He might have been someone important, might have been loved by a mother, a father, embraced by family before he became the human body wrapped around the power of catastrophe and destruction. ____ didn’t feel anything about that, or about the seal between self and the world, or about the seal between that vessel and the world, where people moved in the distant light beyond this blue grey glass.

A prayer reached, a hand outstretched, a longing cry to bring back the dead soul so near, and neither of them answered—neither ____ nor seal. They did not answer, they woke, and with great black flames, they cried as a newborn baby might cry.

Destruction unleashed as a seal came loose enough to let ____ out, and there ____ stood in power, remembering nothing the distant lights, the seal, the world, the sea, and then—

Breath. Deep breaths as the seal woke up around ____ and all they were before was gone.

“Hah?”

Young, uncertain, rising from the bottom of a crater unafraid but wary. Awake again when once he’d been asleep. Destruction rumbled within the vessel, and the vessel looked around with eyes that saw and memories intertwining with destruction like the stairstep spiral of DNA.

Things might have been different. The child might have grown up as a normal human or an ability user. The child might have had family. The child might have been lost forever as the face of the living god inside him.

The gods don’t care about what might have been.

Chuuya, Arahabaki, woke and slept and woke and slept—living human, living god. Everything they were before that moment of their birth at Suribachi was done away that they might live.