Spoilers for character death, if you know where to look. Kurenai-centric introspection.
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A genjutsu user such as herself rarely has the opportunity (--privilege? taken away by the double-edged talent that gives her control over illusions and none over realities, a voice points out) to be anything but constantly on guard. It is such acute awareness of surroundings and condition that keep shinobi alive. Keep them alert.
Constantly, painfully, breathlessly...aware.
(like the press of skin on skin, a lover's familiar warmth, a contact that you no longer have--)
But she is paralyzed by any number of so many things these days; she is not an active shinobi, she is rapidly losing that keen edge, she is not not alone, she is overwhelmed by everything life pierces her with, and recalls with bitter irony that her mind was once so capable of balancing overflows of information.
(Of course, that was when she worked within the confines of her mirages, and as her stubborn mind likes to remind her, this is reality and there is nothing she can do about it.)
So in this awkward, frozen state, even this genjutsu user finds that there are moments when her mind is slow to move, when she is boneless and unconcerned; and these are the suspended, ethereal minutes after she first wakes.
(funny how you awaken peacefully unfettered by the dreams that plague most of your type; likely because you channel them in your deadly spellcraft)
When she can blink sleep-clouded eyes at the ceiling, grope blindly for the edges of consciousness, stretch languidly and think of nothing but the sensation of protesting joints sliding back into place for the day ahead--
and then she is battered without warning by the all-consuming tide of everything she knows she knows, that he is gone, that she is floating in a dangerous limbo and ever more incapable of controlling her direction in the battles to come, and she ruthlessly stamps out the voice in her head, ignoring the fact that it is now her only constant companion, because it does not sound like him--
oh and then the reminder that really, she does have another constant companion, who will hopefully never-and-always remind her of the father, and it is small wonder that after mere days she always wakes with one arm curled protectively around her abdomen even though she is paralyzed most of all by this greatest gift of his, prevented from exacting revenge, from taking action, from doing anything but what she is most incapable of and that is bringing him back--
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and when the waves of thought settle, leaving her spent and worn and still broken in their wake, she is lying face-up on a bed too large for a solitary person staring blankly into an unresponsive ceiling with her guard up once more.
And reopened wounds behind it.
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