Chapter Text
She had never been to other worlds.
It was perfectly possible, like so many things were when magic lived and grew wild in the world. Her very nature made magic unstable, she might break a portal simply by traveling through it, or worse, break it while she was in the space between spaces, and be trapped there indeterminately.
So she had never traveled like that, because it wouldn’t be safe. And now it didn’t matter, because safe or not, she was going.
It was like being a long time underwater, as much as it was like anything at all. She opened her eyes once in the in-between, and saw such a wild impossible absence that surely this must be the Void.
She came to in a pool of sunshine, washed up on a rocky shore like so much driftwood. Consciousness was a long, slow time coming, and she bubbled to the surface piece by piece. Moving water behind her, the cry of gulls overhead. The smell of the sea, and old iron, and bones, and not a single living soul.
She lay still a long time, letting the sound of the ocean bring her back to herself. She ached down to her very bones. Like she’d been stuffed in a jar and shaken.
Lucky her, she’d been lying face-down, her face kept out of the sun by her wild black tangle of hair. Her hands, not so lucky- she must have lost her gloves, at some point, and the backs of the fingers she could see between the curtain of her hair were turning cheerfully red.
Six inches past them, half-buried in the coarse sand, was a strange long knife.
She hadn’t brought it with her. She never carried weapons. She’d never trusted them. By inches, biting the insides of her cheeks to keep from whining, she undertook the task of sitting up. She picked up the knife and sat with her back against a great spar of driftwood, and began to get her bearings.
A great inlet cove before her, rock walls reaching high above on all sides, closing over the broken sea-gate on the very far end, that let what must be the ocean flow in. And it was not a harbor, despite the buildings half fallen-in around the shore, and it could not possibly be. It was a whirlpool, enormous and deceptively lazy, the dark clear blue of very deep water at the center of it. Little eddies spilled off of it, in the rocks and openings past the sea-gate, their own small whirlpools, forming and re-forming in the foam of the great one.
(she could not quite be sure how long it held her attention. the sun moved enough to notice, before she looked away and did not look again)
A city had been built into the cliffs, into the slope behind her and the rock walls around the cove. Built and then abandoned, long enough ago that the only signs of life in the whole sinkhole were seabird nests.
And the long black-iron knife in her hand.
It had a curious design, the haft and the blade all made contiguously, with only tatters of cloth wrapping the grip. The counterbalance to the heavy, diamond-shaped blade was an iron ring at the other end of the hilt. It had good weight to it, like a thing made to be thrown. The edge was long-since dulled, and there was rust flaking from the ring, and as she looked around it began to come slowly clear that it was not the only weapon of its kind strewn along the beach.
The city was a ruin, but not an ancient one. The beach, the cove, the houses- a battlefield older than she was. A whole city overrun, and sacked, and then left abandoned, bones and steel bleaching in the sand.
The sun moved farther still, as she sat there. It was peaceful, for a ruin only just old enough that all the blood had scrubbed off with sun and time. She couldn’t smell it, but only just, and the knife left the smell of iron hot on her hands.
She supposed she must have been spat out of the whirlpool, when she’d finally fallen out of the void. There was a long tradition in magic, of sacred springs and pools and caverns that lead to other worlds. She supposed she had gotten lucky, that there had been a hole in this world old and big and stable enough that it could cough her up and survive it.
She doubted, somehow, that it would serve as a way back. Whirlpools only flowed in one direction.
So what for it, then, but explore her new circumstances.
Her trip up the beach was wobbling and slow, her legs still unsteady under her from that voyage through nothingness. Unbuttoned her jacket at the neck, and then kept going until it flapped open, grateful for the light breeze off the bay. It was too hot for black canvas, too hot for black in general really, but she’d only been complaining about the uniform colors for years. Why stop now?
She could only assume she looked like a haint, a ragged figure all in black, her hair curling in snaky ropes from the salt water. Her boots were still wet, and it chafed. She reached the seawall at the top of the little inlet beach and stopped to take them off. The black-iron knife she shoved through a belt loop, her shoes with her stockings stuffed inside them she let dangle from her hand by the laces.
A white-graveled road led up from the beach, winding and lined with wild-growing shrubs that might have been ancestors of long-forgotten public gardening projects. The buildings were… strange. White stucco and red tile, cylindrical towers and rounded facades, a peculiar aesthetic to the slope of the roofs. Signage in what she thought might be Chinese, the motif of a spiral repeating in the fences, the stones, the garden paths. Stone pillars marked with it, broken to rubble.
So she was perhaps somewhere in Asia. Or another world that had a continent like Asia, and who was to say that parallel worlds had to grow out of western civilization?
Of course she wouldn’t be lucky enough to turn up in a world that spoke English. The gods had spent her whole life laughing at her, why stop now?
The sound of water did not leave her, even as she left the shore behind. The island was full of fresh streams, winding between the buildings and gardens, the soft cool hush of waterfalls somewhere up the valley. Surely with this much fresh water running through it, someone had to have come back. Maybe not to build on the ashes, but it couldn’t be entirely empty, could it?
But the city she walked through was empty, silent except for the sound of water running, and the echo of her footfalls on the cobblestones.
She picked up more strange iron knives, tucking one in each boot and another one in her belt. She did not like weapons, did not like having to use them or relying on them, but she was in a strange land alone. She would take what she could.
She did not know quite how long she walked, through the ruin of this strange and ancient city, half-reclaimed by nature. Found herself wandering through a grove of fruit trees, oranges and pomegranates and persimmons. The oranges were ripe and overladen, torn apart by the birds and rotting. The pomegranates were mostly bright vermillion flowers, the persimmons still tiny and green. She stuffed her pockets with tiny late clementines, and ate three more of them as she walked.
There was no sound in the world except for the cry of sea birds over the sea, the crunch of her bare feet on gravel and the buzz of cicadas farther inland. Until she passed under a stone arch, marked at the keystone with a spiral, and was hailed by a loud shout in a human voice.
It came from above and behind her, and she bolted, diving behind the thorny lemon tree that stood by the gate, looking around for who had hailed her. A laugh, bright and crisp and loud, echoed down, and reluctantly, she looked up.
A wooden hand was perched now at the top of the archway- polished, golden wood, index finger jabbing at the sky. And the voice- in words she couldn’t understand but a fragment of, damn it all- was very obviously, clearly, coming from the hand. It tilted suddenly, of its own accord, and fell on it’s side so that the index finger was now instead pointing at her. She stumbled out from behind the tree, her mouth hanging open.
The hand repeated the words, and she managed to shake her head this time.
“I don’t understand,” she said, and the hand very distinctly said “Hmph.”
She came closer, and that was enough for the hand, apparently, to fling itself over the edge of the gate in a straight plummet. She yelped and lunged to catch it, cradling the thing in her arms. It was surprisingly heavy- she tilted it to look at the base, a wooden column that made up about three inches of wrist and arm. There was concrete filling in the wood, and acid-burned into the flat base of the hand was a symbol, a spiral like the others and yet not quite. She didn’t touch it- a magic circle, it had to be.
The hand made a noise like clearing a throat (oh god, how) and flopped in her arms, catching her by the collar. Repeated some words, and she could only shake her head again. It tried again, in what sounded like a different language entirely. Still not one she knew- but then he tried again.
“этот??” the hand asked, and Piress might have cried, in that moment.
Because she did, yes, thank you. She spoke Russian, or whatever they called it here- the other languages had sounded Asian; Japanese, Chinese, and maybe Korean- Thai???- but he hadn’t said the language name. She couldn’t make assumptions.
“даваи,” she said, and the hand laughed joyfully, wriggling in place.
He had a lot to say, once the barrier was cleared, and her Russian was not quite equal to some of it. His name was Uzumaki Hando, he told her (oh my god, is it really), and he was the last survivor of what was once a mighty village full of mad wizard mercenaries.
“A funny way of counting survival,” she said, lifting him up to look at the seal on his butt end. He squirmed in her hands, wiggling so that she had to catch him close to her chest again.
“A last resort of a dying man,” he said, solemnly. “I was already one-handed, before Bloody Mist came out of the sea for us. I sealed my soul into my hand, spiritually aware wood that I could puppeteer with chakra.” Even in Russian, there were so many loan words. Concepts she wasn’t terribly solid on, but chakra sounded a lot like magic to her. “...Well, most of my soul. I left enough in my mortal body to cast my hand aside to hide, while the rest of me died nobly in combat.”
“And you’ve been here… since?” she said, looking around the empty city, ruined and bleached, from the shade of the tree where they sat. “Did no one ever come back?”
“...There was no one,” he said, palm facing outward, as though he too was looking. “After the razing of Uzushio, no one even came back to bury the bones. Looters never make it this far in. The ghosts turn them back.” A sharp half-turn towards her, as though asking an unspoken question.
“Ghosts?” she echoed. “...Spirits? If they’re here, I wouldn’t know.” That whole realm was unavailable to her, had been her whole life. For better or for worse.
“How did you come here, child?” he asked. “No one comes here, and no one at all ever came here not knowing what Uzushio was. Speaking an obscure tribal language from far to the north, pale as a courtesan.”
“...I came up through the whirlpool,” she said, softly. “I was in a fight, and there was magic, and... “ she looked sidelong at him, wary. “I think I’m a long way from home. Another world, maybe.”
“I always theorized!” said Uzumaki Hando, with a hoot. “How marvelous! The logical ultimate conclusion to the transportation jutsu. What’s your name, my dear?”
She was silent a long stretch, before she answered. So used to giving a false name, because the curse on her true name meant she could be followed with it. ...But could it be heard, all the way in another world? ...If it could, that could be her way home again. And if it couldn’t-
“Chione,” she said. A bare smile found its way onto her face. Hando flashed her a thumbs up.
“Kiyone-chan,” said the hand, and her smile slipped a little. Well- oh well.
He told her of what had been here, a great city full of life, the Uzumaki clan and the madmen that led it. The power of sealing- of fuinjutsu, he called it, trying to teach her crossover words where he could, of the dominant language of the Elemental Nations. A power to seal life and death, unimaginable feats of sorcery. Feared and coveted by their nearest neighbor, Kiri, the Bloody Mist, who came suddenly and completely and killed every man, woman and child they found, razed the village and left again as fast as they had come.
He couldn’t really answer how long ago it had been. He’d been here the whole time, alone, among the bones and the ruins of his kin. His own bones, even, if she was understanding the tale of his sealed soul well enough. Any amount of time would have been unimaginable, she thought. From the wear on the walls, the bleach on the bones, she thought… twenty years at least, if not more. If not many more. A battlefield older than she was, she’d thought when she landed.
He kept describing the Uzumaki as madmen, himself not excluded at all. Which- fair. The evidence was right there. You didn’t condemn yourself to an existence like that, on purpose, and get to be thought of as sane afterwards. He directed her through the empty city, up a stair bordered by a stucco wall that was splattered with brown, stains that the weather hadn’t cleaned off entirely. To a large and well-appointed ruin of a home, though not the largest or most well-appointed she’d seen in the city.
“My home,” said Hando, with a grand sweep of his entire self. “If you can stay here tonight, we’ll set off in the morning, yes?”
“...If I can stay here tonight?” she asked. The iron-studded door opened smoothly under her hand- she supposed if he’d been living here in his house for a whole score of years he’d have to keep the door moving easily. The ceiling of the foyer was tiled in mosaic, swirling blues and greens and a circle of stylized dolphins around the skylight.
“...You really can’t see that, huh,” said her companion, a stillness to him like he was in reverie. She looked around the room again, on high alert, but saw nothing but the dust of time and the emptiness of a home long abandoned.
“See what?” she asked in spite of herself.
“Ghosts,” he said again, and Chione (Kiyone? she could get used to that, she supposed) wondered whose ghosts, if this was his house.
The rows of family portraits that cluttered the walls of the hallway she wandered down had her answer in them. A tall man with blood red hair and a wooden hand - couldn’t be anyone but Hando. And in the pictures with him, a blonde woman, and other redheads, and a progression of children, red and blonde and dark, growing up around them.
“You’re about the same size as my second-eldest daughter,” Hando was saying, tugging on her sleeve to keep her moving, pointing her towards a door. “I’m sure she won’t mind if you use her clothes! And if you really can’t see ghosts, I guess she can’t stop you! But seriously, Mari-chan, you don’t mind, do you?”
He was speaking to someone Kiyone couldn’t see, with that last, and she tried very hard not to flinch while she was carrying him. She didn’t like the idea of stealing from the dead, but she would very much like to not be wearing her heavy salt-stiff uniform anymore, and if you could ask the dead if it was ok to borrow their clothes and they said yes…?
“She says it’s fine,” Hando told her, and gingerly she tried the door. This room, too, was merely dusty and empty, the sort of haphazard mess a teenaged girl might leave lying around. “I haven’t been in here much,” admitted the hand in her arms. “Lot of work to clean stuff up, if it wasn’t bloody or actively on fire I’ve not done much to it.”
So he’d been the one to bury the bodies, then. Alone, with only one body part to his name. Maybe that was why he was still here. It had taken him the entire time to finish. The thought made her body flush cold and then hot, like the knowing alone burned.
“You were talking about leaving?” said Kiyone, setting the wooden hand down on the dresser in front of the mirror while she poked through the closet. “...Are you sure you’re done here?” Not that she wanted to lose her interpreter. But she was sure there were other people in this world who spoke Russian, or one of the other languages she was competent in, and he seemed…
“I think I’d better be,” he said, fingers clicking in contemplation. “If I’ve been looking for a sign, you’re it, right? You’re someone that needs my help.”
She smiled lopsidedly, though her back was to him, so she assumed he couldn’t see. “I guess,” she said. “If you believe in signs and portents, this might count.”
“And if you can’t see ghosts, who knows what else you can’t see? You could get into trouble, like that,” he said, and she snorted.
“You have no idea,” she said. “It’s not just ghosts, you know. I can’t be affected by most magics.”
“...Magic, you mean chakra, right?” he said, and Kiyone shrugged, because sure. “What do you mean, you can’t be affected by chakra.”
“I, well.” she said. “I break spells by touching them, I can’t be tracked or watched by magic, my head can’t be tampered with psychically…” she shrugged again.
He’d been right, everything in Mari-chan’s closet was her size, if a little young for her preference. She started to pick out an outfit, laying it out on the dusty bed.
“What about genjutsu? Ah, illusions?” asked Hando.
“What about them?” she asked. “I’ve never seen one.” Not completely true. She could see illusions cast on objects or other people, but poorly, and she couldn’t see illusions cast on her to alter her perception at all. She’d never been tricked or harmed by one, one way or another.
“Ah,” he said. “Of course.”
“Do you think that’s going to cause me problems here?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at him again.
“It’s going to cause problems,” said Hando, frankly. “But not for you as much as for other people, I think. I’ve never heard of a blood limit like yours in all my years.”
“It’s not an inherited trait,” said Kiyone, turning to him with a frown, and catching for the first time a look of herself in the mirror full on. She winced. She looked like she’d crawled out of a storm drain, her thick, wavy black hair drying in ropes and her clothes ashy with salt and sun. Her eyes were the same as always, though, electric blue and deeply shadowed. She’d been resting poorly for a long time before this.
“You mean it’s acquired? Someone could learn, to simply not interact with chakra?” Hando was asking.
“It’s acquired,” she said. “But it can’t be taught. It’s inherent, but not inherited. My mother did the ritual while she was pregnant with me. Using magic to make something antithetical to magic only works at a remove, so you can’t do it to a person but you can do it to the unborn person inside of them.”
That made him absolutely wild with questions, predictably. How, what, where, why. She only had a couple of answers. She hadn’t been there to see the ritual before she was born, obviously, but she’d been told the story. Her mother had spent six of nine months in the back of her family’s wagon, in a magic circle, unable to leave it or risk ruining the enchantment.
“She had good reasons,” was all she could say, quietly, about the why. And then she made Uzumaki Hando lead her to the baths. There was still running water here, after all this time, mostly because the natural spring system that it tied into had remained undamaged. The water wasn’t hot, strictly speaking, but it wasn’t freezing and she wasn’t that delicate, anyway.
She came out again wearing a soft blue camisole and a thigh-length bodysuit of wire mesh armor, a pair of high-waisted shorts and a squarish silk coat she thought was called a haori. She had a ribbon to tie her hair up with when it was dry, and a pair of thigh-high stockings, but she’d wear her own boots. The open-toed shoes she’d found were a no, thank you.
“I’m definitely coming with you,” said Hando when she emerged from the baths and bent down to pick him up again. “Whatever you are, you’re going to make waves with it, the kind of waves I want to be riding.”
“I kind of just want to find my way home,” she said, even as she tested the words out in her mouth for truthfulness. And she did, really. She very clearly didn’t belong here and the language barrier was just the tip of it. But home… wasn’t that great, either. And if the path home wasn’t swift or straightforward, maybe she didn’t actually mind.
She was adaptable. Wherever she ended up, she’d adapt. If she never made it home again… there were a couple of faces she’d miss. But she’d been on the cusp of a realization before she’d landed here. Maybe it was just a part of growing up, coming into the understanding that, sometimes, your guardians didn’t actually have your best interests at heart. But it couldn’t hurt to have some time to herself, before she went back.
“And we’ll do that,” said Hando, interrupting her thoughts. “But it’ll take time, and resources, and right now we only have one of those things, and getting the other… will make waves.”
“Sure,” said Kiyone, as she returned to Mari-chan’s empty room. Set Hando back up on the dresser, and then dropped face-first onto the bed.
But if she woke up in her bunk at home, she wouldn’t complain.
She did not wake up in her bunk at home. She slept like the unmoving dead for several hours, and then fitfully for several more. No ghosts disturbed her sleep. A few times she half-woke to the sound of Uzumaki Hando’s one-sided conversations with them, but from the ghosts themselves, nothing at all.
In the morning she didn’t exactly feel bright and refreshed, but the battered soreness and exhaustion was gone from her limbs, which must count for something. Hando was right where she’d left him, and she scooped him up and let him grab onto her shoulder, where he could point her in the right direction at his leisure. He directed her around the house, collecting supplies - mostly in the form of paper, ranging from scrolls to scraps, all with swirling magic circles on them. She was careful not to touch the ink, but if she was making any of them into duds by just handling the paper, it wasn’t like she could tell.
You could seal just about anything into anything, Hando told her. He was making her pack up seals full of provisions, food and water and money and camping gear, sealed in stasis and incapable of deteriorating. Uzumaki seals were the best, he informed her, guaranteed not to degrade over time. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t activate the seals herself, he said, because he could activate them, and he wasn’t going anywhere without her.
That made her a little uneasy, but more determined to not let the little wooden bastard out of her sight.
“Wait,” said Hando, in the last sweep before they were to leave. “One more thing.”
He had her take him to the master bedroom of the house, and despite Uzumaki Hando’s vividly obvious weirdness it was an incredibly normal master bedroom, with all the normal furniture and a normal desk full of normal paperwork. Granted, she wasn’t going to poke around in his underwear drawer no matter how much the usual compulsion tugged at her, she valued her sanity too much- the weird shit had been in the sealing workshop, but somehow Hando hadn’t seemed like a person with a healthy work-life balance. He pointed her to one of the bedside tables - there were two, one for each side of the queen-sized bed. Kiyone didn’t ask. If he didn’t want to talk about his dead wife she wasn’t going to make him.
He had her open the drawer, and she let him reach in and rummage out what he wanted. An oblong metal plate riveted onto a cobalt blue strip of fabric, rather like a headband, or maybe a belt. The ubiquitous spiral was engraved into the center of the metal plate. He dropped it into her bag.
“There,” he said. “You’re an Uzushio ninja, now.”
“Am I?” she said, picking up the headband to look closer at it. The metal was scuffed and nicked, but polished to a high shine, and the cloth was clean. “Just like that?”
“Since I’m the only one left, I get to hand out the new promotions at my discretion,” said Hando, and Kiyone shrugged. Fair enough.
It was the lightest mission pack she’d ever carried, filled with nothing but a few changes of clothes and a bunch of paper. Hando found her a waist pouch to carry her salvaged kunai in (that was what they were called after all) but she declined to pick out any other weapons from his stores.
“Got everything I need to win a fight right here,” she said, cheerfully flexing a bicep and grinning wide enough that you could see the extremely sharp points of her canine teeth.
“If you’re sure,” said Hando, clearly not sold. He perched up on her shoulder, braced against her pack. She paused in the doorway, and looked over at him with a smile.
“Tools break,” she said. “Weapons can be taken from you. They get lost, they rust, they age. Nobody can take the strength in your arms and legs. Nobody can use your own teeth against you.”
“I suppose,” said Hando, still a little uneasily. “That’s more true for you than it is for some people, if you really can resist genjutsu.”
“Ha ha! That’s fucked up,” said Kiyone, cheerfully glad in that moment to be herself and no one else. “But seriously, I’m not trained in knife fighting or any other weapons usage, it’d just slow me down to try.”
“But you are trained,” said Hando, as they made their way through the empty city. “You move like it, anyway.”
“I’m trained,” she said. “Since childhood. Not much else to do with someone like me.”
“Someone with your ability?” pressed Hando. “I thought you said it was an uncommon condition.”
“It is,” said Kiyone. “But when someone like me is made, it’s really only for one reason. If you can’t be harmed by magic, you are going to be asked to kill wizards.”
That shut him up, for a bit, only speaking up to direct her on the best path out of the village. They were on the downslope when he picked up the conversation again, wandering down a terraced orangerie, under an arching trellis laden with feral grapevines, to the sound of the sea and shorebirds.
“Kiyone,” he said, sounding so serious she looked at him (and once again felt the rug pulled out from under her when there he was, a wooden hand). “I am… in all likelihood going to ask you to kill wizards.”
“Are you?” she asked. “I suppose that’s fair. I don’t have much else to repay you for your help.”
“You don’t mind it?” he pressed. “You don’t… it doesn’t make you feel used? Like you’re the tool?”
She was about to answer off the cuff, but something about his tone made her catch the words before they left her, made her actually think about it. Did it bother her, that she was a weapon? Did it bother her, that she had been purposefully and deliberately forged to be one?
No, not really. No weapon forged could wield itself. She did not fit comfortably in anyone’s hand, and to grip her was to find that even her handle was sharp.
“I am both the sword and the arm that swings it,” she said, eventually. “I have no loyalty to anyone in this world, so please believe that if I am helping you, it’s just because I want to. That’s the difference, between me and a long black knife. I can make choices.”
He didn’t respond to that immediately, and she tilted her head so that her temple tapped his extended fingertips. He seemed to start a little at the contact.
“Anyway, what about you?” she asked. “You’re just a hand. You’re literally an object. And I’m going to be using you to open all those stupid seals, since I can’t, and speak the language here, because I can’t. Does that make you feel bad?”
It took him a minute to answer that, too.
“No,” he admitted. “It makes me feel helpful.” He curled around her shoulder, heavy but not tight, sun-warmed and smelling faintly of sweet wood and varnish. She reached up for a moment, and covered him with her own hand, squeezing briefly before she let him go.