Chapter 3 Meeting The Children Of Mist

I do not own Naruto.

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When Ryuishi turns four, she decides that it is time to get to work outside of the brothel. She has spent enough time dicking around in her new home. Her choice had nothing to do with the fact that Mother had caught her testing out her chakra control and trying to climb the walls. Nope, Ryuishi wasn't scared of the shrewd woman's gaze, not one bit. So she scoots out of a window in the cylinder-shaped building and disappears into the mist.

Kiri is full of those. Big, ugly stone buildings shaped like soup cans. It looks like some weird planet from Star Wars, she decides as she pulls her hair up into a bun. Kind of like a dystopian nightmare version of Naboo, all old and tattered concrete and succulent climbing vines. Chips are missing from just about every wall and cracks snake out from the stone as far as the eye can see. From those cracks, vibrant green vines creep across the ground, the walls, the roofs, everything. There's an abundance of nature that makes the city look like ruins. The occasional tree pokes out from cracked streets. They are thick barked, leafy things that rise from the ground like squat giants, tall and ugly. The overgrown shrubs catch droplets of condensation from the air and drip drip drip them methodically to the vines below. There are rivers, natural and man-made, that slither through the streets, carrying all the trash dropped into them. They run sluggishly, choked thick with garbage and human waste, the water oozing through canals like pus from an infected wound.

Ah, shit, that was some gross imagery. She regrets it. Gross, gross, why did her mind go to a place like that?

The ever-present mist hangs heavy in the air, and Ryuishi is sure it isn't completely natural. Not any more. It is too heavy, too thick, and always around. It feels like a tangible force that weighs down on her, soaking into her clothes, her skin, her bones. The liquid smoke pours from every inch of the environment and curls in the air, before settling deep in her lungs. The air is stagnant and stinks of rot and mildew, and she finds that of all the things she missed in this place, it is the wind, not the sun. The wind would clear this place out, the sun would only make the smell worse. Quietly, she revises her previous opinion. This city doesn't look like the brainchild of George Lucas. It looks like the bastard offspring of Silent Hill and a public restroom. Ryuishi continues walking, eyes darting around, half expecting to see some sort of grosser version of Pyramid Head burst out of an alley and accost her.

Well, if that's to be the case, she thinks, I better put my fucking hair up.

She finishes tying her hair up with a flourish of her dexterous fingers and takes a deep breath.

Okay.

Okay.

Slanted coal eyes peek curiously through the fog, categorizing exactly where she had ended up on her escapade. The walls lack any familiar signs of deterioration, and the creek that dribbles ahead is completely foreign to her.

She's lost.

Fuck it. She'll just get started on her project in the middle of fucking nowhere on a fleeting whim, without any prior planning or proper research. She's pretty sure it will come back to bite her in the ass, but she has nothing better to do. Maybe she'll find a way back to the brothel later. Or maybe she'll die, brutally murdered by emaciated six-year-old orphans. Who cares? She's always up for a game of unexpected death.

It takes Ryuishi five more minutes of careful searching to locate what will be her first bunch. There are three of them, huddled at the end of an alleyway that reeks of piss and garbage. They are in some weird sort of dog pile on the ground that she supposes is best for warmth, but when she looks at it, all she can think is that it looks very wet. One is drowsing from the edge of the heap, and it is her who spots Ryuishi first. She looks about eight, and her hair is drab almost blond. When the street sees the whore's daughter coming closer, she growls and kicks the other two awake, and soon six eyes are staring down at her. How tall can starving children get, for Christ's sake?

"We don't get no room, go 'way," the blonde growls out, clenching her hands into fists.

"I can show you how to get food," Ryuishi counters, a single brow arched at the aggressive display. Maybe that whole murdered in alleyway idea wasn't too far off.

"We already know how to steal, dummy." But the blond is peering a little closer, her hands loosening.

"I can show you something better. Something that isn't likely to end up with the shit getting kicked out of you."

Eyes narrowed and suspicious, the girl leans in closer, and suddenly she can smell the reek on her, can see the grit in the corners of her eyes and the slime on her clothes. Ryuishi is suddenly hit with the impulsive need to wrangle this child into a pool of soap and scrub her so hard her skin turns pink. She cannot stand grime.

"If ya lyin', we'll beat the snot outta ya," she hisses. But Ryuishi isn't dumb, she knew that when she chose them. She also knows that she has to pick a group that is not only small and young but also desperate. Desperate enough to trust someone as young as herself, desperate enough to learn no matter the cost. With a jerk of her head, she convinces the group to follow her and leads them to one of the gross looking creeks to show them what she knows.

At first, they are suspicious when she pulls the wire from her little yukata, and they get even worse when she pulls out three large pieces of stiff wire mesh. Then she rolls the largest into a barrel and ties it in that shape, and she rolls the other two into funnels, pointing the tip of them inside the barrel and matching up the outer edges before tying them. The contraption is about the size of a small microwave, mostly because it is hard to fit wire mesh pieces on her tiny, tiny body. To the three, it looks like a piece of garbage, and then that thought gets a little too near the current situation because Ryuishi tells them to get the nastiest, most rotten piece of meat they can find and bring it to her.

"If this doesn't work I'll make ya eat it," The blond hisses.

"If this doesn't work I'll eat it by myself." That is a bald-faced lie. If this doesn't work she's gonna get the hell outta dodge and try again with other brats at a later point in time.

When they leave, it is in a group, and she is left alone. Ryuishi can respect that. Three is big enough that you can get assistance when surviving but small enough that the local shinobi won't have won't have thoughts about clearing them out to cut down on the 'riff raff'. Twisting a wire, she lets out a soft snort—as if most of the shinobi in this twisted little village didn't come from the same place themselves.

As she's cutting an opening, Ryuishi ponders the duplicitous nature of the Mist village and the turbulent time she was born in. The village is purging itself, committing genocide of its bloodline users. It's crippling itself, though it doesn't know it yet. To do such a thing is horrendous stupidity, she thinks, especially in a time of war.

And oh, isn't she lucky? To be born during the eve of the Third Shinobi War? Because nobody is looking quite too hard at the genin they push through the academy, and ages are almost completely ignored. Cannon fodder is simply that, and the children they push to the front lines are never expected to make it back. If they do, it comes as a pleasant surprise, a sort of gift that the Mizukage has prevented himself from getting. Not that the Mizukage is acting under his own will, of course. In all actuality, it's a very clever plot by that Uchiha jackass that effectively makes sure that Kiri never has enough power to stand against him. Or is it? She's not completely sure of the timeline yet.

Ahe twists one final wire tight and waits a few minutes for the others to return, keeping an eye out for trouble. When they do come back, the one who had slept on the bottom of the pile thrusts something disgusting in her face. Maybe it was once… chicken? Holy shit, Ryuishi can't even tell. It's rotted and slimy, omitting an odour that reminds her of hot pepper diarrhoea, and she wants to vomit her morning breakfast. A few white maggots undulate inside of it, and her stomach squirms harder in a valiant effort to make her hurl.

It's perfect.

Ahe lets the boy place it inside the trap and lowers it into the water by a strand of rope before tying it to a nearby boulder. Then she motions to the group to follow.

Follow they do, and for a few hours they sneak about, Ryuishi teaching them things along the way. From the riverside, they dig up cattail roots and baby fern shoots that curl out of the soil. In the shadow of a ruined apartment complex, they pluck wild garlic from the ground and snatch together bundles of vines. They collect dry, dead grass and bundles of driftwood and a long flat stone. The group learns how to dig a gipsy well and how to filter the water with gravel, sand, and charcoal. (That last bit was harder to find and she had been forced to sneak into somebody else's yard and steal from their ash pit.)

To those that see them, they look like any other orphan group, lost and hungry, searching for something, anything to eat. Nobody asks, actually most of the time they pretend not to even see them. Ryuishi finds that to be a total dick move. The shinobi sometimes peer curiously, but the group does their best to avoid them, sneaking through back alleys and twisting paths in the fog like silent little mice. They stash their things in the gang's alleyway before pulling up the trap hours later. The group gasps behind her, and even Ryuishi is a little surprised.

Inside are dozens of eels, writhing around like a nest of particularly pissed off noodles. They gasp for air and reveal mouths filled with stubby, sharp little teeth, and the noise they make, all moving together, sounds like something out of a porno. The children behind her make noises of disgust but she shushes them and orders them to bring her the sharpest rock they can find and to filter some water for her. Cleaning these things is gonna be a bitch. The group watches her with some morbid curiosity as she slams the heads off of their thin bodies with the sharp edge of a stone and then peels their rubbery skin off.

"Eels live in gross water and love meaty garbage," she tells them as she scoops the guts out of yet another with her pinky nail. Regret fills her because she knows the smell is going to cling to her hands and clothes like a bad ex. "Even if the water has no air, and looks like it's full of scum, they can survive. I never saw anybody fishing for them, but I saw the birds eat them," she explains.

The group is quiet as she leads them back to the alley, a stinking pile of eel flesh in her trap, washed semi-clean by the water from their new 'well'. They watch as she lights a fire in the bottom of a tipped over metal barrel with the dead grass and driftwood, and then hides the beacon of light with the tattered remains of a blanket. They wonder silently when she cleans the stone of dirt and places it inside with cautious, pudgy hands. The cattail roots go inside the coals and she slices the eel, the fern, and the peeled garlic with her sharp-edged stone into thick blocks, and leaves them on the sizzling hot stone. Soon, a smell begins to fill the air, the smell of smoke and food, and the group worries about others coming before the girl snorts and points out the fact that they are surrounded by apartments that will funnel the smoke up instead of out, and the smell of the filth around them is too pungent to breakthrough.

The blond watches with particular awe when it is finished and the girl pulls a hot pile of food from the barrel like magic. The girl passes around the now roasted roots to be peeled off their burnt skins and eaten, and the brat passing it out looks like some sort of angel. The trio descends and devours the meal like locusts, ignoring the woody texture of the roots and the muddy taste of the eel. It is food, pulled out from places they had never acknowledged, never thought to look. It sits heavy and solid in their stomach and the blond can't remember when she had last been full. It warms her, and she is sleepy, and her group is safe for another day. Better yet, she can gather more food the same way tomorrow.

She looks at the little girl in front of her, so clean and well kept, even after all the digging and cleaning and work. She's too healthy to be like them, her hair too nice and her skin too unblemished. So why would she care?

"Because you're children."

The blond is surprised because she hadn't realized that she had spoken out loud. And also, isn't she a kid like them?

"You're kids," the girl says again, and the blond is scared because when she looks into her dark eyes, it's not like a kid's eyes. It's hollow and dark and empty empty empty, it's the look she saw in the eels' eyes when the girl cut their head off. It is dead. But this girl, this thing, it's talking and—

"You should be cared for, loved and cherished. You're not supposed to be on the streets like dirty fucking animals, you deserve better for no other reason than you exist. You had no choice coming into this world, and the people that leave you like that, they're shit. You deserve to be here, you deserve a chance to live. If that means I have to teach you, hide from shinobi and run away every day, then so be it. Then you can teach other kids, and they can teach even more. Who needs the adults? By the time I'm done, there won't be any lonely kids left, because every orphan in Kiri will be family. They will be a tribe."

—and then the blond doesn't care, because nobody has ever told her that sorta stuff. Nobody ever said she should get a chance just because, nobody told her she didn't have to prove herself.

No one had ever said that she was enough.

So she ignored the empty eyes of the little girl who wasn't a little girl, and she didn't say a word. She just smiled and asked her when she could learn more.

Together, they begin to plot.