Disclaimer: Naruto and all of its character belong to Masashi Kishimoto. I own nothing but the original characters I make.
Chapter 194: Reunion
BLACK ZETSU POV
"Why are they taking so long," groaned Black Zetsu, he is excited to see his mother so every count felt really unbearable.
It has been three hours since they had gone into the sealed chamber and the door had not opened once in all that time, not even a crack to let him know whether anything was progressing or whether everyone inside had simply decided to forget he existed.
He had wanted to enter the sealed chamber with them but Kazuma and the other Otsutsuki had refused without much deliberation and Raiken, who could have argued on his behalf, had simply nodded along with their decision.
Black Zetsu can only look at them with anger, but they didn't know it because he is clearly just a black goo. It is very hard to know his real feeling because of his face.
Raiken had looked back at him with the calm expression, just stared directly at his eyes and then stepped forward and leaving him alone.
So here he was, standing outside. With twenty guards who had not looked away from him for a single moment since the chamber door closed, their Byakugan rotating in shifts so that at any given time a fresh set of eyes was watching him without the fatigue that came from sustained activation. Every hour, three guards would deactivate their dojutsu and step back while three others activated theirs and stepped forward, the transition smooth enough that there was never a gap in coverage.
It was, Black Zetsu admitted internally, a well organized watch rotation for him. Although he knows why they did it and had accepted it, but waiting for too long almost wearing out his patience.
He had spent a hundred years in the shadows, moving through walls and darkness and the blind spots of people who never knew he was there. Being watched this openly and this continuously was an experience he did not enjoy and the fact that he could not do anything about it without undermining his own reason for being here made it considerably worse.
His mother was in that room and after everything he had did for a century, there is no way he would stop here.
He had been exhausting himself, after every manipulation and every arrangement and every generation of people he had quietly moved toward the outcome to let her escape, she was on the other side of that door and he was standing in a corridor being observed by a member of Otsutsuki.
Another thirty minutes passed and finally something clicked, the door opened.
Black Zetsu straightened immediately, his attention snapping toward the entrance with an intensity that he did not bother to disguise.
Raiken came out first, followed by Kazuma, then followed by Madara who was wearing the expression of someone who had just had an extended and exhausting conversation and was still processing most of it. Hagoromo astral form drifted through the wall beside the door rather than through it and then Kaguya stepped through the doorway.
Although the figure of Hagoromo worried him but seeing his Momma Kaguya, Black Zetsu heart feel like stopped, he had been dreaming to meet his mother and now finally he is able to see her again.
Black Zetsu had spent a hundred years holding the memory of her. The image he had carried was the one from before the sealing. What stepped through the door was still unmistakably her, the white hair, the pale skin, but the scale of what she projected had changed. The power was still there but contained now, present without being overwhelming in the way it once had been.
She looked more like a person than he remembered.
She was scanning the corridor with the careful attention of someone who had just woken up in an unfamiliar place and was taking stock of everything around. Her eyes moved across the guards, across Kazuma, Madara, Raiken who was already watching her with that irritating pleasant expression he seemed to wear regardless of the situation, then her eyes found Black Zetsu.
She looked at him for a moment with the neutral assessment of someone looking at something they did not immediately recognize.
Black Zetsu felt something tighten on his chest.
"Mother," he said.
The word landed and for once Kaguya was surprised.
'Since when did I have black son?' thought Kaguya.
Kaguya blinked slowly while looking at Black Zetsu, slowly somewhere deep in her memory was being looked for and it finally connected.
"You, my son" she said quietly.
"Yes mother, it is me," replied Black Zetsu and because he didn't have lacrimal gland, black zetsu can't cry.
Everything become silent, not even Raiken or the guards did not move, nobody in there said anything.
Kaguya looked at Black Zetsu with an expression that was moving through several things at once, recognition and recollection and something considerably more complicated beneath both of them.
The truth about Black Zetsu was not simple and it had never been simple, not even at the beginning. He had not been born the way Hagoromo and Hamura had been born, he was not given a name in the ordinary sense. He had been created from the last reserve of her chakra in the moments before the sealing closed around her.
Every otsutsuki has born with Kama or Karma, they are like a clone that could help them in rewriting someone DNA and helps them a lot.
He was not her son in the way her other children were her sons, Zetsu was part of herself.
And now, as Kaguya stood in the corridor looking at the thing she had separated from the last of herself before the darkness closed in.
Simply said, Black Zetsu is part of Kaguya, it is like a hand but not a hand that is why Black Zetsu didn't have gender, for example hand is still a hand and not a woman or man.
A/N: Did you get my example? I mean if it part hand become a soldier, the part won't generate genital part.
"Zetsu, come to me," ordered Kaguya.
Black Zetsu become a black goo and absorbed back into Kaguya body.
Suddenly a thousand years long memory appear on Kaguya eyelid.
Every war, every manipulation and every generation of people steered toward conflict they had not chosen. Every Madara who had been guided toward a plan that was never his own. Every lie told through carved stone and rewritten scripture. Every death that had accumulated in the century, the full weight of it pressing back into her awareness.
Kaguya closed her eyes and she suddenly cry.
"Grandma why are you crying," asked Raiken.
"Why are you crying Kaguya sama," added Black Zetsu.
Madara and the other guard didn't say anything they just looked at her.
When she opened them again, her tears had stopped. Black Zetsu had become part of her.
"I am sorry for what Black Zetsu had done," said Kaguya.
Everyone become silent, even Hagoromo looked at his mother, only Madara who should be angry. While Raiken didn't know what he should feel right now.
"Black Zetsu is part of myself, before Hagoromo. "It is one of the pure Otsutsuki power."
[DING! 9000 Stars donated by Elon]
[Message: Host, you are right, your theory is very right, Black Zetsu is really part of Kaguya]
[DING! 8000 Stars donated by Jack Ma]
[Message: It is amazing, this part had never been told in Series and now we got his secret.]
"I want to go to earth," she said. The voice was quieter than it had been in the sealed chamber. "I want to see what has become of it and I want to see my other descendants."
Raiken looked at Kaguya for a moment and then nodded once.
"Then let us go home," replied Raiken.