Places
By xannychan
Disclaimer: Naruto is not my property.
A/N: This has been sitting in my laptop for ages. I must have read this a thousand times, which is probably why I never put it up. A little on the short side.
Warnings: Extremely slight Hyuuga-cest.
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Life, for her, was an insult. A slap in the face. A kick in the stomach the moment her face landed in the dirt. Complication was a thing she was familiar with. She embraced the twists and turns for the worse of her life, because it was all she really had. She had only tests, trials, mountains and cliffs and million-mile drops, and she hated it because they were impossible and she loved it because it gave her the one lie she could always—and yet never—count on: she had a hope of getting out of Here alive.
Nobody ever made it out of Here.
Nobody ever even dared to try.
Here was where life was clearly defined, where tradition reigned higher than God (whoever that was), where bloodlines were everything and lineage was less of who she was related to and more of who she was. Here was where everything was backwards.
Here, family was the enemy she embraced as dearly to herself as her very breath.
Nothing existed Here.
Here was where, from cradle to grave, she would live her days. Here was where she relived her daily deaths in the morning when she looks at his shadow in front of her but never dare reach out to touch the body that cast it (Cousin, she'll think, and not consider her affection incest, because there was never any connection to him at all). Here was where, when she bled, she was not healed but punished. Here was where mothers were not nurturing, fathers were not caring, sisters did not love and brothers were sacrificed for the good of the clan, the good of the people, the good that doesn't exist because they are ninja, assassins, cold-blooded killers, and they aren't people until they pull off their masks and let down their guards and feel.
A Hyuuga is never caught off guard.
Here was where love died.