The words—"Only one of us can survive."—did not fade. They crystallised in the grey air of the inner space, becoming a law as immutable as gravity. Renjiro stared at the Other—the original, the displaced soul—and felt a violent, instinctive rejection tear through him.
'No. There has to be another way.'
As the denial surged, a searing, white-hot pain lanced through his metaphysical form. It centred behind his eyes, a pain he knew intimately—the strain of the Mangekyo. But here, without a physical body, it was a pure agony of essence.
The grey world around them shimmered, distorting like a heat haze, and for a split second, the comforting glow of the memory-house flickered, threatening to vanish entirely.
The reaction was instantaneous and instructive: this place, this confrontation, responded not to force or willpower, but to truth. Denial was a destabilising poison.
Gasping from the psychic shock, Renjiro clutched at his head. His focus, sharpened by pain, turned inward to the source of his greatest frustration: the tri-wheel Mangekyo, the power born of Hiro's death that refused to bow fully to his command.
He searched for the "block" with new eyes—not as an obstacle to overcome, but as a phenomenon to understand.
And he realised what it wasn't.
It wasn't a wall of foreign chakra. It wasn't a mental seal placed by some outside force. It was an… absence of permission. A hollow space where a key should turn.
The Other Renjiro watched him, his sea-green eyes holding a depth of weary understanding.
"You see it now," he said, his voice a soft rumble in the static. "There is nothing to break. Nothing to force. You've been pushing against a door that isn't locked. It's simply waiting for you to decide if you're going to walk through it alone, or with me."
"Waiting?" Renjiro breathed, the concept foreign.
"My Mangekyo," the Original explained, gesturing vaguely toward his own non-glowing eyes, "the six-pointed pattern you inherited… its nature is tied to agency. To choice. Not to emotion, not to trauma. To the fundamental right to act. I awakened it not in a moment of loss, but in the terrifying, silent moment I realised my ability to choose had been taken." He looked directly at Renjiro, his gaze unflinching.
"As long as you are the sole decision-maker in this body, acting with unquestioned authority, that part of our shared power—the part that is fundamentally mine—will reject full integration. To use the tri-wheel eyes completely, without this resistance, would require you to overwrite me entirely. To make the choice to erase the last vestige of my agency. That is what the 'block' has been: not a malfunction, but a conscience."
The reframe was total. Every struggle, every moment of frustrated powerlessness with his own Mangekyo, was cast in a new, glaring light. It wasn't a tool resisting its user. It was a soul refusing to be made a tool.
Before Renjiro could formulate a response, the grey space dissolved. Not into another memory-loop, but into a raw, invasive perspective.
He was no longer a spectator. He was the Original Renjiro. He heard his mother's voice, thick with worry, and felt a cool cloth on his brow. Then, a terrifying, internal snap.
A presence, vast, confused, and utterly alien, flooded into the heart of his mind. He felt himself being pressed down, folded, compressed into a dark corner of his own consciousness. He tried to scream. No sound came. He tried to move his hand. It remained still. Through his own eyes, he watched as his hand, now moved by another will, twitched. He saw his own face in his mother's worried eyes—his eyes, but the look in them was suddenly, horribly older, aware in a way a five-year-old's shouldn't be. The terror was absolute, a silent, screaming paralysis. This was the moment of conquest. The first, irrevocable loss of control.
The memory surge did not stop. It became a torrent, a shared history of silent conflict.
He felt the Original's quiet panic during early, clumsy Uchiha training sessions, watching his body be pushed too hard by a will obsessed with catching up. He felt the jolt of agreement when young Renjiro, guided by Ethan's memories, showed unexpected kindness to a clan outcast—a flash of "Yes, that's right."
Then came the sharper moments. The first serious injury on a mission—a gash from a bandit's sword. The Original's silent, internal scream of protest as his body bled, overruled by the interloper's cold calculation to use the pain as a distraction for a counter-strike. The helpless, boiling rage during the war, when the Mangekyo—his Mangekyo, the six-pointed star—was accessed and used by Renjiro for the nth time. It was a violation, a wearing of his soul as a weapon.
A specific memory crystallised with painful clarity: the confrontation with the Kumo Jinchuriki, years ago.
The Original, trapped within, had screamed a warning that couldn't be heard:
'They will trace you! They will see it as Konoha's aggression!'
He could only watch, in helpless horror, as that single act became a tiny stone that helped start the avalanche toward the Third Great Shinobi War. The guilt of the action was Renjiro's. The guilt of foreseen, unpreventable consequences was the Original's alone to bear, a silent ghost in the machinery of history.
But the torrent was not only of conflict. As the memory-flow continued, its tone shifted.
He felt the Original's fierce, unexpected pride when Renjiro, through brutal effort and borrowed wisdom, mastered a difficult jutsu. A warmth that was not his own bloomed when Renjiro earned his jonin promotion, a silent,
"That's my body. Look what it can do."
There was no bitterness in these flashes, only a complex, wounded awe at the life being lived with his hands. This was not the memory-stream of a vengeful spirit. It was the archive of a co-pilot, one who had disagreed, feared, and raged, but also, against all reason, admired and even cherished the strength that had kept their shared vessel alive.
The memories released him as suddenly as they had seized him. Renjiro stumbled back in the grey space, his spectral form trembling. He wasn't breathing hard—he had no lungs—but the disorientation was total. The weight of a shared life, of decisions made with only half the soul's consent, settled upon him with crushing density. He finally understood. The eyes weren't malfunctioning. They were waiting for a verdict on the crime of his very existence.
The Original Renjiro stood patiently, having shared his entire silent history without a word of accusation. When he spoke again, his voice was clear, dispassionate, laying out the geometry of their dilemma.
"There are three paths," he stated. "Not out of mercy, but because they are the only possible configurations of a system containing two wills."
"Option One: Erasure.
You make the conscious, willing choice to assert complete dominance. You overwrite my consciousness entirely. The block vanishes. You will have total power." He paused, his green eyes holding Renjiro's.
"The cost: Lose both Mangekyo, together with a lingering, psychic guilt that will never leave. A subtle, permanent fracture in your sense of self. You will always know you are a man built on a grave you dug yourself."
"Option Two: Reversal.
I reclaim primary agency. You become the observer, as I have been. The life continues—our skills, our relationships, our body—but the will behind it is mine. You would experience the world, but not act upon it. The Mangekyo would respond to my traumas, my choices."
"Option Three: Coexistence.
A partnership. Shared control, negotiated through a permanent, unbreakable mental link. No more silent observation. Every major decision, every use of the Mangekyo, would require conscious agreement from both. The power would be accessible only through unity." His expression grew graver.
"The cost: Your mind is no longer solely your sanctuary. There is no undo button for this bond."
He presented the options not as a salesman, but as a scribe reading from an immutable scroll. The emotional stillness that followed was heavier than any tension. Renjiro was not being asked to decide in that moment. He was being forced to comprehend that indecision itself was a choice—a choice to remain fractured, unstable, a danger to himself and everyone around him. As if to emphasize the point, the grey inner space gave another subtle, sickening lurch, a hairline fracture of black nothingness splintering the air between them.
The Original Renjiro watched the instability, then returned his gaze to his counterpart. In his calm, certain, unavoidable tone, he delivered the chapter's final, clarifying blow.
"Now you understand what the eyes are waiting for."
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