Chapter Text
A primary specific samsaric error… didn’t happen often. Or really, at all . The set of requisite circumstances to pierce the inherent protections of the soul and corrode the barrier between life and past, now and then - to hold memories beyond the mortal coil and reintegrate them into the newborn life… Long. Exhaustively long, and oftentimes weirdly specific.
So, this begins with weird specificities. He should have expected that, really- his life had been nothing but a mix of incredibly odd and enduringly mundane since his first memories. A lost toe in first grade, accidentally swapped with another’s and reattached to the wrong person. Mediocre grades, with an inkling that he might - note: wasn’t- advanced in mathematics.
A best friend who went missing for two and a half months, only to return and reveal he’d been with his father on their dairy farm. A stable group of three companions- including the missing milkman- and a decent, if somewhat introverted social life during middle school.
An older sister who decided to go on a long distance business trip to Venezuela five and half months after he saw her talking to military personnel at twelve thirty in the morning. Five postcards and the occasional video call, congratulating him on his six A’s and the one B- in psychology.
Dying of hyper-aggressive heart cancer at nineteen- tumors arrhythmically spread across his body day by day- numb, the sound of his breathing the only way to know he still was . …there wasn’t really anything to balance that out. At least his professors had been willing to give him some extensions, so… highest grades he’d gotten so far?
His vision started to fuzz around the edges, and he sighed, hearing the soft sound in the hospital’s empty silence. He really felt like he should have expected something like this…
………
A world away two brothers stood on broken rocks, staves clutched in nervous grips, half the power of a god in duplicate roaring beneath their skin as they stared down the monstrous form of their mother’s dream.
Their nightmare .
………
On the sixth of January, some time after his sight faded, but not before he could no longer feel the cold , the icy dread that tickled at his misplaced toe and failing organs-
A boy died.
………
“Your dream is over , Mother!” A rumbling roar- the crashing roar of a soulless beast given soul, an abomination of nature twisted over- desire for power, for chakra already lost. A seal in three hundred and sixty one scintillating iridescent lines, characters flowing like water over oil under the light of an empty sky. “The people deserve to be free! Please-” his voice cracked even as his chakra shrouded around him like the weight of the world- “please…”
A hand gently brushed the side of his horn, soft tremors hidden by the mere act of comfort. “She’s gone , Hagoromo. The God Tree has exerted its dominion over her.” A different seal, no less powerful, flickered into existence over robes. “And mother… if you can hear this…” two palms slammed down onto the bound abomination, brilliant with the force of their chakra. “We’re sorry it had to come to this.”
The world shuddered . A point - a singularity of force sparked into existence far above the battlefield, the very continent beneath them peeling off the face of the earth like so much dust and ruin. A worm-like white, the essence of abomination, the soul of a woman who had ate the cumulation of the god tree’s cruel reign and ascended to little more than chakra itself twisted free from the Juubi in the same moment its mortal being slammed into Hagoromo.
Chakra- so much energy , unlimited and immense- rushed through his tenketsu, pooling at the locus of inevitability around his eight gate. Without his mother’s influence, it was just a drone- advanced, viscous and capable, but soulless .
The Juubi was trapped.
A breath caught on the settling sound of crumbling rock, replaced by aborted laughter, then choked giggles. “We did it. We actually did it. I didn’t think we’d live to see the sunrise.”
Hagoromo smiled slightly- it had been far, far too long since they’d been able to laugh like that. Looking out over the continent that was more dirty gray and ashen brown then the vibrant green it should be… it might be a long time yet again.
He smiled- watched the moon rise for the first time- felt the ten-tails shifting within him, ever probing in impatient patience. He smiled.
………
A soul swept through the unrelenting torrents of samsara, that cyclical loop, ever onwards to some unseeable past and future. In [here] where time meant less than the letters of a name, and a name meant less than the illusion of continuity, the soul drifted with a million others of itself, an infinity of others.
A faint essence of not-theirs colored-
A bit of wispy something, from being caught at the edge of being for a moment too long, held by the dying grasps of a tenacious parasite.
Emotion, a flicker of it- gentle and confused. Sorrow caught in the blurred edge of dead and the next thing off. It didn’t want sorrow.
For a single moment, an endless second and an eon unlimited, it wanted , and in wanting was infinitely more alive-
………
The walls between life and death are already weak under the clever use of chakra- the immortality of nature, in congruence with the possibility of soul? To those who possessed the absolute height of power… it made anything possible.
Ootsutsuki Hagoromo stood in a sealed chamber two and a half miles beneath the waste-lands, chakra flickering in a pattern soothing to sore tenketsu. He breathed - in. Out. Shift. In. Out . The Juubi shifted in the space beneath his seal, responding to the simple stimuli.
Amaranthine eyes snapped open, and their gaze weighed the world. With absolute perfection of control he grasped the entire mass of the Juubi's chakra, feeling it squirm in a sort of inquisitive indecisiveness as he set it running through his body, pooling just before the eyes that broke samsara.
In the end, creation of all things was just a wish.
His palms clapped together with a deep thrum, a wave of dust blasted away from his furiously flared robe, rinnegan shining almost eerily bright in the cavern’s darkness. With the whole of his being he focused on a singlar desire- he forgot his small village. His ninshu classes. The monks at the temple. The birds, chirping on a warm summer’s day.
The waves- ever- moving.
Sound.
Hamura, pale eyes, mouthing- a warning to be careful.
The screaming of the Juubi.
The darkness of the chamber around him, the taste of dust on his tongue, cool air, light- and he spoke without speaking- “Become nine!”
To understand… that, was not his wish. He wished for the Juubi to be split into nine parts- not nine smaller Juubi clones, not nine portions of unthinking chakra to seal away beneath the bones of the earth, not nine mindless drones-
The Sage of Six Paths demanded nine people - and that was the final piece of the puzzle.
For all its impossible powers, chakra could not make a soul from nothing.
………
In that bleak, roaring nothingness swimming with all that would and wouldn’t, a shard of reality forced its way into death. A swirling vortex of energy- just a tinge of some greater work, the soul knew inherently- brushed its way over the currents of the wandering, gathering enough of an impression so it could create its own .
The power touched his- and his want - however faint and undirected, however it had barely just sparked- grabbed at the sheer essence of possibility and was swept along.
………
Even then, there was a final barrier to a primary specific samsaric error. To any normal being, even a chakra construct, the memories of a soul would have failed to imprint on the physical essence of their body. The bijuu were not chakra constructs, though- they were chakra itself, a universal law. In being , their souls were written immortal into the fabric of existence itself, and so that problem resolved itself rather neatly.
Smile playing softly across his lips, the Sage of Six Paths watched eight sets of eyes flicker open, flickering illumination cast from the last remnants of exhausted chakra in the air. “Hello,” he said softly to those who’d woken and the one who hadn’t. “My name is Ootsutsuki Hagoromo. I’m your father.”
Children. He’d wanted those for so… so long. His grin was the widest it’d been in years, looking at the eight small beastlings who watched him with adorable confusion… and the one tanuki that slept.