The Labyrinth | Chouka

[ghostfinch]

imagine keeping these posts in your workbox instead of ever posting them  

[ghostfinch]

Her parents were surprised to hear the news. There wasn't much that surprised them after years of hearing about Chouka's latest rule-breaking or tantrum in public, her latest act of rebellion or some scene she made at the academy. It caught her off-guard that anything could surprise them, and her nerves were immediately raw as she realized their surprise wasn't quite surprise but... pride. They were proud of her for saying she was going to pursue the police department, even if that expression was met with some surprise and some confusion. They gushed praise, actually meaning it this time - not some shiny thing to hold in front of her and keep her attention away from further opportunities to reign hell down on unsuspecting people in public - and it hurt her to see it now, when she had picked a path for herself and was so sure of herself and had DONE THIS for herself.

"Whatever."

-

It didn't tame the wild thing in her chest.

In a very real way, she hadn't expected it to. The entire path was a band-aid on a bullet wound. The bullet was still inside, poisoning her bloodstream with shards and forcing her to rot from the inside out. She had chosen it because it was time for her to do something other than cause problems in the village, because Arashikara was capable and she was going to have options and she was going to advance without Chouka.

So, she filled out reports and took statements. A pen sat in her left hand all day as she listened and wrote and listened and wrote. It was more clerical than she'd expected work to be, but there wasn't much she could do in terms of changing that.

Before long, she was allowed to follow along and shadow an officer. That was more entertaining, but no one in the police department knew how to treat her. To some, she was a troublesome rebel given an opportunity to be on the right side of the law. To others, she was a powerful shinobi who never backed down from a fight. To other still, she was the daughter of a friend and they all had to look out for her.

She spent her life living in the shadow of the loss of her sister, trying to possess the same wildness Choika had naturally wielded without losing herself in the process. Here, she lived an enigmatic existence, someone to one person and someone else entirely to another. She had no room to invent herself; she was coloring in the lines to a drawing she didn't pick out. Following orders as a person she was pretending to be.

The only way she could silence the expectations of her fellow officers, her fellow chunin, her parents, the kage, her ******** sister was to fight until her blood roared in her ears like the lioness her parents promised she would be. She fought with her fists, primarily, because she liked the way her hands ached after the fight, how her knuckles split on some punk's teeth and the reminder of it followed her for days. She liked to fight barehanded, but she could wield damn near anything in a fight to win. She was reckless, she was dangerous, she was juggling chainsaws on fire while blindfolded.

She loved staking out a bar and waiting. It felt like stalking her prey, it felt like she could focus on a single thing and drown out the ten thousand expectations that followed her as Chouka Akimichi. She loved to barge in and she loved it when they put up a fight. She hoped they wouldn't surrender, she hoped they wouldn't go easy. The lowliest of street thugs with the least to lose had the most fight in them and she loved to punch it out of them, one bruise and one broken nose at a time.

She craved the sanctioned violence. The blood of criminals baptized her every night as she fought her way into neutralizing them before bringing them in. And then the chief said the public was complaining about the violence of officers, and she hated that she had to ensure she stayed by her partner more faithfully - whoever it was they saddled her with. She had to be polite and gentle with the worst of the worst.

Her performance weakened, until she started going out on her days off to fight. She fought in underground clubs, she fought in public bars. She fought outside of the village's boundaries, truly outside her jurisdiction and just for the taste of violence. She never let her hands heal all the way. She had to start visiting a medic she paid under the table, because the hospital was told to look out for her. Her hands looked deformed at the end of some nights, even.

She fought her way to awards and pins for arrests. Her parents were so happy for her and she bared her teeth. Didn't they know? Didn't they notice? She had had so many teeth stitched back into her gums from medical students and they didn't even know she spent more time wrapping her hands and icing them than she did shaking hands with civilians and her chief and some other kind of diplomat or some s**t. They hung up her awards and talked about her to everyone who would listen but they didn't know that her face had been fixed so many times that it didn't even feel like hers?

She hated them. She hated them for not knowing, for not listening, for not seeing what they didn't see. She was rotting before their eyes and they thought, they really thought, that she was getting better. Recovering from the loss of Choika by returning to her orderly, kind, polite self. It couldn't be farther from the truth. She was falling deeper into her lack of identity. It was nothing but officer, nothing but daughter, nothing but definitions given from the perspectives of others. Who was she to herself, when she was alone?

-

She had done more missions than any other rookie, and then more than any other senior officer. She rose through the ranks with ease because of her hard work and her parents' approval felt sour. She had meant to explore it for herself, and instead her parents took it as an opportunity to tie her to some role or identity without her agreement. She was tired of the commendations. Her chief mentioned some strange, far-off job and she jumped at the chance. "Get me out of here." Her work history made it hard to deny the request. She was off to some crystal labyrinth that tourists had gone to and never returned from.

 

[ghostfinch]

They wanted to give her a dozen officers for the labyrinth expedition. She had denied the proposition for many reasons. This was where she could be in her own headspace as herself, without any masks or misperceptions.

The job required little detective work. She was able to determine the location because of all the talk in town about the tourist location; despite the well-documented number of tourists who had gone there and perished, it was quite a popular spot. It was gaining even more traction considering it had reached the ears of ghost hunter enthusiasts. She didn't really understand all that, but at least it was easy enough to go to the labyrinth. On the outside, it looked like the unassuming mouth of a cave.

A few meters in, and the crystals began. They were initially just embedded in the wall, orange in color. But as she traveled further, the walls became entirely crystal. A few twists and turns and the floor and high ceiling were entirely crystal, too. She was glad she could maneuver on the surface because it wasn't as slick as it looked. But she had little else to be thankful for, as she finally reached the 'labyrinth' portion where she had to make decisions to move forward: left or right.

She lost track of time. She walked so much her heels ached, and it made her angry that she found nearly every ******** dead end in existence. She pulled out her tonfa and began striking the walls when she'd finally had enough of it. Her battle cry was filled with anger initially, but as she began striking and eventually breaking down wall after wall, her cry became feral, then frantic and scarily human. Her voice was hoarse by the time her tonfa broke. Behind her stood piles of shattered crystal. Ahead of her was still a left and right path. She had definitely charged her way through the middle of the labyrinth - she was just sure of it - but now she had to finish things. She had no idea if it was even possible for her to be on the right path, given that she hadn't traveled fairly.

She made it only a few steps down the left path when she heard a looming voice. "Hff. You will not cheat the labyrinth." Immediately after the voice finished, she was blown through a powerful gust that must have made her black out, because she was back at the entrance of the labyrinth. "Are ya ********' kiddin' me?" She screamed out hoarsely.

When nothing responded, she huffed to her feet and shook her head. "No way in hell," she growled. She rolled herself into a ball and began rolling through the labyrinth [ Akimichi Human Bullet ]. She began rolling faster as she picked up speed, her own expertise with the technique enabling her to maneuver it masterfully through the different halls of crystal.

She could, at least, remember her previous decisions up to the area she had destroyed initially. At that point, her bullet tank had charged up enough strength to knock down the walls easier than she had before. She barreled through the labyrinth again and this time, didn't stop. She pushed past wall after wall after wall until she was at the presumed end, landing in an earth clearing. She rolled to her feet and stood seamlessly, hardly out of breath and with a wild mane framing her face. "Who the ******** do ya think ya are?" She asked the ten foot tall bull-man ahead of her.

His gaze burned into her but she didn't relent. She crossed her arms and cocked a hip, unimpressed. "You takin' out these tourists? I'm gonna take ya in buddy, unless you wanna do things the hard way. And gods, I hope ya choose the hard way."

The minotaur huffed, and their battle began. He swung his axe at her in many different, skilled ways, and she evaded it or blocked it with her oversized, Akimichi-enhanced hands. He could take her punches without issue, much like she could avoid being chopped to bits. He charged at her with his horns and she met him head on, the two grabbing each other's fists as they tried to push each other over.

It was during this confrontation that the two had a conversation: Chouka was angry and cussing up a storm but the Minotaur was slow-speaking and far more stoic. Yet, Chouka recognized that his anger was a slow simmer, and her's was an explosion, but they were still both quite angry. Eventually, she asked, "Do you even want to be here?"

The Minotaur was visibly caught off-guard. "What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean," Chouka insisted, and the Minotaur waited only a minute longer before succumbing. They quit their physical battle and the Minotaur answered her at length, explaining what he was tasked with by birthright and how the other creatures of myth had disappeared but he still had a duty to put people through trial.

And that's when Chouka had a great idea.

-

"...and that's all!" Chouka said at the desk of the chief. She had just explained everything about the mission and how it went and why there was a super tall minotaur in the police department right now.

"I need to retire," was all the chief said in response.