peering around her. She definitely wasn’t anywhere near Konoha. The amount of pine meant she’d probably ended up way further north, although she didn’t have enough light to be identifying exact species to narrow it down much further than that. How the hell did Minato aim this thing?

Tori was soaked, and the forest was colder than a Fire Country night. She shivered and peeled off her outer layer, wringing it out. A few minutes later, Minato returned, now also wet.

“Good news is, I destroyed it for you,” he told her. He still sounded stressed, but there was a hint of relief in there. “So that problem, at the very least, has been resolved.”

Minato was not mad at her for breaking his jutsu, per se, but everything about his body language was deeply tense. He banned her from ever drawing it up again without his direct supervision, or even mentioning the idea of it to anyone. Now that Tori wasn’t afraid of dying alone in a cave, it occurred to her that Minato had hundreds of his seals in Konoha. Tens of them were in his house alone. One was in the Kyuubi’s seal. If an enemy could do what Tori just did, they were all fucked.

Tori was very certain no one else on the planet could do what she did in this very specific regard, including Minato himself. But perhaps a motivated person could copy her, or an informed person could follow her line of research to figure it out themselves.

“Okay,” Minato finished his very long list of commands on things she was never even to think about doing again. He took a deep breath. “Now we can move on to the other problem. Your teammate did what?”

She walked him through the story again, and was relieved that she seemed too tired to cry. That asshole wasn’t worth her tears, although she still felt deeply stupid and almost embarrassed as she described what happened to Minato. She felt like a whiny kid recalling the passive aggressive comments, and then like a moron when she described trusting his plan.

When she was done, Minato said very slowly, “I want you to understand that I believe you, Tori. However, as Hokage, I will have to do an investigation before making any decisions.”

Tori frowned. “So no one sent a message?”

Minato raised an eyebrow. “Tori, you beat any message they could get to me.”

That seemed wrong, as Tori had also had this whole upsetting detour where she’d nearly drowned in an underground room.

“Okay,” Tori replied dully. “What do you want me to do?”

If he made her go back to her mission, she was going to throw a fit. Instead, he put a comforting hand on her shoulder.

“You successfully completed your assigned part of the mission,” he said. “And, as much as you scared me, I’m really glad you didn’t die. I think you should get some rest.”

He brought her to his home. Tori had not seen full light in days, and even the kitchen overhead light made her squint and blink rapidly when he switched it on.

“I want to hear what they report before they know you made it back alive,” he told her in a hushed tone. “So lay low and hang out here a few days.”

Tori squinted at him. “That’s pretty mean,” she assessed. “I like it.”

She wasn’t sure how he would treat this situation if it happened to another shinobi. Certainly he wouldn’t let most people stay in his home; they didn’t exactly have a revolving door of house guests. It made her feel better, she thought as she showered off in the guest bathroom, to be reminded someone did value her as more than a tool or an obstacle.

Even if he commented about the mission first, her brain reminded her traitorously.

When she stepped out of the bathroom, a set of women’s pajamas had appeared neatly-folded on the guest bed. They were almost definitely Kushina’s, and given Kushina was significantly taller than her, fit comfortably loose. Tori stepped out of the guest bedroom to find Kushina angrily chopping vegetables in the kitchen.

“It’s 2 AM,” Tori told her. “What are you doing?”

Kushina paused, sticking her bottom lip out at Tori. She was wearing a baggy shirt that came down to mid-thigh and her hair was braided back and wrapped for sleep. Tori barely had time to react before she was in a hug.

“I’m working out my feelings in a productive way,” Kushina said, releasing her. “Besides, you need to eat.”

Tori did not want to admit she wanted a longer hug. Instead, she persuaded Kushina to let her eat cup ramen instead of the full course meal Kushina appeared to be preparing to make. Kushina did insist she felt better chopping things up and she was only saving herself time doing it later for dinner, so Tori sat at the table and listened to the rhythmic sound of Kushina taking out her anger on some carrots.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Kushina insisted more than once. Minato might have told her the basics to explain Tori’s presence, but surely Kushina didn’t know all the details of Tori’s mission. She was in no place to know if Tori had actually done anything wrong or not. Still, sometimes Kushina’s blind faith was reassuring.

“Thanks for the PJs,” Tori told her before escaping to bed.

She’d never stayed overnight in the Uzumaki-Namikaze house. She’d only ever seen the guest bedroom to dump her coat off before a party. But the bed was comfortable and had a thick comforter, and she found herself bone-tired. She fell asleep immediately.

#reborn au #my writing #this is almost 7k making it TWICE as long as i wanted it to be. why

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secret-engima · 8 months

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Kumo Thoughts

So this will hopefully be quick but the most common take I see for Kumo in the Naruto fandom is that it's a overly militaristic hellhole (pardon the language) that kidnaps and forcibly breeds any bloodline it can get its hands on and like.

I get it?

the Naruto ninja world is absolutely messed up enough to accommodate a village like that. Especially with- *waves at Kiri*, *waves at ROOT*, *waves at Ame*, *wa-*. But I feel like personally I think that's. The shallowest take? Like if that's how you wanna world build it! You can! Lots of angst and interesting subterfuge down that way.

But we seen in canon that shinobi who live in Really horrible villages do tend to go missing-nin en masse; Kiri is the poster child for this, but Iwa and Suna both have some ... pretty noticeable defections. On the flip side the only REAL Kumo missing-nin we see, iirc, are the Kinkaku brothers.

From The First Shinobi War.

Like- what are things we know about Kumo *really* from the show/s?

and the one everyone harps on in worldbuilding- they tried to kidnap Hinata and Kushina.

HOWEVER. The rest of the things we know about them are:

2. Their Raikage is allergic to doors. He refuses to acknowledge doors. He can and will smash through any wall, window, or other non-door entity in order to exit or enter a room when at all possible. This is not the behavior of a Strict Rigid Militaristic Man this is the behavior of a feral gorilla someone stuffed in an office and expected to do paperwork. Which, granted, A is fully capable of doing his paperwork, by all accounts he's actually really good at running his village. But again. This man is allergic to doors or manners and anyone who is willing to arm wrestle Senju Tsunade to get medical assistance for his own men can't be all bad let's be real.

3. Killer B exists. I feel like he alone is enough evidence against the "military breeding program hellhole" fanon but to break it down. This "brother" of A is not actually his brother. In canon, B is literally just- *some kid*, AT BEST a cousin of the previous Jinchuuriki but that is not confirmed iirc, that was among several other kids that were all lined up and told "we need a new Jinchuuriki and A needs a fighting buddy, run at this training dummy and see if you can help him decapitate it" and when B was the one who succeeded they went "congrats you're his brother now, here's your complimentary octopus monster". And like everyone just accepts this? Not a SINGLE person calls B as a fake brother or points out that he and A are not actually related. Not to mention B has the strongest and most stable relationship with his Biju until Naruto and Kurama work out their bromance, and B was rocking that friendship with his biju *years* before Naruto even knew Kurama was a Thing That Existed.

4. B is also beloved by his village. BELOVED. The people adore him and his weird rapping nonsense. And yeah there's flashbacks in the anime to that not being the case when he was first introduced but B was actually able to work on changing their minds. You really think "small feral child rapping at civilians to make them warm up to him" would have flown in Kiri? In Iwa who canonically keep abusing their jinchuuriki to the point of running off? Nope. No sir. B is also allowed to have a team of his own, and seems to not only be an accepted member of the village but also a much trusted and beloved one who is even allowed his own team? Even Konoha doesn't have that good a track record lbr. It took Naruto face punching the guy who just committed genocide on the entire village for Konoha to go "you know what? We like you now".

5. One of the only other jinchuuriki we see that has fully mastered their Biju state and is on good terms with their Biju while also not being a missing-nin (or brainwashed and then immediately dead) is ALSO a Kumo ninja. Namely the holder of the Two Tails. Now on the wiki it says that she was put through a "detestable" training program but we all know how inconsistent Kishi is with... everything worldbuilding ever. And if we go off behavior alone from the brief scenes with her, Yugito Nii is?? Really stable??? And solid with her Biju??? She gave her pawprint for an Uchiha child's book of cat paw prints for crying out loud.

6. throughout the entire show, Jinchuuriki are consistently treated as the lowest class citizens. In basically every village. Naruto in Konoha, Kushina cried when she realized Minato was going to make Naruto a Jinchuuriki and put him through what she went through growing up as one so you know she didn't have a great time either, GAARA is his own entire dissertation on Jinchuuriki treatment and stability, Fuu was raised by the village leader of her village but had zero friends and was canonically super lonely and isolated, Han and Roku straight up ran away from Iwa because of whatever they were put through, a maneuver only repeated in another village by Utakata from Kiri. But in Kumo we find two jinchuuriki who have mastered their biju, are well respected by their peers and fellow citizens, and are basically treated like any other really weirdo ninja from the village barring needing to be monitored with bodyguards in B's case, which is mostly because he keeps running away to go train under rap artists so you can understand why A is ready to go frothing at the mouth feral at his brother sometimes.

All I'm saying is that if even the village's "monsters" are treated that way, why does everyone stick with the fanon that they're a breeding, bloodline stealing hellhole?

Imo it would be WAY more fun to world build Kumo as the feral mountain ninja-mandalorians of the Elemental Nations, who have a reputation for bloodline theft because they keep finding Actual Strays, Refugees from other villages, and Illegitimate bloodline children and going: YO ANYONE GONNA ADOPT THIS? and not waiting for an answer. Your a missing ninja from Kiri and you're fed up with both them and missing-nin life and want to come work for us? Great. Oh you also have a valuable kekkei genkai that can be inherited? Awesome have you heard of our red light district and child support program or better yet our tax deductible program for marrying one of our lovely civilians and raising a family here where no bloodline purges will ever happen ever. Oh you're a stray Uzumaki on the run from bloodline hunters? Well we may have been involved in destroying Uzushio (depends on your fan interpretation since canonically we do not know which villages did that other than Not Konoha) but we also have hot food, good housing, high ninja standards of living, and free weekly entertainment in betting when our Raikage is going to launch his desk at his brother like a high speed missile because B's rapping got too cringy.

Let Hinata's and Kushina's kidnapping either be the exception to their usual playbook of how they acquire bloodlines (hey it's not their fault if the other villages can't keep it in their pants/can't inspire loyalty) OR have it be seen, culturally in Kumo, as something more akin to a rescue mission. Yes these two girls are useful and have useful bloodlines, that's tactically wise, but also have you SEEN how Konoha treats their jinchuuriki? They have seal master princess and are treating her like a dog on a leash! And literally everyone knows what the Hyuuga do to their own kids if they aren't main branch, and we can't rescue any of those kids without their eyeballs exploding and them dying but hey we can snag the heiress and then any kids she has won't have to be branded so-.

Like I feel that would be so much more INTERESTING? Instead of having Konoha be the only "nice" village and make this weird tonal dissonance for how the "nice" village has the most incompetent leadership (Sarutobi) and underground atrocities (Danzo and Orochimaru) while every other village is Horrible All The Time For Everyone why not have Kumo be actually Really Functional and treat their shinobi and Jinchuuriki well and their horrible reputation is *mostly* (not entirely, because. Ninja.) be cultural clashes between the feral mountain ninja and Everyone Else and propaganda from the other villages who would like their shinobi to STOP DEFECTING TO KUMO PLEASE. WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY HAVE DENTAL.

Seriously I feel like there is so much more you could do with that angle than just "yet another shinobi village that is Bad and Awful and Needs The Power of Friendship yet somehow has this really stupid goofy jinchuuriki man who loves his brother and his village shut up don't think about it".

#Secret Engima Rambles #naruto #naruto worldbuilding #ninja economics #naruto economics #kumo #naruto kumo #long post

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