'Thrown shadows down a corridor can be frightening, but not as ghastly as the being that cast it.'

Xion brooked the stairs that wound up the Hokage Mount. He thought of just the spot next to Hashirama. It was easily the most identifiable landmark in the whole village. And the view was incomparable. 

He put his weight on the railing, his arms folded on the cold steel. This height saw a lot of updrafts. And Xion thought it was nice to just close his eyes and feel like he was flying. He could not deny the powerful feeling of galloping into the wind or the free thought of kicking his legs high at the swirling sky. He released a shaky breath and slowly reached his hand outward to swim in the air. It all felt connected; that these monuments saw every birth and death of any conflict. Established by the village’s founders, and herald to their lingering will. The list had gotten long since the old days, but each Hokage had their own greatness. Xion wondered, was that something achievable by someone like him? Some one so tainted so--

‘--[corrupted]?’

This voice. It had no soul. Xion resisted, immediately. Like usual. But he could never shake the feeling. Insatiable hunger. Desire. Ravenous.

No. His will--was his own. He peeked over the railing. From this height, it seemed like he’d go burling towards the ground at any minute. His breath hitched. His eyes were wild. Some force from within him demanded he vault the railing, plummet to the earth, just to see how fast he’d fall, just to see if he could survive.

His torso went over the railing. Anymore and he’d fall. He fought the force with all he had. Suddenly it--no, he spoke.

With wayward eyes, and a cheshire grin, Xion spoke with no semblance of humanity, “‘Stop! Oh my! That’s dangerous, y’know? Standing so close, with gravity just waiting to be challenged! A taste of reality’s savoury flesh!”

He salvaged his senses quickly, but instead of reeling himself up immediately he dangled there. If only for a moment. He looked absolutely insane. He was sure of it. 

In these moments he could almost feel the presence inside of him using it’s will, it’s words, to tear right into the screaming surface of reality. How could he ever be good? Do good things? More importantly, how could he prove to himself especially that he wasn’t bad? Safe behind the railing again, he took in the view. His hair raced in the wind like snow. Like a leaf being set free to ride the wind, the strands burst sideways in a rush of adrenaline. Xion could hear the wind rise in it’s hymn, dancing in rhythm and using it’s excitement mingled as it flew across the surface of the world. He slowly pried his eyelids open. What met his eyes was like nothing he had ever imagined before. The world rolled out before him like a giant scroll. The grass, the mountains that sat in their respite long past the village border, parted before him as his eyes raced over hills and valleys towards where the sun’s fire licked the cloudy sky. Red, pink, blue, purple, orange, green, and yellow swirled around Xion in vivid color. In moments like these he could forget his shortcomings. The problems he had; his home was here. Here where the world unraveled and the wind sung. Here where the skies roared and the sun caught fire. Here in the Land of Fire. He looked to his side where the carved faces overlooked the village. The stone heads that had seen the countless battles and moons that carved this city into the agonizing threshold of a new world. Was that the pinnacle of one’s lifetime? Build a city, take the throne? But how could he do that? Where would he start? And what idea could unify the people under him?

Certainly not what had been displayed here.

He’d met the current Hokage. Lean build, he sat ramrod straight. Dark, worn eyes that spoke of his ire without him having to. His face was swathed in shaven, coarse facial hair. He’d only seen him briefly as Xion himself was soon scouted out to a war zone. Kumogakure. The battleground of the latest conflict. To the same vain, Xion thought, Amegakure was during the war of the Five Nations back in the old days. All he remembered was fire and ghost outpost. A direct result of Konaha. All bitter still, it was in direct conflict to the warm hearts and gracious people that lived here. Or so he thought.

He rested his thoughts on a palm,”Ominous skies, killer shinobi, people in mortal danger... seriously, aren't we tired of this?”

WC: 812

[ You could see your world. ]

That's why people came up here, isn't it? A hand held high, tilted with an open palm as if to caress the scene of the leaf village below them. If they just squeezed - a flex closed into a fist, a little harder to fully grasp the image - would they capture it beneath their knuckles? Could someone, anyone, so heartily claim a place as 'theirs'? Not just a world; not just a village, not just a law, but a home, even. This is where you could belong, they'd think. This is where I belong. That's why they were allowed this vantage, across the expanse of every roof and ant of a civilian crawling about below them.

This could be your home.

No, perhaps not, but it was her world.

They were rare moments, yet brief, where Mei-Mei stewed at all in these sentimentalities that were so far removed from the general pop and bang of her personal dramatics. Maybe that's why she stole away here, so as not to tarnish her image. Even then, this was a reflection on the picturesque whole. Introspection was not what she did, not even at her lowest points - self-actualization had already been reached, as far as she was concerned. The soft gaze that leveled currently over the village - her village - was not of a place of heart, or mind, but something as simple as proximity. The way the sun looks upon the earth as it rotates. The acknowledgement of "yes, this is a special thing, a thing that is special because of its reliance on me and the orbit that prioritizes my existence. "

From a young age - from the birth of their thoughts - the Will of Fire was deeply ingrained within the Kimura. Not one veered from their loyalty to the leaf, nor their devotion to its peoples and its ideals. Even Mei-Mei, with her silken garments and puffy furs and bright, pompous coloration to draw that much more attention to herself -- even she cared for this "world", her own. There was so much important to her, so much ambition for everything everyone else didn't want her to be; but this village would always be the satellite she sought. This was her constant, the one in a sea of male faces and disgruntled chiding. She didn't need to wish to die in cause for it to realize she was willing to do anything to keep it as it was, selfish or otherwise.

She needed Konohagakure to always remain Konohagakure, for her, for the people she cared for and wanted to be cherished by within it. That's why she claimed this sight for her own, a radiating warmth from the pit of her chest to the tip of her fingers while they shaped a scene around the one before her eyes. She could see everything, therefore it was all her own. It was so very simple, to take notice, to make claim --

However, it turned to be that the sprawling cityscape was not the only thing within her field of vision. A tilt of her head, a purse of her lips; a scrawling of annoyance across her features, quickly passed and then reaffirmed as she focused in on the person wobbled against the edge of his own outlook. "Hey." She announced, properly nudged out of her whimsy and back into the starring role she so loved to play. "Hello." Her tone was leveled and aimed directly to the softest spots beneath the boy's skin, biting like fangs and piercing like an arrow.

He didn't seem alright, she would note, as if in passing. She hadn't noticed him until now; she was a little further up, having climbed for a wider purview -- his field of vision might have offered him the strictly better view, but she hadn't been here for details. The little people, as it were. She had wanted to see its whole, to cup it in her hand and keep it sealed within her fingers. This had distracted her from glancing just below, skidding down and hopping to a *loud* point a meter or two behind the other. He hadn't seemed to notice her, either, and that made her relax into her typical languid self-assuredness. She always did enjoy the upper hand, as it were.

... Still. He didn't seem alright. "You might have fallen, you know. If you so wish to sully my village with the unsightly look of your blood, I'd be happy to bring it el --" He spoke. It broke her out of her mandated tirade, the bit of her that had to pomp and fluff and wave around her feathers as if to say 'listen to me, look at me.'

It caught her off guard, and the 'o' her mouth was opened into hung for a few key seconds as she mulled it over in her head. She didn't care to continue her chastisement, already hanging onto a new train of thought that seemed much more compelling. "Why would we be?" It came easily, that arrogance. It came easily, that narrow-minded blindness to change. After all, what would she change? She knew everything she wanted, and she knew how obtainable it could be. She played by all the rules of the game.

Why would she make it harder to win?

"Isn't this better? To know? To see?" For someone who wasn't a shinobi and didn't care the least to become one, she was happy to defend its marketability. She held just enough respect for the trade to not outright insult it, but the real value was in the appearance of strength, of will, of desire -- the only differences between her and a shinobi, she reasoned, were a title and the freedom from indentured servitude. She had everything else down just as well. "It's better this way," she mused, every opinion stated firmly as fact. "It's better to know where everything and everyone really stands. You can expect it, like this"

"We'll always win out in the end, anyway."

[ 1028 ]

He froze. That voice was right on his heels. It was answering his question as well. His eyes sauntered over his shoulder.

A girl?

There was a steadiness to her, as if all the storms in the world were a whispering breeze if she was there. Her eyes were big and bright, like most girls. They spoke of a beautiful soul that her pompous voice seemed to deny. Her hair was as waves of pure autumn, softly reflecting the light of the sun; each strand moving freely in an ocean born breeze, a compliment to its length. With eyes of fire themselves, in glossy serenity, her aura seeped into the summer air between the two of them. 

Though beauty is only one thing, attitude--personality. They were the true gauges of merit.

Xion sized the girl. Eyes not faltering from his regained icy-calm. Her dainty gait was at odds with her haughty words. There was a casualness to it that wasn't quite fitting to her unassuming frame. Her words could crush a man burdened by strong emotion and feeling. As he’d already doubted just moments ago, to do something like they did in Kumo, something of that caliber, the people here can’t be all that kind. He went to retort but he felt the vessels in his eyes twitch, as if they were going to strain. To burst. He held his tongue. The tell-tale signs that if he spoke, ugly sound would come out, and the hand that would come to praise him would be smoky, reeking of darkness. But not unlike his own. 

‘[Wield] me. Use me to [test] her.’ Xion brooked this voice to silence. Now was not the time. Besides, there were many more civilized ways of dealing with mild indiscretions. 

“Heedless words--.” He braced the view once again. “--Mind if I throw them back at you? Is that something you’ve seen? Scorched bodies? A sting in your heart--while looking at a scene of fire? Especially when you’ve gone through something similar. With words like that, I’d hope not. And I don’t really think you have, either.--”

A low hum traveled from the earth, stories below. The hum that is accompanied by an updraft at this type of height. The kind of organic breath that seems to travel through someone, up one’s spine, and through one’s fingertips. The rogue stream of air that sends one’s hair into a flurry, but calming, sobering.

She said something to the vain, that it allows people to know there place. He felt gaslit, if only for a moment. “Where everything and everyone stands.” Who’s to say that Konoha really deserved that title? If it had it at all? But then again, how much pride, or the lack thereof, did he have to even dismiss such a thing. After all it seemed to him that the Land if Fire was the least prone to violence and a manifest destiny-esque takeover. Well, that is what he thought up until recently.

And the second half of what she said. That they’d ‘always win’. She couldn’t be too sure. In the back of his mind, he felt as if, a reckoning was due. And he couldn’t argue, at least logically, that it wasn’t well deserved.

Who was she anyway, he thought. 

He wasn’t one to lose his composure, to anyone but himself. He hardly ever showed distress beyond fatigue. He remembered, in the past, he showed a polite interest in the lives of his family, of his brother, but otherwise kept himself to himself. But the memories of Kumogakure intertwined with his own experiences threatened his voice to rise above the sacred silence. As if a glance, touch, and one small comment could stir a hurricane of harsh and horsed insults. His own Pandora's box would open, sending each word full speed ahead to shatter her soul into a million pieces. 

But he was never into testing his wit on a complete stranger. He was far too aware of social graces for that. She certainly didn’t sound like she held the same sentiments.  

Still her words had such a trained sneer. Hard to believe a girl as delicate looking as her could spit such venom. Nothing was starting to surprise him anymore. He already had a dull exhaustion to it, like they'd been over the same bitterness too many times before. 

“--Y’know, you’ve got a lot of conviction, for a little girl. It’s almost sounds like you’ve never had a thought that wasn’t about yourself.”

WC: 777/1589

"Don't be a bitch." The hot-headed annoyance came easily to her, one side of her lips twisted backwards in a sneer to scrunch her face. Both hands were on her hips, a grand and obstinate show of defiance towards the scan of his eyes across her. She didn't mind the feeling, of course - she lived for people to look at her - but she wasn't about to melt under his steely gaze. There was something odd about him. Something she couldn't place her unmarred fingers on, lest she worry it dirty them.

Despite the way she spoke, it didn't come across harshly. It was off-handed, irritated but not angry. That's how little she thought of his retort -- or anything anyone said to her that she didn't agree with, really. It would never take much to work her up, but it'd take more than someone trying to pierce her heart with 'sad ideologies.' What did she care, really? It wasn't even personal to her. "Of course I haven't, and I don't intend to. That's gruesome. I'm far too precious to be subjected to such gory, disgusting scenes. Don't you know a delicate girl when you see one?"

A playful muse, meeting his body-check with one of her own. He was thin, far too thin, in a way that gave him the appearance of something Mei-Mei could grab and snap like a baby bird. Not that she would, fairly, nor was that something she particularly disliked, but it couldn't be said he was attractive by society's standards. He was lanky, and long; and a mess of off-putting white and grey and darker tones, a striking monochrome against the orderly, passionate colors of the girl standing across from him. He looked as odd as he sounded, but there was something in that disassociated gaze of his that stopped her from approaching further than she already had. A heel clicked against the ground, her head tilted up and angled to the side even as her eyes stayed measured on him. "And yet, what does it matter? That isn't my job. That's your job, isn't it? I can only assume you're a shinobi - everyone else is, for one reason or another."

She pulled a hand with boredom through her hair, waves of tempered flame threaded and falling through her fingers. Each time a curl tugged at a tip she'd give it a tug back until it fell into its place -- as everything should be. "Isn't it your fault, then? If you cause these atrocities? If you commit them, or you can't stop them from happening? Aren't you supposed to be the strong one?" Her stare had strayed from him as she fussed with her hair, snapping back with dispassionate yet mutely intrigued gold. Flecks, here and there, matching his glow for glow. "Face it. This is your life, this is my life. We all have our positions. Play your role or give up and die. The Hidden Leaf Village has no time for weak figures."

She meant this, for all of her pride. She wasn't going to gamble her life on becoming a ninja, but she wasn't about to gamble Konoha's on some boy whose nerves got the better of him.

"Why would I think about anything but myself?" Her words were curt, pointed but not sharp. There wasn't a trace of disingenuous tenor. "Mmm ... nope! That's not true. Of course I'm important. I only ever look after myself and I'm right for that. I don't completely disregard the existence of people like you, however. You also have worth."

A straighten of her spine, one raised eyebrow. "You could make a good husband one day if you just did your job."

[ 652 | 1680 ]

When someone smiled at Xion it was like for a split second everything stopped and their smile pierced through all the bad in his past, his life so far. Making it seem like things would only get better. But she had the smile of a menace, the slight curve of the lips. A satisfaction, as if having completed a deeply, personally needed action; expressed by the slightest curve at the mouth's corner and a youthful confidence worn in a light raise of the eyebrow above a quizzical, joyful eye. Like this was a competition she set to win.

When she swore, he quickly turned. That was aggressive. Excessive. Was she talking to him? Humans rarely made much sense to him. He’d heard worse. Seen much worse. There was no pain or hurt to be felt, and thus he lacked the flaw of being moved to emotion that easily. The reptilian part of one’s brain that kneaded emotion and territoriality into action was lost on his numb response to stimuli.

Every smile that lit up her features was the wrong sort. It's like she ran on cold malice instead of any form of genuine affection. He thought that perhaps she was a baby that was left to cry, or a personality disorder the doctors couldn't fix. Either way she had as much empathy as one of his kunai. It was clear to him that she was trying out her wit against a stranger, and he must look entirely unassuming.

There was definitely more nuisance to what he was saying than she could realize. He spoke of personal experiences and his own coming of age. Of course he didn’t expect her to know that. Which is why he found her conviction so odd. Just a few months ago he would have agreed with her words. Thinking that those with admirable canon paired best with his kind. But sharp words meant nothing to him. Not anymore. Despite all he’d seen lose their lives, amidst all those who’d suffered, what he was starting to value more were genuine smiles and actions. He wouldn’t outright dismiss the idea, but he could tell she’d never  experienced any loss inside that conceited bubble of her’s.

He could feel his Otherself revving and writhing in her twisted words. A perfect parallel to her dark tone. ‘She knows that reality is the [shape] and the point is the [tooth]: nothing has ever lived that will not die. Flesh so [sweet] and [succulent] has yet to decay. Indulge.’

Back facing her, he returned to the view. No use in seriously debating someone this odd.

“You absolute dolt.” He tittered to himself. “You have no idea what you’re saying. Just pig-ignorant. This could not get dumber.”

And as if to prove him wrong, she went from antagonizing to flirtatious patronizing. He was visibly annoyed now.

What did she mean by that anyways, he thought. He wasn’t so burdened by emotion that her words could absolutely crush him. Nor as saccharine not to take issue with what he was saying. 

He’d met her kind before. And he thought back to the woman who had changed his life. Beautiful yet malevolent. Looks that could kill, and they would. Femme fatal is what they were called, beauty that could bend men to their whim. Ever since that day, he’d never underestimated the female shape. More dangerous than any forthright man. More mettle to their merit.

He wouldn’t downplay her ability. If he could even call it that. She was a kid, even if she wasn’t one physically, exactly. She thought she was invincible, that the sun should rise and set whenever she opened her eyes. He could think of a lot of ways to bring her down to earth. Wild eyes, baited breath. 

When the flash of annoyance comes so does a bad idea. Isn't it always this way? He didn’t know her, but he wasn’t too keen on making her--acquainted with his bad side. In that moment he funneled all his strength into his feet and used it to pan the walk way, creating distance between the two, with his mouth shut and hands relaxed. In the long run it's better that way. If he were to speak in anger his dark thoughts would have a crack to seep through, perhaps for a long time to come. But when he is steady, when I remember that he is in full control, he can usually keep it together. Until then, it's his own responsibility to ignore, the ground beneath his feet and the wind in my tousled silver mane. She needs an adventure, needs to scrape her knees and maybe a good mortal wound. While it was impossible to know her motive, he’d met this personality type before. 

Before long he was drawn into the world before him, once again. In this light that paints his skin so warmly, the trees below are dancing ladies, each in dresses more fabulous than any designer can craft. A day so fine, and the only thing she could think about was picking a fight> They move, choreographed by the wind, in perfect time with one another. They are the life and soul of this early summer morning, and he tried to guess how many hues of green his eyes are witnessing. As they stretch upwards and outwards toward the light, drinking in rays as pure as the rain, he stretched an arms up too, fingers spread toward the sun and slowly begin to dance 

“Wow. You don’t even know me, and those are your first words? You really gambled, I’d say. There are people with wit and teeth, sharper than your own y’know. So give it a rest, I’m not impressed.”

WC: 983/2572