Naruto: astigmatism
astigmatism
gen, kakashi. until we're both sick of seeing.
Kakashi had been waiting for it, but of course, like all things, that didn't make it any easier when it came. One of those times, then, when he is glad that he hides half his face, because his mouth is making weird contortions under the black fabric, muscles twitching involuntarily, trying to dredge up the replies he had been practicing in his head, trying to think of the right version of the scenario.
In Kakashi's mind Sasuke is a little bit more accusatory and Kakashi, consequentially, is a little bit more defensive.
In reality, Sasuke, rolling his shoulders a little bit to loosen his muscles, is almost casual when he asks, "Do you have a copy of the Third Hokage's study of Sharingan?" and Kakashi, just as casually watching the movement of Sasuke's arms, shakes his head.
"Doesn't the Academy library have a copy of it?" Kakashi asks.
"Not the actual book. Some of the other texts make references to it, but the one book in the library that has a decent summary of it has those exact pages torn out."
"How coincidental."
Sasuke gives him a look.
Kakashi feels a bead of something cold move from his armpit to his ribs, but in fact there's nothing there; in fact there's nothing unusual about himself anywhere except for in his mind where nothing seems to be working quite right. "Sasuke-kun," and he's always like the way those hard k sounds come out of his mouth, sometimes he slows down his words so he can draw it out, "Don't you ever feel the need to just stop seeing?"
Sasuke does something Kakashi thinks is his equivalent of mentally chewing on a question. Kakashi squints a little because if he looks hard enough he can maybe see Sasuke's mental jaw and tendons grinding. Kakashi turns around just as Sasuke stops thinking and says, "No," but it's lost in the sound of Kakashi's voice as he tries to wave the question away with, "Never mind."
In Kakashi's mind he can pretend to freeze this moment and save it for another time. The sun is bright and the grass smells sticky and of too much summer.
*
Sasuke was born silent. His mother thought he was stillborn and began to cry until she saw his eyes, a lighter red than his skin, but still red, open and watching as they washed the blood away from him. Soon his eyes became the same color as the basin of water, and then they had to get press his eyelids closed.
People who possess Sharingan are born not crying. They're born with their eyes the red of Sharingan, so their first look at the world is red, and bloody, and of people's chakra moving up and down in their blood streams, and their first instinct is to try and copy everything they see. They forget to cry. Sasuke, like all the other children born with Sharingan, spent the first month of his life blindfolded to keep him from wasting his chakra before he could control it. After a month his eyes, like all other children, went back to his natural black, and his mother saw his real eyes, the eyes he would use for most of his life, for the first time. Sasuke doesn't remember that when they took the blindfold off of him, he started to cry, just like a newborn baby, just like he was getting born again. Sasuke doesn't remember a lot of things about that time; most of the children don't remember their first Sharingan experience, and none of the adults talk about it. But what Sasuke does remember is that afterwards, growing up, he would sometimes be suddenly struck by fear of the dark, and he would be deathly afraid to blink.
What Sasuke knows is, even know, on very few occasions, it still happens, even though he's older, even though he constantly tells himself there isn't anything to be afraid of.
*
Tracking the Sharingan gift is strangely like tending a crop field. For reasons unknown to anybody, there will be years when many children are born with Sharingan, and other years when there is hardly anyone. The year Kakashi was born, there were many, and he, born with one Sharingan eye, was considered unusual, the odd one out. He spent his childhood trying to prove to everyone his skill, and the students and ninjas a couple of years older than him, all born in a low year, adopted him basically as a mascot. So by the time he was in school officially, he already knew more than all of his class combined, and he just kept going like that.
But the year Sasuke was born, there were barely any children born with Sharingan, so he was considered special, heads above the rest of the children born that year. That's one of the differences between Sasuke and Kakashi: Sasuke, before he could even walk, already could feel from the way the adults treated him that he had power, all he had to do was to find it, whereas Kakashi, by the time he understood what people around him were saying, knew that if he wanted to accomplish anything in life, he had to fight for it.
This is why sometimes Kakashi wishes it's Naruto with Sharingan and that it's Naruto who Kakashi is supposed to train and watch after. Because Kakashi can understand Naruto, pigeon-holed, everyone pouncing on every mistake Naruto made as a parentless child to prove themselves in the right and Naruto in the wrong. Because that's Kakashi too. And because Naruto, sometimes, really breaks Kakashi's heart, though it's Sasuke who, for the most part, Kakashi would wish everything for.
*
[The reason there isn't a summary of the Third Hokage's Sharingan theory is because the only pages on which it is summarized on were sliced from the book and neatly folded into a hidden pocket of the cover of Kakashi's copy of "Come Come Paradise." It's copied somewhere in one of Kakashi's notebooks too, but that was from before, when Kakashi was a student, and that was when the book on Sharingan that Sasuke would later look for and find incomplete was still in one piece.]
tried to attack the basics of the Third Hokage's Sharingan theory with his counter theory, but to no avail.
The Third Hokage indeed had a good theory as to how and why Sharingan works as it does, but the teaching of this theory to students is, surprisingly, incomplete at best. Students are taught that the reason the Sharingan eye is red as opposed to the white Byukagan eye is that the Sharingan eye is a direct portal to the heart chambers and muscles. But nowhere in the curriculam is it taught that the reason why Sharingan is often found in both eyes is that in order for Sharingan to work perfectly, the tunnel into the opponent's cardiovascular network must also be opened. The explains the nature of Sharingan, which is that more or less an cooperative activity as opposed to the one way singularity of Byukagan.
For reference's sake, the rest of the Third Hokage's theory went like this: Sharingan works by infusing the chakra into the blood as opposed to moving along the keirakukei, the chakra highway. As the blood travels to the head it brings the chakra to the eye, and that turns the eye into a red color. The user then converts the chakra into two forms, one to keep the way into the user's heart and blood open, the other to enter into the body of the opponent by way of the veins and arteries. The reason that Sharingan can't copy an attack based on advanced bloodlines is that all bloodline attacks depend on chakra being infused in the blood. The chakra of the Sharingan user would be unable to mix with the chakra of the advanced bloodline opponent and would instead be thrown out back at the user. But in ordinary cases, the user's chakra races along side the opponent's keirakukei, winding through the blood streams instead of directly conflicting. When the opponent attacks, the user's chakra senses it from the veins or arteries, returns to the user's body, reenters the bloodstream, and feeds the information back into the brain. Through this, the user now has, from the opponent himself, the ability to use the opponent's attacks.
Why a pair of Sharingan eyes, then? Because when the eyes return to their normal forms, it requires the chakra in one eye to close the entranceway into the body and the other eye to receive the returning chakra. Although purely Uchiha-blooded ninjas can cope with just one Sharingan eye and still be able to switch from normal to Sharingan, those who are of mixed blood are unable to return their eyes to normal with only one.
Theoretically, Sharingan only requires a large amount of chakra if you use the Sharingan eye to see. If, for instance, one converts his eyes into the Sharingan eyes and keep his eyes closed, then no chakra would be needed to open an entranceway into the opponent, nor needed to draw back the chakra. Therefore, those who are unable to use both eyes must keeping one eye blinded all the time, because otherwise they would have no way of keeping his chakra in his body and away from other people. Using the Sharingan technique is indeed a reflex in those who possess it; unless the eye is blinded, one-eyed users have no way of controlling whether or not they copies other people's attacks. This is why babies are born with Sharingan, and why the custom is to let them spend the first month of their life with a blindfold on until their reflexive chakra control kicks in and shuts off the Sharingan.
Of course, this took a while for the Uchiha clan to understand, during which time many
*
Kakashi has tried for most of his life to practice Sharingan in front of a mirror, and at first he believed it didn't work because he didn't have a pair of Sharingan eyes. But when Kakashi asked Sasuke to try and copy his attacks from a mirror reflection, Sasuke couldn't, no matter how he hard he tried. All Sasuke could do was stand in front of the mirror and stare until his eyes watered and tears ran down his face, and finally Kakashi had to stop, even though Sasuke wouldn't let him at first. Kakashi reasons now that Sharingan requires two people. It's impossible to practice or use Sharingan in the mirror. The problem with a mirror is that the chakra can't enter into the bloodstream of a reflection and instead bounces around aimlessly in the air until the user draws it back in.
But anyway. Kakashi had nightmares that night, about Sasuke's eyes in the mirror, getting wider and wider, sucking everything in, eventually even taking Sasuke himself into their depths.
*
The legend of the Sharingan eye is that there was once a blind man, born from an Uchiha father and a Hyuuga mother whose father possessed the Byukagan eye. Gifted with natural talent, he never became a ninja because he never learned how to sense without his eyes. But he grew up to be a proud and strong man, always trying to overcome his handicap. Then one day ninjas of a neighboring village attacked the blind man's family, raping his wife and daughter, slowly mutilating his son. It was as they were advancing on the blind man that Sharingan was born. Forcing his chakra to his eyes, the blind man began to cry tears of blood, turning his eyes from a blind blue to a deep red. In that moment he could suddenly see, but not see as one normally sees. And in that moment he was able to fight back, using the attacks being used on him.
This blind man passed his technique onto his children, and it was thus that Sharingan became the unnatural ability of the Uchiha clan.
The true story that no one besides the old, silent men of the Uchiha clan know is that there was once a Hyuuga clan ninja who, in a moment of cowardice, abandoned his teammates to the enemy; however, the enemy was persistent and followed him, so that they caught him along with his teammates anyway. The enemy took pity on his teammates, as they showed courage, but him they despised, and so stabbed his eyes out with a shurikan. Blind, afraid, and ashamed, the man began to cry, and in that moment of clarity, like the thornbird who impales itself upon a thorn and sings a lovely song, discovered the ability to use his chakra to see. Thus he escaped and, unable to go back to the home he left behind, married instead an Uchiha woman and became part of the Uchiha clan. Though he had a son, it was finally to his grandson that he passed on the Sharingan. Unbeknownst to him, as he was already dead by the time the side effects began to kick in, the earlier forms of Sharingan, unfinished and unpolished, would cause the user's eyes to eventually burst and blind him, and in the earlier days the children born with Sharingan would almost immediately die of chakra exhaustion. However, the Uchiha clan, upon discovering the strange abilities of their red-eyed children, eventually whittled Sharingan to the form it is today.
*
There are a lot of myths about the children born with Sharingan. They're supposedly the children who learn to walk faster, to read quicker, to do jutsu better even with the assistance of their Sharingan, to have a better memory, to even go so far as to think quicker. These are also supposedly the children who are quieter, who die sooner, who go insane easier.
Kakashi doesn't know about that. He's never seen the statistical evidence for that, but he suspects that if he asks, Sasuke know and might tell him something.
But he does know this. The feeling you get when your Sharingan recedes back to your normal eye color, when you're switching from looking at the world through blood and blindness and sweeping heights to looking at it as other people must see it, that emotion, that overpowering paralysis, the feeling the Hyuuga ninja, first to use Sharingan, felt as he closed his eyes and died, that is the thirst for life. Every child born with Sharingan feels it at least one in his life, even those with only one Sharingan eye, like Kakashi. They feel it, and under the blindfold they hunger for it.
And Kakashi may not know everything about Sasuke, but he does know this: that if he, Kakashi, had the gifts Sasuke had, could feel the power of his Sharingan in the corners of his eye, was constantly tasting that thirst for life as he moves easily from red back to black, then Kakashi, too, would never, ever want to stop seeing like the Kakashi of now,having only tasted that hunger once, still wearing a blindfold, and afraid of mirrors, wants to stop seeing.
gen, kakashi. until we're both sick of seeing.
Kakashi had been waiting for it, but of course, like all things, that didn't make it any easier when it came. One of those times, then, when he is glad that he hides half his face, because his mouth is making weird contortions under the black fabric, muscles twitching involuntarily, trying to dredge up the replies he had been practicing in his head, trying to think of the right version of the scenario.
In Kakashi's mind Sasuke is a little bit more accusatory and Kakashi, consequentially, is a little bit more defensive.
In reality, Sasuke, rolling his shoulders a little bit to loosen his muscles, is almost casual when he asks, "Do you have a copy of the Third Hokage's study of Sharingan?" and Kakashi, just as casually watching the movement of Sasuke's arms, shakes his head.
"Doesn't the Academy library have a copy of it?" Kakashi asks.
"Not the actual book. Some of the other texts make references to it, but the one book in the library that has a decent summary of it has those exact pages torn out."
"How coincidental."
Sasuke gives him a look.
Kakashi feels a bead of something cold move from his armpit to his ribs, but in fact there's nothing there; in fact there's nothing unusual about himself anywhere except for in his mind where nothing seems to be working quite right. "Sasuke-kun," and he's always like the way those hard k sounds come out of his mouth, sometimes he slows down his words so he can draw it out, "Don't you ever feel the need to just stop seeing?"
Sasuke does something Kakashi thinks is his equivalent of mentally chewing on a question. Kakashi squints a little because if he looks hard enough he can maybe see Sasuke's mental jaw and tendons grinding. Kakashi turns around just as Sasuke stops thinking and says, "No," but it's lost in the sound of Kakashi's voice as he tries to wave the question away with, "Never mind."
In Kakashi's mind he can pretend to freeze this moment and save it for another time. The sun is bright and the grass smells sticky and of too much summer.
*
Sasuke was born silent. His mother thought he was stillborn and began to cry until she saw his eyes, a lighter red than his skin, but still red, open and watching as they washed the blood away from him. Soon his eyes became the same color as the basin of water, and then they had to get press his eyelids closed.
People who possess Sharingan are born not crying. They're born with their eyes the red of Sharingan, so their first look at the world is red, and bloody, and of people's chakra moving up and down in their blood streams, and their first instinct is to try and copy everything they see. They forget to cry. Sasuke, like all the other children born with Sharingan, spent the first month of his life blindfolded to keep him from wasting his chakra before he could control it. After a month his eyes, like all other children, went back to his natural black, and his mother saw his real eyes, the eyes he would use for most of his life, for the first time. Sasuke doesn't remember that when they took the blindfold off of him, he started to cry, just like a newborn baby, just like he was getting born again. Sasuke doesn't remember a lot of things about that time; most of the children don't remember their first Sharingan experience, and none of the adults talk about it. But what Sasuke does remember is that afterwards, growing up, he would sometimes be suddenly struck by fear of the dark, and he would be deathly afraid to blink.
What Sasuke knows is, even know, on very few occasions, it still happens, even though he's older, even though he constantly tells himself there isn't anything to be afraid of.
*
Tracking the Sharingan gift is strangely like tending a crop field. For reasons unknown to anybody, there will be years when many children are born with Sharingan, and other years when there is hardly anyone. The year Kakashi was born, there were many, and he, born with one Sharingan eye, was considered unusual, the odd one out. He spent his childhood trying to prove to everyone his skill, and the students and ninjas a couple of years older than him, all born in a low year, adopted him basically as a mascot. So by the time he was in school officially, he already knew more than all of his class combined, and he just kept going like that.
But the year Sasuke was born, there were barely any children born with Sharingan, so he was considered special, heads above the rest of the children born that year. That's one of the differences between Sasuke and Kakashi: Sasuke, before he could even walk, already could feel from the way the adults treated him that he had power, all he had to do was to find it, whereas Kakashi, by the time he understood what people around him were saying, knew that if he wanted to accomplish anything in life, he had to fight for it.
This is why sometimes Kakashi wishes it's Naruto with Sharingan and that it's Naruto who Kakashi is supposed to train and watch after. Because Kakashi can understand Naruto, pigeon-holed, everyone pouncing on every mistake Naruto made as a parentless child to prove themselves in the right and Naruto in the wrong. Because that's Kakashi too. And because Naruto, sometimes, really breaks Kakashi's heart, though it's Sasuke who, for the most part, Kakashi would wish everything for.
*
[The reason there isn't a summary of the Third Hokage's Sharingan theory is because the only pages on which it is summarized on were sliced from the book and neatly folded into a hidden pocket of the cover of Kakashi's copy of "Come Come Paradise." It's copied somewhere in one of Kakashi's notebooks too, but that was from before, when Kakashi was a student, and that was when the book on Sharingan that Sasuke would later look for and find incomplete was still in one piece.]
tried to attack the basics of the Third Hokage's Sharingan theory with his counter theory, but to no avail.
The Third Hokage indeed had a good theory as to how and why Sharingan works as it does, but the teaching of this theory to students is, surprisingly, incomplete at best. Students are taught that the reason the Sharingan eye is red as opposed to the white Byukagan eye is that the Sharingan eye is a direct portal to the heart chambers and muscles. But nowhere in the curriculam is it taught that the reason why Sharingan is often found in both eyes is that in order for Sharingan to work perfectly, the tunnel into the opponent's cardiovascular network must also be opened. The explains the nature of Sharingan, which is that more or less an cooperative activity as opposed to the one way singularity of Byukagan.
For reference's sake, the rest of the Third Hokage's theory went like this: Sharingan works by infusing the chakra into the blood as opposed to moving along the keirakukei, the chakra highway. As the blood travels to the head it brings the chakra to the eye, and that turns the eye into a red color. The user then converts the chakra into two forms, one to keep the way into the user's heart and blood open, the other to enter into the body of the opponent by way of the veins and arteries. The reason that Sharingan can't copy an attack based on advanced bloodlines is that all bloodline attacks depend on chakra being infused in the blood. The chakra of the Sharingan user would be unable to mix with the chakra of the advanced bloodline opponent and would instead be thrown out back at the user. But in ordinary cases, the user's chakra races along side the opponent's keirakukei, winding through the blood streams instead of directly conflicting. When the opponent attacks, the user's chakra senses it from the veins or arteries, returns to the user's body, reenters the bloodstream, and feeds the information back into the brain. Through this, the user now has, from the opponent himself, the ability to use the opponent's attacks.
Why a pair of Sharingan eyes, then? Because when the eyes return to their normal forms, it requires the chakra in one eye to close the entranceway into the body and the other eye to receive the returning chakra. Although purely Uchiha-blooded ninjas can cope with just one Sharingan eye and still be able to switch from normal to Sharingan, those who are of mixed blood are unable to return their eyes to normal with only one.
Theoretically, Sharingan only requires a large amount of chakra if you use the Sharingan eye to see. If, for instance, one converts his eyes into the Sharingan eyes and keep his eyes closed, then no chakra would be needed to open an entranceway into the opponent, nor needed to draw back the chakra. Therefore, those who are unable to use both eyes must keeping one eye blinded all the time, because otherwise they would have no way of keeping his chakra in his body and away from other people. Using the Sharingan technique is indeed a reflex in those who possess it; unless the eye is blinded, one-eyed users have no way of controlling whether or not they copies other people's attacks. This is why babies are born with Sharingan, and why the custom is to let them spend the first month of their life with a blindfold on until their reflexive chakra control kicks in and shuts off the Sharingan.
Of course, this took a while for the Uchiha clan to understand, during which time many
*
Kakashi has tried for most of his life to practice Sharingan in front of a mirror, and at first he believed it didn't work because he didn't have a pair of Sharingan eyes. But when Kakashi asked Sasuke to try and copy his attacks from a mirror reflection, Sasuke couldn't, no matter how he hard he tried. All Sasuke could do was stand in front of the mirror and stare until his eyes watered and tears ran down his face, and finally Kakashi had to stop, even though Sasuke wouldn't let him at first. Kakashi reasons now that Sharingan requires two people. It's impossible to practice or use Sharingan in the mirror. The problem with a mirror is that the chakra can't enter into the bloodstream of a reflection and instead bounces around aimlessly in the air until the user draws it back in.
But anyway. Kakashi had nightmares that night, about Sasuke's eyes in the mirror, getting wider and wider, sucking everything in, eventually even taking Sasuke himself into their depths.
*
The legend of the Sharingan eye is that there was once a blind man, born from an Uchiha father and a Hyuuga mother whose father possessed the Byukagan eye. Gifted with natural talent, he never became a ninja because he never learned how to sense without his eyes. But he grew up to be a proud and strong man, always trying to overcome his handicap. Then one day ninjas of a neighboring village attacked the blind man's family, raping his wife and daughter, slowly mutilating his son. It was as they were advancing on the blind man that Sharingan was born. Forcing his chakra to his eyes, the blind man began to cry tears of blood, turning his eyes from a blind blue to a deep red. In that moment he could suddenly see, but not see as one normally sees. And in that moment he was able to fight back, using the attacks being used on him.
This blind man passed his technique onto his children, and it was thus that Sharingan became the unnatural ability of the Uchiha clan.
The true story that no one besides the old, silent men of the Uchiha clan know is that there was once a Hyuuga clan ninja who, in a moment of cowardice, abandoned his teammates to the enemy; however, the enemy was persistent and followed him, so that they caught him along with his teammates anyway. The enemy took pity on his teammates, as they showed courage, but him they despised, and so stabbed his eyes out with a shurikan. Blind, afraid, and ashamed, the man began to cry, and in that moment of clarity, like the thornbird who impales itself upon a thorn and sings a lovely song, discovered the ability to use his chakra to see. Thus he escaped and, unable to go back to the home he left behind, married instead an Uchiha woman and became part of the Uchiha clan. Though he had a son, it was finally to his grandson that he passed on the Sharingan. Unbeknownst to him, as he was already dead by the time the side effects began to kick in, the earlier forms of Sharingan, unfinished and unpolished, would cause the user's eyes to eventually burst and blind him, and in the earlier days the children born with Sharingan would almost immediately die of chakra exhaustion. However, the Uchiha clan, upon discovering the strange abilities of their red-eyed children, eventually whittled Sharingan to the form it is today.
*
There are a lot of myths about the children born with Sharingan. They're supposedly the children who learn to walk faster, to read quicker, to do jutsu better even with the assistance of their Sharingan, to have a better memory, to even go so far as to think quicker. These are also supposedly the children who are quieter, who die sooner, who go insane easier.
Kakashi doesn't know about that. He's never seen the statistical evidence for that, but he suspects that if he asks, Sasuke know and might tell him something.
But he does know this. The feeling you get when your Sharingan recedes back to your normal eye color, when you're switching from looking at the world through blood and blindness and sweeping heights to looking at it as other people must see it, that emotion, that overpowering paralysis, the feeling the Hyuuga ninja, first to use Sharingan, felt as he closed his eyes and died, that is the thirst for life. Every child born with Sharingan feels it at least one in his life, even those with only one Sharingan eye, like Kakashi. They feel it, and under the blindfold they hunger for it.
And Kakashi may not know everything about Sasuke, but he does know this: that if he, Kakashi, had the gifts Sasuke had, could feel the power of his Sharingan in the corners of his eye, was constantly tasting that thirst for life as he moves easily from red back to black, then Kakashi, too, would never, ever want to stop seeing like the Kakashi of now,having only tasted that hunger once, still wearing a blindfold, and afraid of mirrors, wants to stop seeing.