The old Lie
"Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori": It is a sweet and noble thing to die for your country.
01
Neji was a good soldier. It was not just a feeling that he had, he knew that he was a good soldier. It was one of the facts of life.
When Lee came bursting into the forest clearing with the news, he had scowled at first. "Nine birds," he said to himself. Lee glanced into the sky, shook his head at first, and then became still.
"Yeah," Lee said, fixing his dark eyes on Neji. "Nine birds."
02
There were very few casualties in the beginning, and for each life that was lost, Tsunade added another year of grief to her life. The first name that she saw on the list didn't even register itself in her mind. He was one of the many ninjas in Konoha, and Tsunade felt a tumor of guilt beginning to embed itself into her womb.
"Tsunade-sama," a soft, male voice cut into her thoughts. "You shouldn't--"
"Iruka." Tsunade lifted her eyes to the chuunin standing at attention in front of her. A smile softened her hard-set lips. "You're not at the battle-front." When Iruka did nothing to relax, she stood up, and walked over to place a hand on his shoulder. "At ease, my man. At ease."
03
After the eighty-ninth man, Kakashi stopped counting. There was another ninja coming--from Sound, he could tell--and without a pause, he sent a spray of kunai towards the already bleeding enemy soldier.
There was a second of silence on the field, and then, almost as if there was only one mind thinking for all of them, the Sound nin began to retreat: a slow, trickling away that left Kakashi's skin still tingling with anticipation. There was a moment as the remaining Konoha chuunin waited for an order from Kakashi. He looked around and made a head-count. Twenty to begin with. Now only nine were left standing.
"Fall back," he said. There was no use following the enemy. It would end up as one long, arduous wait no matter what he did.
He waited for the closest chuunin to follow orders before he followed, and soon, he could sense the others behind him, silently making their way through thick forest. Kakashi wondered, as he let his hitai-ate slip over his sharingan eye, if Gai would be willing to play a round of Roulette.
04
There was something almost sly about the way women fought, Shikamaru decided, touching the protruding bone in his right arm. He had noticed the girl coming, and he knew, with certainty, that this would happen. But he had held onto the shadow, and because of this, he knew he had saved at least twenty lives. He winced when a twinge of pain went through his arm, and then rolled his eyes. "So fucking troublesome."
The other men were silent, and then, without saying a word, Chouji walked up to Shikamaru, and punched Shikamaru in the stomach. The dark-haired Chuunin grunted, and bent over.
The last thing that swam through his hazy mind was the fact that, thankfully, Chouji had caught him before he fell face-first into the blood-mixed mud.
05
When Shizune suggested that the new genins should be used as a replacement for the soldiers and buy some time, Tsunade had slapped her. Shizune had stared into the golden eyes of the Hokage for a while, her cheek red and tingly with sensation. There was silence, and in Shizune's mind, there was the ring-ring-ringing of the sound of Tsunade's hand making contact with her cheek.
Tsunade stilled after hitting her friend. They did not talk for the rest of the night, and Shizune actually fell asleep while Tsunade sat-- completely still--in front of her desk.
The next day, the first team of genins was sent to the line of battle.
They never came back, and still, whenever a silence settled in the Hokage's room, Shizune hears the dull ring of Tsunade's angry resignation.
06
There was one thing that Kiba prided himself in, and it was this: he was a survivor. It ran in his family. The Inuzuka family, everyone knew, was the closest to nature among all Konoha ninjas. They shared their blood with wolves, after all.
But when he saw Akamaru's knees bend, and then buckle with a sickening crack, Kiba wondered how he had ever thought he could make it through.
07
Sasuke and Naruto were always together in the war. Sakura would flutter in and out of the scene, but Sasuke and Naruto were always together. After a while, the commanding chuunins and jounins realized that they could not separate the two, and from then on, whenever they assigned jobs, they made sure to put them together. It was always, Sasuke'nNaruto, scout ahead, or, Sasuke'nNaruto, keep guard, or Sasuke'nNaruto, enough.
The first time Sasuke left the camps without Naruto, he woke up quietly, and looked to his left where Naruto always slept and was surprised to see bright, blue eyes staring into his own. Naruto got dressed with Sasuke although he could have slept for another hour, and walked with Sasuke to the lines. Naruto waited in the dark and the cold, cold rain until the commanding jounin came out to give orders. When Sasuke's group left, Naruto watched, feeling slightly sick in his stomach.
When Sasuke came back, with four kunais lodged in his back--the first serious wound he had received the entire war--and on the brink of fainting, Naruto was waiting for him in their tent. He, too, was wounded for the first time in the war: a kunai had lodged itself in his left leg, and had begun to fester even before they had retreated to the lines.
It was always Sasuke'nNaruto after that.
08
The first time Hinata swore in her entire life was when a kunai flew past her and planted itself in Shino's side. The blood that flowed out barely stained the black coat that Shino was wearing, and before she could blink, bugs had seeped out and began to cover the wound. Shino did nothing, but the kunai was slowly pushed out of his body by the bugs inside him.
The first time Hinata swore with meaning and anger, was when Kiba cried after Akamaru died.
The first time Hinata killed--truly killed--made her smile with dry humor that she thought she didn't have.
"You son of a fucking bitch," Hinata had hissed. Kurenai didn't say anything when Hinata kicked the limp soldier in bitter resignation and walked away.
09
There was something horribly ironic about the world, Ino decided when Chouji managed to block an attack with only his will and his body weight.
When he dropped to the ground, with a soft smile on his face, Ino killed the enemy, and bent over Chouji. She watched with hard, blue eyes, short hair that wisped around her ears, and a scar running down from the tips of her ear to her left breast, while her friend died.
Back at camp, when Chouji's absence was noted, Ino dismissed it with the excuse that Chouji had been moved to another area of battle.
She never told Shikamaru. And, oddly, Shikamaru never asked.
10
Konohamaru had once been fascinated by Shakespeare. He still remembered his grandfather teaching him Sonnet 29. And each night, he would wake up with tears in his eyes, and the image of his grandfather on the back of his eyelids. He would recite that poem, then, and would lull himself to sleep.
"When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes," he once told Udon, with a crushing pain in his throat, "I all alone beweep my outcast state." He had stopped when he realized that Udon did not absorb his words. The other boy had looked at him through shining glasses that reflected the light coming through the classroom window.
"What-"
The burning in his throat--and now his eyes--did not stop, but Konohamaru pushed himself through. "And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries," he said. He blinked, and when he opened his eyes again, Udon was looking down at his book. "And look upon myself and curse my fate."
Konohamaru looked back down on his books, and blinked again. When a tear drop blurred the ink on his paper, he shut the book angrily, and stood up. The teacher--a substitute, since Iruka-sensei was fighting in the war--looked up anxiously. When Konohamaru walked out of the room, only silence followed the sliding of the door.The next day, Konohamaru got a detention slip which he used as a bookmark. He stayed till five o'clock at school that night, cleaning all the black boards in the school, and when he was done, he walked in an empty school with only shining black boards to mark his presence.
That night, when Konohamaru woke up again, he got up and dressed himself as he usually did. Without waking up his caretaker, he walked to the school, and opened the door to his room. In the silence, he could hear the breeze picking up the leaves of the tree that stood by the open window. The black board glistened eerily, and Konohamaru, with hard, silent eyes, picked up a piece of chalk and began to write.
The next day, in the silence of the classroom, and the open stare of the substitute, and in Konohamaru's absence, only Udon would read the words that had been neatly written in the center of the bard.
"When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings."
The poem was never erased: that day, all the genins had been taken to battle, and two months later, senior students in the Academy. Konohamaru was hard, and cold during battles. He was a good soldier, and every night, he would whisper the poem to himself. But when the commanding chuunin had kindly told him that any noise--even his whispers--could alert the enemey, Konohamaru stopped.
When Konohamaru held Udon's intestines in his hands, and felt the blood pouring into and mixing with the cold, unforgiving mud, he remembered another poem that his grandfather had recited. And Konohamaru watched, with a hardened heart, and with the smell of chalk still lingering in his nostrils, as Udon's eyes rolled to the back of his head, and the dull, brown orbs vanished to reveal only white.
When Iruka-sensei, and the commanding chuunin of Konohamaru's group found the boy, he was holding Udon close to him, and reciting a poem that only Udon could hear.
"In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori."
End of The old Lie