The kunai drops.
For a fraction of a heartbeat I'm not even moving it. I'm watching it fall like gravity is the one making the choice, like I can blame the earth for what my hand is about to do.
Metal flashes under lantern light.
The bound man jerks, gag muffling a sound that isn't a word anymore. His eyes are huge and wet and furious with the kind of fear that makes you hate the person holding the blade because hating is easier than begging.
My wrist snaps at the last instant.
Not mercy. Not courage.
Pure, ugly instinct—my body refusing to cross a line it recognizes as irreversible.
The blade bites into the side of his neck instead of the center.
Warmth splashes my fingers.
Not a spray. Not theatrical.
Just blood, immediate and intimate, slicking the kunai handle and my palm like I've dipped my hand into someone else's life.
The man convulses. His gag becomes a wet, strangled choke.
My stomach drops through the floor.
I didn't spare him.
I just made it slower.
The world narrows to that sound, and I think—stupidly, desperately—that this is where fate will do something. Where reality will correct a wrong. Where some invisible pressure will clamp down and stop the blade like it stopped my throat near Naruto.
Nothing happens.
No hand closes around my ribs.
No story-force edits this moment.
Because this isn't Naruto's axis.
This is the underside of the world, where extras and spies and nameless bodies are processed into silence, and the plot doesn't bother watching.
A Root operative steps in behind the bound man as smoothly as a shadow shifting.
There's no hesitation. No disgust. No adrenaline.
He draws a short tantō and slides it in under the jaw with a single practiced motion.
The choking stops.
The body slumps.
The blood keeps moving for a moment anyway, as if it hasn't been told the scene is over.
My hand stays frozen around the kunai.
The metal feels colder now, slicker. I can feel my grip slipping, and I clamp down harder, like I can squeeze the reality back into place if I just hold tight enough.
Danzo watches the corpse settle like a teacher watching a student finish writing.
His visible eye shifts from the dead man to me.
"You adjusted," he says calmly.
My throat works. I swallow bile. The tongue seal coils tight, warning me against saying anything that might be interpreted as refusal.
"You did not refuse," Danzo continues. "You did not run. You did not drop the blade."
A pause.
"Good."
Good.
The word hits wrong. It lands on my skin like another seal tag.
I look down at my right hand.
It's shaking.
My left arm—my *missing* arm—pulses with phantom pain, as if my body wants to punish me for using the only hand I have left to do this.
Blood pools at my knees and spreads across the stone floor in a dark sheen that reflects lantern light like oil.
The smell arrives late. Copper-heavy. Warm and thick and real.
My stomach heaves.
I turn my head and retch onto the floor.
No one moves to comfort me. No one flinches. The only reaction is the slight shift of a Root operative stepping away so it doesn't splash his sandals.
Danzo's voice remains flat. "Clean him."
A hand clamps the back of my collar and yanks me upright before I can sag into it. The motion jostles my stump; pain knifes through my shoulder and I gasp, eyes watering.
A cloth is shoved into my palm.
"Wipe," the operative says.
The word isn't loud. It doesn't need to be. The room is built to make quiet orders feel like law.
I stare at the cloth as if it's an alien object.
Wipe what?
The floor? My hand? The blood that now exists because I exist in Root?
My right hand moves anyway—slow, stiff, mechanical.
The cloth smears red across stone.
It doesn't erase it.
It just spreads the fact of it into a larger stain.
The dead man is dragged away as if he's a heavy sack. His head lolls once, mouth still gagged. I catch the brief glimpse of his cheekbone, bruised and swollen, and my mind does something uselessly human:
*He had a face.*
That's all. Not his name. Not his village. Not his crime.
Just the unbearable reminder that he was a person until we decided he wasn't.
Danzo steps closer, and my body tenses before my mind can.
"You will learn," he says, "that hesitation is not a virtue."
My tongue seal tightens at the base of my mouth, as if it agrees.
Danzo's gaze drops to my empty sleeve.
"And you will learn," he continues, "that pain is simply another instructor."
The words should feel threatening.
They feel like policy.
He turns away as if we've finished discussing weather.
"Take him," he says.
Gloved hands close on me again.
The kunai is removed from my grip with casual efficiency. A Root operative wipes it clean with one pass of cloth and slips it away like it was never used.
Like the whole scene can be folded and stored.
I'm led out.
The corridor's air is colder than before. The lantern light seems dimmer, or maybe my eyes are adjusting to the fact that I've just crossed a line and there's no going back across it, only deeper in.
My stomach keeps threatening to revolt again. My breath trembles. Every step pulls at my shoulder bandages. The phantom limb still itches like madness under skin that no longer exists.
Somewhere behind me, a door closes softly.
It's amazing how quiet the end of a life can be.
---
They bring me to a washroom.
Stone basin. Cold water. A bar of rough soap that smells like lye and nothing else.
A Root operative points.
"Wash."
I kneel and plunge my right hand into water so cold it shocks my fingers numb. Blood clouds out in slow red threads. I scrub harder, frantic, as if friction can undo time.
The soap stings a cut I hadn't noticed on my knuckle.
Of course I'm injured. Of course my only hand is already damaged. The universe doesn't even bother with symbolism—it just stacks consequences until you stop believing you deserve better.
I rinse again.
Red fades. Not gone—just lighter, diluted, pretending.
My skin still smells faintly metallic.
I scrub my wrist, my palm, under my nails until my fingers ache.
It doesn't help.
It never helps.
Because what I'm trying to wash off isn't on my hand.
It's in my chest.
A Root operative watches with that same patient stillness. Not disgust. Not judgment.
Containment.
When I'm done, he tosses me a plain dark uniform. It smells like storage—dry cloth and dust and the faint ghost of someone else's sweat.
I dress with one hand.
It is humiliating in tiny ways that cut deeper than pain: wrestling fabric over my stump, pinning the empty sleeve, tying cords clumsily, feeling the imbalance at every step.
I used to take two-handed things for granted.
Now every movement is a reminder: I am permanently less than I was.
Not in potential.
In math.
They lead me back to the cell.
The door shuts.
Silence returns like a lid.
I sit on the futon and stare at my right hand.
Clean.
Almost.
I can still feel blood slickness in my memory, and the memory is stronger than soap.
I press my fist against my mouth.
The tongue seal coils tight as soon as my lips part, as if it mistakes motion for rebellion.
I close my mouth again and breathe through my nose.
The air down here never smells like outside.
No sunlight. No cooking fires. No leaves.
Only ink and stone and antiseptic.
The village above continues like a person smiling over a rotting tooth.
Naruto is up there.
Naruto is probably celebrating, eating ramen, boasting about being a ninja now. Naruto is stepping into the next scene with fate pressing warm and dense around him like a cloak.
And I am down here because I tried to touch his world.
I tried to save Iruka.
I paid with an arm.
Then I tried to survive Danzo.
I paid with something else.
A thought tries to form—*I'm becoming a monster*—and my mind flinches away from it because that thought is too clean, too dramatic. The truth is uglier.
I'm becoming a person who can be used.
The difference matters. Monsters choose.
Tools are shaped.
I squeeze my eyes shut and try to recall the timeline again, carefully this time, like touching a bruise.
Team assignments.
Bell test.
Land of Waves.
Zabuza.
Haku.
The pain behind my eyes flickers with each name, like a candle flame threatened by wind. The details blur at the edges. I can see fragments—the bridge, the mist, the sound of senbon hitting flesh—but every time I try to hold the sequence steady, the ache spikes.
My knowledge isn't a map.
It's a curse with holes in it.
And if Root ever figures out what kind of curse I carry, they won't just leash me.
They'll vivisect the information out of me until there's nothing left but obedience.
I open my eyes.
The lantern in the wall doesn't flicker. It's too steady. Controlled.
I wonder, briefly, if they designed the light to never change so prisoners lose sense of time faster.
The thought is pointless.
Still, my mind clings to pointless things because the alternative is staring directly at the fact that I killed someone—halfway, clumsily—and someone else finished it like snuffing a lamp.
My stomach knots again.
I curl forward, resting my forehead against my right hand, and breathe until the nausea eases.
Plan, I tell myself.
Not heroism. Not revenge.
Plan.
Step one: stay alive.
Step two: stay uninteresting.
Step three: do not reveal future knowledge.
Step four: never, ever attempt to directly change Naruto's major beats again.
That last one isn't morality.
It's physics.
I've felt the world's correction.
Steel bends away from him.
It bends into me.
If Danzo orders me to interfere with Naruto, the story itself will punish me for it. That's leverage, in a sick way. A boundary even Danzo can't brute-force without paying a cost.
But Danzo loves costs.
As long as someone else pays them.
I let the thought settle like a stone in my gut.
---
The door opens without warning.
A Root operative enters, mask plain. He tosses a small packet onto the floor: dried meat, rice, water.
"Eat," he says.
I sit up too quickly and pain snaps through my shoulder. I hiss softly, then clamp my jaw shut. Sound is weakness here.
I eat anyway, one-handed and awkward.
The food tastes like nothing. My mouth is still tender from the tongue seal; swallowing feels like dragging skin over sandpaper.
When I'm done, the operative watches me for a beat longer than necessary.
Then he speaks.
"Tomorrow you return to the surface."
My pulse stutters.
Return?
"To where?" I rasp without thinking.
The tongue seal tightens, biting the base of my tongue with a warning sting. Not enough to silence me completely—just enough to remind me what belongs to Root now.
The operative's mask tilts. "Academy."
The word lands like a slap.
Academy.
Children. Noise. Sunlight.
Naruto.
My ribs tighten at the thought, that familiar pressure brushing me like a current.
The operative continues, voice indifferent. "You will attend as normal."
Normal.
With an empty sleeve pinned to my chest. With a curse mark in my mouth. With blood on my memory.
"And you will observe," he says.
Observe what? Who?
He answers without being asked.
"Uzumaki Naruto."
My stomach drops.
The pressure around my ribs deepens, colder now, like reality itself becoming alert.
The operative doesn't notice—or if he does, he doesn't care.
"Report behavior," he continues. "Report contacts. Report abnormalities."
Abnormalities.
As if Naruto's whole existence isn't already an abnormality sealed into a child.
As if my presence in this world isn't the strangest thing in the room.
My mind scrambles.
If I'm close to Naruto, fate's pressure will spike. I've felt it. I might not be able to speak. I might not be able to move. The world might punish me just for thinking too hard.
But refusing isn't an option. There is no "no" in Root.
The operative leans closer, and through the mask his voice becomes quieter.
"If you attempt to warn him," he says, "your tongue will correct you."
My mouth goes dry.
So Danzo already anticipated the obvious.
They're not just leashing my body.
They're leashing my *language.*
Because language is where knowledge lives.
I nod once, stiffly.
The operative straightens. "Sleep."
He leaves.
The door closes.
Silence returns.
Academy, I think, and the word tastes like fear now.
Not because of exams.
Because that's where Naruto is.
That's where the story's gravity is strongest.
And Danzo wants me orbiting it.
Not as a friend.
Not as a rival.
As a hidden camera.
I lie down on the futon and stare at the ceiling I can't see in this dim light.
My stump throbs.
My phantom fingers twitch.
My tongue aches with the coil of a seal that will punish me for speaking too freely.
Somewhere above, birds will be calling. People will be walking. Iruka will be teaching like nothing happened, because that's what adults do after bleeding—they pretend they didn't.
And Naruto will be there, loud and bright, protected by fate's warm insistence.
I will be there too, in a uniform under my civilian clothes, in a body missing an arm, with a mouth that can't tell the truth even if it wants to.
I close my eyes.
Sleep doesn't come easily.
When it does, it tastes like iron.
---
Morning arrives without sunrise down here.
They wake me with a hand on my shoulder—careful of the stump, not kind.
A blindfold goes on.
The world becomes motion.
Upward this time. Stairs. Warmer air. The smell of wood returning. The faint scent of smoke from cooking fires aboveground, so normal it makes my throat burn.
They remove the blindfold in an alley I don't recognize.
Konoha is waking.
Sunlight spills between rooftops. A vendor calls out prices. Someone laughs. A child runs past carrying a bag of bread.
For a second my brain tries to pretend last night didn't happen.
Then my empty sleeve tugs against my pinned fabric, and the illusion shatters.
A Root operative stands beside me in civilian clothes. No mask. His face is unremarkable—built to be forgotten. That's the point.
He doesn't look at me directly when he speaks.
"You will walk to the Academy," he says. "If you run, you will be retrieved. If you speak of Root, you will be corrected."
The tongue seal pulses faintly, as if it's listening.
He hands me a small slip of paper with an address.
"After Academy," he says, "return here."
Then he steps back into the alley's shadow and is gone as if he was never there.
I stand in sunlight feeling like an infection trying to pass as skin.
The village smells alive—rice steam, sweat, damp wood, leaf-green morning.
My stomach churns.
I start walking because not walking is how you get dragged.
Every step toward the Academy is heavier than the last.
Children pass me and glance at my empty sleeve. Their eyes widen; their mouths tighten. Some look away fast. Some stare too long.
Pity. Curiosity. Fear.
The kinds of looks Naruto is used to.
The thought makes my ribs tighten, and I flinch like I've been hit.
I reach the Academy's front gate and stop.
Noise spills out—shouting, laughter, the scrape of chairs. Life continuing like it always has.
My right hand rises to the doorframe.
I hesitate.
Because I can already feel it, faint but growing—warm density in the air like a current shifting toward a familiar center.
Naruto is inside.
The story is inside.
And I'm about to step into its gravity with Root's leash around my tongue and Danzo's eyes behind mine.
I push the door open.
The sound of the classroom hits me like a wave.
And then—over it, louder than anything—Naruto Uzumaki's voice.
My ribs tighten. The world's pressure swells, warm and heavy, like fate itself turning its head toward me.
For one terrifying second, I can't breathe.
And the last thought that flashes through my mind before the door clicks shut behind me is simple and sharp:
If I'm too close to Naruto, the story will notice.
If Root notices the story noticing me…
…they'll start cutting deeper.