Not Even One Breath.

[Kanade]

A small and warm flame flickered in Chiaki's chambers of Kintsugi, illuminating the purple haired woman that sat at Chiaki's desk where scrolls, bits of paper, and notebooks lay scattered around her in what could only be described as a frenzied mess. Hands on her forehead, the woman willed the tears into being that blurred her vision to come, as they wouldn’t otherwise.

Another failed fuuinjutsu seal, another failed experiment, another failed ritual. The lump of inanimate matter lay still below her stomach, and she could feel it with the synthetic nerves she had given herself. She didn't have a heartbeat, and neither did it, but she could tell, all the same, that the jutsu had ended. She named it in her mind, jutsu, because it wasn't the miracle she had been working toward, the miracle she had been hoping for, the unattainable miracle she had wanted. The hard stool and desk were a reminder that she had to continue, for her and Kirari. She had told Kirari she wanted to have a child, which was the source of the tears that rolled down her cheeks, and pattered on the paper below her chin. She had given herself the look, the feel, even the smell of a human, had reconstructed the human lymphatic, circulatory, respiratory, ocular, nervous, and other systems using theoretic and synthetic silicone and fuuinjutsu.

Chiaki reached out, her dull orange eyes illuminated by the candle that guttered, nearing the end of its life toward the flickering flame and snuffed it with her index finger and thumb. With the last candle extinguished, so too was the hope that the fuuinjutsu that she had been working on for months would work. There wasn't even trace chakra pulsing through it anymore.

Channeling chakra in the dark room, Chiaki opened the door to her personal realm, finding herself despondently looking at the elevator’s floors that she had conjured up this time. In bright red characters read: “Failed experiments”. It was only dedicated to one thing, and one thing alone.

As her finger depressed the megallium button she wasn’t surprised when the double-doors opened to the sound of music, discordant and melancholic, a good fit for her mood. Her butterflies even fluttered around erratically, not daring to touch her as she made her slow ascent to the floor, feeling as alienated from her as if she were something akin to a youkai. As the mirrored megallium doors closed, she got a good look at the woman in the mirror. A woman that was as far from the bright and kind kunoichi that she had been in Kumogakure no sato as she could be. Purple disheveled hair and ink-stained fingertips denounced the slow descent into despair that she had made in the past few months. She had tried to carry a child in her, forming a seal above where her synthetic uterus was, but what had come out was-.

The doors slid open and she was face to face with the tubes upon tubes of failed experiments. She walked over to the oldest one, the first time that she had tried to have a baby with Kirari. A hunk of silicone in the shape of a small fetus bobbed up and down within, completely void of all things that she would consider life. She had made a core for it, a girl, and had made sure that the jutsu would provide limbs, a brain, all the working parts of Chiaki’s own body that simulated life.

Chiaki couldn’t, however, combine the chakra signatures of her and Kirari. She had tried to take the chakra of both individuals and channel it into the babe, and it had worked for the first month, or that is what she had told herself. She felt like she had something inside of her that wasn’t completely her own, but when that chakra petered out and she could no longer distinguish it from herself, she had cut herself open with a scalpel and found the lump of silicone that, now in the cylinder turned to face her, completely inert. It was a cruel simulacrum of life, a life that she had left behind when she had followed Maido’s thoughts, plans, and expectations of her. Power. Power at all costs, and the hope to be there through the ages, healing the land. What unabashed hubris.

Chiaki had wanted power, she wanted to protect those who mattered to her, wanted to protect those who she cared for, and from that want, and from the fear that she was too weak to do it, she had sacrificed so much. She had told herself, foolishly, that she knew what she was doing. Chiaki had drawn out plans for each and every part of the human body and even now she could feel the false heart pumping silicate based blood through her faux body, bringing false blood to her false muscles and organs. She had understood the need for all of these things, and especially for chakra to create life, to create something that was apart from her but also a part of her.

All of this, along with her knowledge of human genetics, biology, anatomy, and physiology had made her lust for a body that wouldn’t age, that would be able to protect those she loved, but would also be capable of living, eating, breathing, and reproducing like a human’s body. She had made the leap into this form hastily, and was now feeling the bitter sting of regret. Regret and shame. Shame and disgust. The bile didn't come as the overwhelming emotion of self-loathing washed over her in hot waves.

She came out of her repose, finding that she was crying, yet again, not that the tears were anything remotely close to real tears. For that to be so, she would have to be organic. For that to be true, she would have to be living, still. She retracted her hand from the large cylinder in front of her, finding her fingers resting against the cool glass, and walked slowly toward the tube at the end of the room.

There was another cylinder there, the twin of the one at the entrance, already filled with preserving fluid that would make sure that her silicone would last far longer than it would otherwise, waiting in anticipation for her next failure. She lifted her shirt, and there, now broken, was another seal, similar, more complex, more chakra intensive than the one that she had made when she had met Kirari and they had made plans for a baby, had been so caught up in each other that the world could burn for all they cared, and Chiaki had been so proud to unveil that seal, the first iteration of many failures to come.

Chiaki’s hand sought the scalpel on a nearby table and pressing it into her silicate flesh with a squelching incision, she pulled out another inert silicone simulacrum of a fetus. This time, the hair was made from suiton chakra, and had settled on an ombre dash of green and red. The hair was short, and the features reminded Chiaki of Kirari. She placed the small inert bit of silicone into the tube and watched as it sank to the bottom before bobbing up to about eye-level. It stayed there, eyes never opening to see the world, a small construct that Chiaki had made in the likeness of Kirari, using ancient runes, crafting, silicone, fuuinjutsu, her expertise in Iijutsu, medicinal arts, tenkujutsu, and even her kyoukan tether to try to bring this small, would be baby, to life.

It never had lived though, never once was it anything but a construct jutsu, one like she had seen that once, the phoenix. The flames of that jutsu when Maido and Shinjiro had clashed for the greaves in her mind burned, and so too did the tears, once again, as she slammed her fist onto the table, finding the floor slick with her silicate blood, she toppled onto the ground. The cacophany echoed around the empty room, before settling into a sickening stillness that not even the wingbeats of her butterflies interrupted, as they lay on the floor as still as if they were dead.

.


Chiaki took the scalpel and drove it into her face, into her eye, into her ear. Each blow aimed at a part of her that she knew she could repair, somewhere in the back of her shrieking mind. Cros had been right, she was a monster now. She surrounded herself with beauty and butterflies, she tried to bring health to the sick, food to the hungry, and even life to the lifeless, but had sacrificed her own humanity for it.

She wove the seals for a jutsu she knew wouldn't work, but tried it anyhow, tried to turn back time to the time where she had a body, tried to turn the clock back, but the jutsu fizzled out in her hands, leaving them burnt with the chakra she had expended, barely conscious because of the overexertion of her chakra system.

Exhausted, she stared with eyes unseeing at her hands, covered in red silicone blood, her shirt still was pulled up, revealing the gaping wound leading to her sterile and useless uterus. Long strands of purple silicate hung loose and tangled about her head. And she sat there, not breathing, not crying, numb to the world with her body, designed to feel, designed to make sure that she felt every hurt, every change in temperature, every laugh and cry. Numb to all the pain, all the signals screeching at her in her fake Central Nervous System howling at this moment that she was going to die.

She knew better.

And the pain didn’t distract from the gnawing agony that swirled inside her core, shaped like a butterfly. Ironic that she thought that when she was undergoing her conversion from human to Elemental Body that she could be something as beautiful as a butterfly.

At least now, the ruined silicone body that pressed its forehead against the pedestal with the cylinder finally understood what Shinjiro meant. He might be housing a monster, but she wasn’t even a part of this world anymore. Her hand, straining against the scalpel hung poised above her core, pressing into her breast, and she stayed like that for a long while as the rhythmic dripping of silicate fluids pounded in her ears, willing herself to stab the butterfly in her chest and end it all.

The woman who didn’t even look like Chiaki anymore wished for the sweet darkness of obliviate sleep to take her, but she was denied even this. A dull metallic clatter, and a soft thud echoed in her room of failure.

She belonged here.