Two taps, and a swish, followed by three bumbs, and the constant sound of liquid bubbling at at even pace.
Xenovia was awoken by music.
*Tap Tap, swish, bump bump bump*
*Bubble*
Life had sort of lost meaning for Xenovia, and she didn't know what to do with herself. Some of the light had come back to her eyes, but as it were she had lost some weight as she was only eating enough to survive and barely. She barely slept, and she barely moved. Nobody really messed with her, and she didn't know why. Still, she would have thought that only she would be awake at this time of night.
She looked and saw Naruto working, making music.
Naruto tapped his finger against the side of a bottle and vibrated the contents of it, while his other hand stirred a different potion he was working on. The bump was Naruto putting his hand on top of a different bottle and trapping the steam inside for brief moments, before he let it out as it changed colors.
*Tap Tap, swish, shake shake, bump, shake*
The tone changed as he continued working on something, but the fact that there was music to his actions didn't change. His eyes were filled with a spark and a love for what he was doing, so for him any noise he made while working was music to his ears. Xenovia could see that spark and love for life in his eyes. They were eyes that she lacked, and she was envious of those eyes.
Naruto took out small chunks of frog organs and tossed them behind his back into a pot of shimmering potion. He tossed another frog liver into the potion every 7 seconds on the dot, adding to the music. Every frog liver he added changed the boil and color of the potion, becoming more and more lime green as he added more frog livers to it.
With a handful of minerals tossed into the fires, even the fire produced more sound as the flames turned bright pink underneath one of the potions.
Xenovia sat up and watched him earnestly.
When he was done, Naruto sniffed the outcome of his work, and he grinned as he discarded the potion by feeding it to a slime. Naruto set up everything again and he restarted the entire process from scratch.
He had failed whatever it was he was making.
He failed, but he still smiled and he never once lost the spark for life in his eyes. Xenovia watched him mesmerized, a small smile on her lips. She looked around the room and saw that she was the only person that was awake other than Naruto. She was the only one that was going to get to watch this show, listen to this music.
She crawled closer to him on her hands and knees, watching him from a hiding spot that was nearby, right behind one of the church benches.
She had never seen potion making as something beautiful.
The colors, the sounds, the fumes of different colors. She had seen and heard them before, but with only the light from the windows and the fires to illuminate what Naruto was doing, the sparkle in his eye was only enhanced. His blue eyes reflected everything that he was doing, and a rainbow of colors were in his eyes. They glowed in reflection of everything he did, and that love, that spark, enhanced those reflections and showed a genuine passion.
The music was more intense, but different.
The sounds before had been like a sharp rock, but now the sounds he was making were closer to a smooth jazz if she had to say. They were the EXACT same sounds as before, but Naruto changed the order he was doing things this time. That made the word of difference in how the sounds resulted in a change and sounded like music in a different way.
Naruto wasn't a genius through success.
He was a genius through failure, but because of all of the times she had been defeated by him, she never truly appreciated this. Naruto failed again as he produced another potion that didn't seem to be the thing that he wanted.
He failed again.
He failed again.
He failed again.
The music he produced kept changing, the sounds of him creating became music to her ears as each failure seemed to change the way he worked. He was improving, trying harder, and loving what he was doing more and more as he worked. His failures didn't set him back, they only pushed him forward. Losing something didn't make him lose hope, it only made him strive to try harder and succeed.
He failed again.
Why couldn't she be like him? She lost everything, he was an orphan who had been loved by nobody, hunted by the church, but he seemed to have something that she didn't have anymore. She lost everything just like him, but their eyes couldn't be more different than each other.
Naruto grinned wider with each failure.
Xenovia could only imagine how many failures that Naruto had under his belt to this day, he stayed up later than any of them, and woke up earlier than all of them. He was constantly working, and that always made it seem like everything came easy to him when he always seemed to have just the thing. He was confident, he was happy, and he was laid back, but more than that she was seeing just how much of a hard worker that he had to be to make all of those parts of his personality work.
The man who smiled through all his suffering, not because it was a mask, but because he was a man who could feel a deep love for life.
Naruto offered her a bottle and a spoon to stir it, and she was stunned when she realized that she had left her hiding spot at some point and crawled right up to him. She looked at him, and he winked at her for a moment, before he started to make music again.
He wasn't making a potion to her anymore.
Xenovia started to stir, every time he tapped, she stirred in the direction that his head was leaning. She put the potion back over the flame and watched him, and he tossed a jar of bird stomachs to her. She didn't know how, but after watching him fail and fail, even she knew exactly what needed to be done. She started to fill the liquids from two different containers together in multiple bird stomachs and shook them up.
She tossed them into the pot of boiling frog livers, and they floated on top of that potion, and she smiled as the different color flames were reflected in her eyes.
She was right next to Naruto, she could much more greatly see the true passion in his eyes.
A small spoon tapped against her head as Naruto passed a duty onto her, and as she added vibrations to one of the potions, she heard a new sound get added to the music that they were making together. The swirling sound of water on rocks added as Naruto swirled a potion filled with small purple stones up and changed the clear potion into a purple potion.
She hadn't seen that part of the music before.
She was keeping up with the beat, the music, the fumes and the colors. She got lost in the smells as her mind fell into a trance, the only things she could see were Naruto and what they were doing. She didn't see the time, the moon through the window, all she could see were the potions, the fires, and Naruto. All she could hear was bubbling, tapping, swirling, crunching, popping, and Naruto's breathing. All she could feel was the heat on her face and hands, the moist fumes against her skin, her arm touching and brushing against Naruto's arm now and again. She could only smell the rainbow of scents both great and horrible that came with making potions.
Everything that made up life's ups and downs, she was experiencing everything and nothing at the same time.
This was life and creation.
Xenovia was smiling brightly, her eyes filled with a bright sparkle as she took her eyes off of Naruto and started to put all of her effort into what she was doing. Naruto glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, and he grinned a happy grin.
They made music together.
They failed.
They failed again and again, and then again once more.
With each failure, Xenovia felt the music continue changing to whatever her mind turned what they were doing into. It didn't matter, they were creating the music, they were creating the colors and the smells. The sensations that filled her senses, she was apart of making them. She was creating, she was building something, making something new and amazing. She was failing, but she could understand.
The more she failed, the more amazing it was going to feel when she succeeded.
Losing something wasn't the end of everything, it was the beginning of something. Just because you lost something, just because you lost everything, didn't mean that you couldn't start over and do better. You could be mad, sad, or feel any emotion, but the one thing you couldn't do was lose hope and allow yourself to succumb to despair and fear.
Xenovia caused another failure.
Naruto caused a failure.
The light that started to shine through the window was sunlight, it was still too early for anyone to really start to wake up though. For hours they had done nothing but work together as the sounds of their creating filled the church with a gentle music.
Xenovia looked at instructions on the book that Naruto had open, reading it out of the corner of her eye as she kept her eyes moving between what she was reading and what she was doing.
Naruto stood up and Xenovia blinked when she saw him holding a potion, looking at it with a different grin from the failures.
Her eyes sparkled when she realized.
Success.
The joy that filled her heart, hours of working and failures had not been in vain, through all of those failures that they brought upon themselves, in the end they were all important to getting the success. Her heart was filled with joy as she looked at whatever it was that she helped to create. The light was back in her eyes, her smile was wide and completely genuine, and she felt a sense of accomplishment. The joy that swelled up in her breast was enough to take her breath away for a moment.
Naruto extended a hand to her.
Xenovia took that hand.