The Angel's Ambivalence [Naruto]

Kaguya Ohtsutsuki

"Sometimes I tell myself I'm okay. I repeat it like a mantra. I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay. Because I'm afraid if I stop, even for a moment, I will drown in all the reasons I am not."

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Minxie's POV

I'd never really given much thought to how I would die.

Now, before you accuse me of going all Twilight on you, you have to understand that me being a shinobi and not thinking about my death was actually pretty unreasonable of me. After all, as a shinobi, death was something I faced every day. It could happen at any time, any moment, so of course thinking about exactly how it would happen would've been pretty logical. Then again, logic and I had never really been the best of friends, which probably explained why I was barely having a reaction to encountering death right now.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I'd faced death so many times before that it no longer fazed me. With the amount of monsters and crazy shinobi that I dealt with on a daily basis, near-death situations were pretty much a constant for me, almost every bit as normal as having breakfast in the morning. In fact, it'd probably make me really uncomfortable and concerned if I didn't almost die at least once a week.

Or maybe it was because I'd never really been all that afraid of death, anyway. I knew it was going to happen someday, and there was a part of me that, as a shinobi and a Jinchuriki, had resigned myself to that particular truth a long, long time ago. The few times that I did think about dying, however, I'd imagined that, if my death were to come early, it would mean something, that it'd be worth it. That it'd be heroic, honorable, something to be proud of.

Dying as a result of falling into a pool of lava? So not something to be proud of.

This realization came to me, ironically, when I was about six feet away from falling into said pool of lava. For a moment, I wondered if I should save myself at all, if I even wanted to. Because the truth was, at that moment, I didn't want to. I didn't want to keep fighting, to keep living, in a world where my brother was no longer part of the equation. And right here, right now, giving up would be so simple. It would be easy to give up all that pain, to save myself from the impossible task of figuring out how to live my life without Ryuu in it. And I wanted that. For once, I wanted the easy way out; I just wanted it to all stop, probably more than anything else I'd wanted in a long, long time.

But then I remembered my team, and I knew that I couldn't do it. I couldn't take the easy way out. I couldn't let myself be that selfish, not when I had the power to save them, not when they still needed me.

Somewhere in the middle of choosing between falling into the lava or saving myself, between choosing to die or choosing to live, I made a promise. I wasn't sure to who or why, but I promised nonetheless. I promised not to try or to forget, but to endure, to pretend. For the sake of the people I loved, I would pretend to be okay. I would laugh and joke and smile; I would fight and save and endure; I would pretend that I was whole again, that I was okay, until my friends believed it.

And maybe eventually, one day, if I was lucky... I would believe it, too.

I managed to stop myself from being destroyed by the scorching, fiery depths that had materialized out of nowhere just in time, my chakra wings fluttering rapidly and keeping me suspended in the air. I supposed the fact that I could fly and still somehow almost ended up falling into a pool of lava was a testament to just how much of a failure I was.

It took me about another two seconds to remember that, while I could levitate just fine, the rest of my teammates could not, and they were probably about five seconds away from falling into the lava and burning to death. I quickly pulled myself together, my eyes darting around in search of them. Thankfully, Sasuke reacted faster than I did and summoned a hawk to stop his fall and catch him, which meant that I only had to worry about rescuing Naruto, Sakura, and Kakashi-sensei.