Chapter 560: Loyalty
"...I'm sorry, Lord Menma."
Kisame Hoshigaki's gaze settled on Naruto. His face, with its blue gill-mark patterns, carried a complicated expression -- something reluctant in it, something regretful. But underneath those, more than either of them, the settled quiet of a man who had already decided.
Naruto's expression held a kind of unwillingness to accept what was in front of him. But more than that, it held the particular helplessness of someone who already knew how this was going to end.
He looked at Kisame. This man who in another world had become one of the people he trusted most.
He had genuinely wanted to bring this one back. Wanted to give this man -- who had spent the better part of his life navigating falsehood and deception, who had been betrayed by the very ground he stood on -- the kind of life that the other world's Kisame was actually living.
"You won't take me up on my offer?"
"You'd have everything you need. I can bring you to my world right now. You've seen what it looks like -- the version of you over there is living exactly what you've been looking for. No deception. No falsehood. No killing. The only purpose is making the world a better place."
Naruto said it, and his mind moved over the images he'd shown Kisame through the genjutsu.
The other world's Kisame, in a clean uniform, running operations alongside him. Occasionally showing an expression this world's Kisame had never been able to wear.
Relaxed. At ease. An expression that didn't need to be watching for threats from any direction. That Kisame could sit and eat with his teammates after a mission was over. Could spar in the training yard with the newer members. Could sit alone on a rooftop in the middle of the night looking at stars, without spending that time calculating whether someone was going to put a blade in his back before morning.
That kind of life. The kind this Kisame had closed his eyes and imagined -- not once, but countless times, in countless sleepless nights.
Naruto had put his offer out clearly. If Kisame was willing, he could take him there.
"Yes, Lord Menma."
Kisame nodded once. "I'm grateful. Truly. For what you gave the other me -- a road so bright I wouldn't have been able to imagine it myself."
"But I can't accept."
A pause.
"...Even though I genuinely envy that man."
There was something in his voice beneath the words that was almost inaudible. A faint note of bitterness that he wasn't quite suppressing.
"He got lucky. He found a good leader." His jaw set slightly. "But on my side of things -- I've already chosen the road I'm walking."
He said it, and then he lowered Samehada, the blade tip coming to rest on the ground.
Kisame had already answered the earlier question Naruto had put to him. He had explained how it started.
When he first learned that the Fourth Mizukage had been a puppet all along -- controlled from behind by someone else the entire time -- something in him had gone completely adrift.
Not confusion in any ordinary sense. Something that came from further down than that. From bone. From blood. From somewhere in the core of a person that doesn't have a proper name. If even figures at the very top of the world were fabrications, did anything real exist at all?
Were the things he did every day real? Was the thing he gave his loyalty to real? Was the reason he was alive real?
He had become numb to the world. Not the numbness that means exhaustion and wanting to rest -- the numbness that means you have stopped looking for the answer because you no longer believe one exists.
He couldn't conceive of any path by which this world could become the place he had always wanted -- somewhere without falsehood at its foundation. The more he thought about it, the more impossible it became. The more impossible it became, the further down he sank.
And at that precise point, Uchiha Obito had appeared. Had extended the plan.
An illusory world. Infinite Tsukuyomi.
It had pulled at something in Kisame that he hadn't known was still there to pull at.
In that world, there would be no deception. No falsehood. No killing. Every person could live the life they actually wanted to live. No one would need to harm anyone else just to survive another day. No one would need to build themselves into something hard and careful and always watching just to keep breathing.
If the real world was already beyond saving, why not simply make the dream world instead?
That thought had been like a rope thrown to someone in water. Kisame had closed his hand around it. He had not opened that hand since.
"Even though that world is also false?"
"...Yes."
Kisame nodded steadily. "But at least that world's falsehood would give me more of whatever it is I'm actually looking for than the falsehood in this current one."
"Moon's Eye Plan. Infinite Tsukuyomi. Whatever it's called -- in that world, I wouldn't have to kill my comrades anymore."
"Even if it's not real. That would still be the first world I've ever encountered where I don't have to kill the people beside me."
He said it, and then brought his attention back to Naruto.
Naruto sighed.
This was what he had always respected about Kisame. That loyalty. The kind that wasn't performed, wasn't spoken to fill silence -- the kind that had grown into the bones and run through the blood over so many years that it had become indistinguishable from the man himself.
Unless the leader betrayed him first, Kisame would not turn.
He thought about how that story had ended. This man, at the final moment, had chosen to kill himself rather than let the information he carried fall into other hands. Had protected what he wanted to protect until the very last second, in the most absolute way available to him.
He had been that way for Obito.
In Naruto's own world, he had been that way for Naruto.
"Then it seems I can't change your mind."
"No." The corner of Kisame's mouth moved. It might have been a smile, or it might have been something else entirely. "I appreciate you trying. But I won't regret this."
"Changing sides isn't called having no regrets. It's called running away."
"Whether it's Uchiha Madara or Uchiha Obito -- as long as he's leading toward the world he described, the shark doesn't release what it's already bitten into."
Naruto was quiet for a moment.
"...Then I can give you what you're looking for."
"Since you won't leave -- I'll send you to that world to see it."
Kisame went still.
He had already raised Samehada. Already set himself mentally into the state he used when facing a serious opponent. Already drawn the internal line that said this was a fight.
His body locked in place. Samehada suspended in midair, neither coming down nor going forward. He stared at Naruto, and the expression that crossed his face -- that shark-like face that rarely produced anything identifiable -- was something close to bewilderment.
Because he saw an eye.
It wasn't like anything he had seen before. Not a Sharingan. Not a Byakugan. Not a Rinnegan. A golden eye, a color and shape entirely its own.
It rotated slowly in Naruto's socket, giving off a light that was warm and unhurried -- not sharp enough to force the gaze away, but impossible to look away from regardless.
And then Kisame felt like he had forgotten something.
The sensation was strange. Not like having something taken from him by force -- more like surfacing after holding his breath at the bottom of deep water for a very long time, breaking into open air and drawing a first real breath. His whole body became lighter. The heavy things that had been sitting in his mind, things that had accumulated over years, things that made breathing feel like effort -- they released all at once, without warning.
When the world in front of his eyes reconverged, Kisame Hoshigaki found himself standing somewhere he had never been.
Above him, deep blue sky. Beneath his feet, soft grass. In the distance, mountains. Water. A village. And in the air, a smell he didn't quite recognize -- but one that was, without question, comfortable.