Chapter Text
I was in hell. Or at least I thought I was, when I finally reached the mental acuity necessary to process visual information.
It was a reasonable assumption to make, as I was surrounded by crude huts made out of stone and wood. All of which were ablaze. Thick clouds of smoke clogged the air just above me, so I wouldn’t know if there was a night sky with stars or the craggy roof of an enormous cave. I felt scalding heat on my skin, and there was screaming too, a lot of it. No doubt the screams of the damned. I could see motionless bodies all around me, many smoldering, and I could smell the familiar stench of the dead and dying.
Yep, must be hell.
They didn’t have a whole lot of fire at the bottom of the Baltic sea, and I vividly remembered my death. Remembered the beeps on my radar, the thunderous crash as the torpedo hit, throwing us out of our chairs and shattering the bulbs over our heads. Remembered how we were cast into unforgiving darkness until the dim, flickering emergency lights kicked on and bathed everything a muted red. Remembered my own silent horror reflecting on the faces of every crewmate in the control room as we felt the vessel we entrusted our lives to groan underfoot.
Then, reality sank in, and we all blitzed into frantic action. I had ordered my crew to surface as quickly as possible—decompression sickness was the least of our concerns.
I regret those orders now. Implosion would have granted us a quick death.
We rose just high enough to avoid catastrophic failure, but not high enough to have any hope at reaching the surface. Instead, freezing water began to rush in. I had always adored the ocean, and I think I still do. But feeling it slowly climb up my skin, inch by inch, felt like the ultimate betrayal.
Finally, my beloved Indie—the USS Indianapolis, my pride and joy—ripped in half, and I along with my beloved crew were sucked out into the freezing ocean. Dark, but for the glimmering, golden sun above. Tauntingly out of reach. Saltwater seared my lungs as they filled against my will. I was too numb to thrash, and it would accomplish nothing anyway. My vision darkened around the edges, and my last thoughts were the first prayer I’d made in years. Maybe, if I had been more devout (and not an instrument of pointless war), I wouldn’t have wound up here. God damnit—wait, should I say that here? Maybe I should try and get on the big man’s good side.
Ah, screw it. I was already in hell, and I’m pretty sure the damned don’t get let out early on good behavior.
By god, it was loud. Both from the screaming and from the crash of fire ravaged buildings as they collapsed. I tried to get up, but found that my legs couldn’t support me; I could barely even manage to position them under myself. Annoyed and panicked, I tried to at least cover my ears, but I didn’t have the strength to lift my arms either.
There was a body near me, belonging to a woman that might have once had dark hair, though now it was almost all burned away along with her scalp and the entirety of her back. I could tell she had frantically rolled on the dirt road, trying in vain to put it out—something I thought should have worked. The fires of hell must be unnaturally fierce, however, because she died with her face twisted in agony and desperation.
How can a person die in hell? Was she double dead? Did she get sent to turbo hell? If she redeemed herself during her time here, would she go to heaven? Or did Pemdas happen and she got sent up one level to purgatory? I hoped she ended up someplace better than here; for some reason, I felt some kinship with her. Like she was important. But I had no idea why.
The strangest thing about the woman was how giant she was. If she stood, my eyes would have only matched up to her knee, if that. As I surveyed my surroundings, I realized that I must have been sent to giant hell by mistake, because everything appeared to be scaled up. The doors on the houses, the metal braziers alongside the road—which were, ironically, the only things not on fire—and even the braying goat headbutting a wooden fence in a frantic attempt to escape were all massive.
Goats in hell. Huh.
I had seen the devil portrayed as a goat in movies, so maybe that wasn’t so strange.
A tendril of smoke made it into my airways, and I coughed. And kept coughing, the sound strangely high pitched to my own ears. Breaths came shallower and shallower, my throat burned, and I tasted blood as my ravaged throat turned raw.
It was awful, and I tried to reign in the involuntary reaction. Tucking my chin and clenching all the muscles in my neck, I attempted to build up saliva in my mouth for lubrication. I must have been severely dehydrated, because it took a long time.
Furious with myself and my circumstances, I scowled into the blazing village. Hell needed someone to upgrade their infrastructure. This shithole looked like it was built in the dark ages. Maybe, if I see a demon soon, I could make a bargain; I’m no civil engineer, but I have some basic mechanical knowledge I was forced to pick up in the Navy, and I knew how to make asphalt. Even hell’s inhuman punishers must be able to see value in paved roads.
I might even see one of hell’s keepers now. The only living—er, conscious?—thing I’ve encountered yet, slowly creeping towards me. It was hard to see from this distance, but I could tell from his body language that he was rather shell-shocked.
Not a demon, then. A survivor?
I had seen such behavior before, most notably when I had made port the first and only time in Latvian waters. Riga had suffered terrible air raids, but we needed to make repairs and the survivors would do anything to pay back at their aggressors, even at their own continued risk. As they led us through bombed out residentials and shattered ruins of what they might have considered skyscrapers, I saw this same numb look of incomprehension on their faces, as if they couldn’t so much as process the atrocity leveled against them.
But as the person—a boy, he might have been a giant but his face was clearly young—drew nearer, I could tell that he was different. He was uninjured, for one, and his clothes were nice, if a little strange. A flowy red…tunic? That he was all but swimming in covered up most of his figure. The left sleeve was loose and long, but the right was missing altogether, revealing a bare, toned arm carrying some sort of knife.
A soldier, then, I realized. Green, almost literally. He looks like he’s about to puke. He’s lucky he made it to the battlefield so late.
But why were there soldiers in hell? Was the underworld going through some sort of civil war? If so, I might just find an interesting way to spend my eternal damnation after all.
“Hey!” I tried to call out, but the sound came out unintelligible and was overtaken by more wet, wracking coughs. Not wanting his first impression to be of me choking, I quickly smothered them as the cloying taste of iron coated my tongue. But the sound had captured his attention.
“Taicho?” he called out shakily. “You need to see this.”
Another giant came into view, this one much older. He had a full beard, a brown bandana with a metal plate, and an outfit that almost matched the kid’s. Only, he had what appeared to be a brown combat vest over the red garment. Since his right sleeve was also missing, I could tell he was incredibly buff, and not with stunt muscles either. He had the same build as Sir—my father—minus the gut I’d always known him to have.
“A child?” he rumbled, and the illusion was broken. I'd never met anyone in my life who had a voice like that—it was low and melodic. It sounded like how cigarettes taste.
Then my brain processed his words. Child? I looked down, and found my fingers to be disproportioned and pudgy. I tried to make a fist, scarcely believing my eyes, but my fingers were slow to respond.
So I wasn’t in hell for giants. I had been de-aged. Or reborn entirely?
“Why isn’t it crying?” A girl looking to be the same age as the first boy—who was all but clinging to her superior’s metaphorical skirts—asked. I would have taken offense at the selected pronoun, but I likely would have used the exact same phrasing in her place.
“Is he even alive?” the boy echoed.
Okay, it was permissible, but he?
I would have said something just to fuck with him, though I wasn’t sure my tongue had the dexterity to manage such a feat. But it didn’t matter, because if I unclenched my throat muscles even slightly, I’d be thrown into another coughing fit regardless. Instead, I blinked lazily at him.
“So creepy,” the girl whispered. Again, fair play. “It’s just sitting there, in seiza. Isn’t it scared of the fire? Kami, it’s right next to its mother’s corpse!”
Oh, was that my mother? I looked back at the burnt woman. She did seem to be reaching out towards me, with desperation fixed by rigor upon her face. That explained the sense of familiarity I felt. Even though I didn’t know the woman, I couldn’t help but feel a little sad. I hadn’t had a mother in my past life; I guess the streak continues.
“She’s a baby,” their leader said, and I internally thanked him for his observational skills. “Babies aren’t known for their ability to think.”
I bet he would be a great singer.
“She’s still an Earth Country citizen. We’ll take her with us, and any other survivors we find if they can be transported.”
As he surveyed the burning remains of the village, his face was a mask of fury.
“Those Konoha bastards. Iwagakure will never forget this.”
Wait. What?