Renjiro stood frozen, staring at the face that was his own, yet wasn't. The Original Renjiro's expression was one of weary patience, like a teacher who had just explained a fundamental, unpleasant theorem and was now waiting for the student to work through the implications. There was no malice in his sea-green eyes, only a profound, settled certainty that made Renjiro's own churning emotions feel childish by comparison.
Disbelief curdled into a hard, bitter lump in his throat. His mind, usually a fortress of analysis and contingency planning, felt like a trapped animal, darting between the three cages he'd just been shown.
'Option One: Erasure.'
To consciously, willingly annihilate the consciousness beside him. To become a singular will in this body at the cost of becoming a ghost-haunted house. The power would be absolute, but he would lose his Mangekyo. Even the guilt… it wouldn't be a feeling.
It would be a structural flaw in his soul, a silent scream woven into his very chakra. He would look in the mirror and see a monument built on a grave.
'Option Two: Reversal.'
To step into the shadows. To become the silent watcher, as the Original had been for all these years. To feel the body move, to sense the world, but never to direct it again.
The helplessness of the prospect was a physical nausea. To give up his will, his purpose, his hard-won strength… to surrender his life as a shinobi, as Renjiro, and become Ethan the observer all over again, but without even the hope of a separate existence. It was a living death.
'Option Three: Coexistence.'
A partnership. The word sounded noble, but the reality was a relentless intimacy. A permanent mental link. No more private thoughts, no more solitary decisions. Every strategic choice, every use of the Susanoo, every moment of fear or doubt, would be witnessed, debated, and shared.
He would never be alone again.
The appeal was there—to not be a murderer, to not be a ghost. But the burden was terrifying. To be forever yoked to another, to have his sanctuary of self permanently occupied… it felt like a different kind of erasure.
A bitter, humourless smile twisted Renjiro's lips. The sound that escaped him was half-laugh, half-groan.
"So that's it?" he said, his voice scraping in the static air. "The grand choice. The resolution my eyes have been waiting for." He began to pace, a short, agitated path in the grey.
"Option One: I become a monster to myself, haunted and less powerful. Option Two: I cease to exist as anything but an echo. Option Three: I sign up for an eternal, inescapable roommate in my own skull." He stopped, facing the Original, his expression raw with frustration.
"Forgive me if I don't see a choice here. I see a series of equally terrible punishments. An illusion of agency. You say the eyes are waiting for a verdict. It feels more like they're waiting to see which form of torture I pick."
He was ranting, and he knew it, but the unfairness of it was a fire in his chest. "You present this like it's a logical puzzle, but every answer is wrong! Erasure robs me of power I can't use without destroying myself. Reversal takes everything I've built. Coexistence chains me forever. Where's the winning move? Where's the path forward that doesn't end in some form of mutilation? This isn't Fair!"
The Original Renjiro listened, his face impassive. When Renjiro finished, his chest heaving with spectral breath, the Original's eyes narrowed. The patience there hardened into something sharper.
"You sound like you're making excuses," the Original said, his voice low but cutting through Renjiro's self-pity like a knife. "You, of all people, complaining about fairness."
He took a single step forward, and for the first time, Renjiro felt the weight of his presence not as a passive truth, but as an active force. "You lived a life. It ended. You were given a second one. A body, a chance to become strong. You took it. You shaped it. You lived."
He paused, letting the words sink in like stones.
"I never finished my first life. I was five. I got sick, and then a stranger woke up in my home. I've watched you use my face, my hands, my heritage. I've watched you make choices I would never make, fight battles I would have lost, and yes, achieve things that… that I can't help but feel pride in, in some twisted way."
His voice didn't rise, but each syllable was etched with a lifetime of silent witnessing. "You are not the one stuck in limbo here, Ethan. You are the one who has been living. However complicated, however painful, you have been alive. This 'choice' you find so unfair? It's the consequence of that life. It's the bill coming due."
The hypocrisy of his own resentment dawned on Renjiro with sickening clarity. He had spent years wrestling with the guilt of taking this life, but he had always framed it as an abstract wrong, a cosmic accident.
He had never truly, fully centred the person he had displaced. The one who had been here, watching, feeling, all along. His arguments withered, exposed as the privileged complaints of a squatter who had grown too comfortable in a house that wasn't his.
A defensive, sarcastic retort bubbled up, a last refuge. "So how am I supposed to make this choice, huh?" he sneered, the bitterness now directed inward. "Do I just… shout it into the void? 'I pick door number three!' Will that satisfy the metaphysical ledger?"
The Original Renjiro didn't flinch at the sarcasm. He simply watched, his gaze unwavering.
"You know how," he said, "You focus. You meditate. Not to escape, but to decide. You hold the choice in your mind, you weigh it with the whole of who you are, and you let that intention shape what happens next. The will is the catalyst here. There is no external ritual. Only internal resolution."
The instruction was infuriating in its simplicity. It demanded sincerity in a moment ripe for cynicism. Swallowing the last of his bitter defiance, Renjiro looked at the grey floor, then back at the patient, waiting face of his other self.
With a sigh that felt like it carried the weight of two lifetimes, he slowly sank down, crossing his legs beneath him into the lotus position. It felt absurd, meditating in this nowhere place, but he had run out of other moves.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the sight of the Original. He tried to quiet the storm of frustration and fear. He focused, not on empty stillness, but on the three paths before him. He held them in his mind: the cold, final silence of Erasure; the passive, fading twilight of Reversal; the constant, complex symphony of Coexistence.
As he focused, something monumental shifted.
It began as a tremor in the nothingness. Then, a roar. Not of sound, but of sensation.
'Chakra.'
It slammed back into him, not as a trickle, but as a crashing, tidal wave of power. The void within him was suddenly a supernova. The familiar, vibrant, terrifying river of energy raged through pathways he'd thought severed. It was overwhelming, a deafening roar of life and power after the absolute silence. He gasped, his back straightening, his hands flying to his chest as if to hold in the surge.
And as the chakra returned, the world began to collapse.
The grey space didn't shatter; it unravelled. It peeled away in great, soundless strips, revealing not another layer of reality, but a dizzying, formless fall. The distant glow of the memory-house winked out. The stable ground beneath him dissolved into a vortex of swirling, non-colour. Then came the pain.
It erupted behind his eyes with the violence of a supernova contained in a skull. A white-hot, blinding agony that was light and sound and pure, undiluted violation.
Renjiro cried out, a raw, wordless sound, his hands clawing at his face. His mind, already reeling from the chakra surge and the dissolving world, became a blur of fragmented, screaming thought.
The consequences of whatever he was choosing—whether he was leaning toward annihilation, surrender, or fusion—were beginning to unfold not in the abstract grey space, but in the flesh-and-blood reality of his optic nerves and chakra coils.
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