For as long as Tenzou can remember, his duty and obligation has always been to Konoha. He cannot remember an existence beyond that context, for it has been ingrained in him from the moment his eyes opened that he is a tool fashioned to have nothing at all but a name that is not even a name that matters, that he is, like many others like him, is to adopt pride in the nation to which he belongs. It is of the greatest servitude and purpose to defend Konoha and all her faults and follies, tooth and nail, body and soul. His blood belongs to the earth of that of which he is born from, like the deep rooted trees that towers over Konoha in an endless stretch of green, and the Senju bloodline that courses through his veins. He was born from the tree and thus, that is where he shall return.
It tends to happen to individuals who spend most of their lives confined within glass walls and white tiles, prodded and poked with needles and ashy white hands, the taste of chemicals always bitter and thick at the back of his throat. The taste never faded, nor did the gleam of haunting golden eyes that Tenzou finds out later, had belonged to his maker.
He's heard it all, speeches that blind, words that are meant to instill loyalty from men and women who dream of wars and send their soldiers to fight and die for them. He has also heard the opposite, where whispers from naive mouths behind hands say that there is no name, no flag that is large enough that can ever cover the shame of killing innocent people in the name of war being fought in the shadows.
Tenzou didn't care then and he didn't care now, didn't care what the politics were like, didn't think twice about his orders so long as Konoha remains standing. He doesn't know how many bloodlines he has ended, how many villages and towns he has erased from the face of the map with no one left alive to tell the tale, no one to even whisper on who the monster behind the deed is. He leaves behind nothing but a forest growing on blood soaked earth, bodies hidden under its roots.
Tenzou isn't like the others; he isn't even like Sharingan Kakashi, who's known for the lightning in his hands and the howl of his pack, the holder of over a thousand copied jutsus and the ruthlessness of his hands -- the genius prodigy trained by the fourth Hokage himself, son of the White Fang. Tenzou is a shadow, comfortable in his lack of a name and face, a lack of a self, and everything that humans are supposed to have. Tenzou doesn't remember how many genocides he has committed, doesn't lose sleep over the sounds of necks snapping in half or arteries bleeding out, or carrying back dead soldiers to cremate.
Tenzou doesn't mind it at all -- it's what he's made for.
It's the only thing he knows how to do and how to be.
A cold and calculating killer with no face, no name or reputation.
After all, you can't break something when there's nothing to be broken.
*
Sometimes, Tenzou dreams of a girl's voice, whispering through glass. He doesn't remember her face, doesn't even know her name, how tall she might have been, or if she had long hair.
She calls him Tenzou, tells him that is his name.
He's never sure if she had been real or if she is the result of borne out of the necessity to withstand the laboratory experiments he had gone through, something that stems from pain and hurt, a weak mind, and a weaker will. It didn't really matter either way -- ROOT made sure that he had no weakness after they found him, that any whisper of a past is erased.
He would have been okay with a number and a codename.
Tenzou sounds better though, she would say in his dreams.
So he kept it even if it didn't really have any sort of value.
*
Kakashi had been the first chip in his impenetrable armour.
YOU ARE READING
Beneath the Sun
ФанфикTenzou never had a problem being ANBU, being a nobody -- no emotion, no past and no future. He preferred it. Up until he isn't. Later, Tenzou will realize that his loyalty was a reimbursement for his own inferiority. (Or that story where Tenzou, an...
