See No Evil
by Nezuko, Prince of Rats
This is a work of derivative fiction based on "Naruto" by Kishimoto Masashi. The characters and the world in which they live are the property of Kishimoto-sensei.
Warning: Story involves the death of a young child
What Shiranui Genma wasn't looking at was the little girl's face. He didn't look at her long, plaited hair, or her round, rosy cheeks. He didn't watch her eyes fill with wonder, then horror, shock and pain, when the man in the cheery festival mask appeared before her and slid a blade across her father's throat, covering the floor in his blood. He didn't see the saffron yellow brocade of her kimono take up the crimson like a rich dye, turning her prim costume into something more vibrant, more exotic.
No, what Genma let himself see was a bundle of biology. A nexus of nerves in a slender neck. A target point for his poisoned needle to slip between vertebrae, still soft at the edges where new bone was being made by a growing body. He saw a professional challenge, a need to use a different toxin than his usual fare, on thinner, more flexible senbon, in order to stop the electric flow of information between brain and body without damaging the doujutsu. He saw a paycheck fattened by hazard pay from this S-ranked mission to eliminate the rogue ninja now dead at his feet, and his scion, the girl, the last bastard carrier of the bloodline his village was paying him to exterminate.
Genma didn't see, refused to see, anything other than the mechanics of his job. He blocked from his vision the way the girl's strange, orangish eyes filled with sudden, desperate tears. Closed his ears to her little cry of pain as his needle pierced her skin. When she fell limp and lifeless, and he hefted her slight body to cut out her eyes to return them to Konoha, he didn't let himself feel the shocking frailty of her tiny, pale limbs, or the warmth that clung to her as if she still lived, or the way her body bent and moved and weighed in his arms the same way his sister Haruko's body had done when he'd found what the Kyuubi had left of her.
All these things Genma didn't experience. Not before, while he watched and waited for the unguarded moment when his task could be achieved. Not during, when the adrenaline of the fight with the girl's father coursed through his veins and sped up his already racing heart. Not after, when he sped through trees with the liberated and now sightless orange and white orbs he'd taken from the girl and placed in the box the ANBU medical ninja had given him to retrieve them in. He saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing but the wind in his hair and the branches beneath his feet.
He was almost home, almost back to the Hidden Leaf Village's gates, when he came across the silent row of granite Jizo: mild-faced, bald little Buddhas, some dressed in knitted, blood red caps and capes or orange ruffles the color of the little girl's eyes. Jizo the enlightened one, the bodhisattva who renounced Nirvana to take pity on the souls of dead children who wander lost between the worlds.
Genma stumbled, his legs giving out under him, and he fell from the tree with a heavy thud, not even attempting to break his fall. He crashed down onto the statues, knocking two over and tumbling to a stop in front of the row of saints. An arm twisted crazily beneath him, bent the wrong way, in the wrong place, halfway between elbow and wrist. He didn't feel the pain of the fracture. Didn't feel the place his skull had collided with a grey granite head, knocking his mask askew and leaving a smear of blood on the cold stone. All he felt was a hollow emptiness rushing out of him in heaves and sobs, leaving him somehow even more cold and hollow when the void had passed.
A chill winter sunset washed light orange and pale yellow over the dried grass, the stone Buddhas, the crumpled figure of the black-cloaked ANBU, kneeling in grief in front of the statues, as if somehow those images of divinity could offer him solace.
When Genma returned to the ANBU compound, delivered the precious doujutsu-containing eyes and turned in his report, he was calm, collected, unaffected. When he went to have his broken arm set he reported the injury as "an unavoidable consequence of mission action." (And who would disbelieve him? A solo S-class mission against a rogue jounin with the Orange Sight could be expected to produce injuries. The medics were surprised Genma wasn't more damaged than he was.) He felt the searing pain when they snapped the bones back into place. He felt the burn of the stitches they lodged in his temple, where his scalp had peeled back against Buddha's skull.
In the cafeteria he felt the hunger of his exertions, and ate mechanically. Calmly. He tasted the food, and was glad for the odd flavors, the strange textures, the subtle wrongness of the meal that told him he was home.
In his room later, in the semi-darkness, Genma saw the photographs of his sisters smiling down from the wall. He looked at the cluster of memorial tablets for his family, silently standing like the row of Jizo. Mindful of his aching, casted arm, Genma got up from his futon and lit a joss stick, then murmured a prayer to the silent room. When he lay back down, he turned off his small bedside light, the better to appreciate the orange glow of the burning incense. He watched it until he fell asleep.
Written as part of an application to play Genma in an online RPG, Scarlet Spiral. The scenario: How does your character cope with a mission where s/he has to kill a young child?