A/N: Meta-future!fic. Implied NejiTen, peripheral NaruHina. Some light language. I'm still on hiatus, despite this little…thing.
…Please read and review!
coda in d minor
i.
She doesn't have a mother.
On her father's good days, she asks questions constantly, never giving up on the slight chance that he might tell her something, because for shinobi, anything can give you information. But her father is shinobi, more so than she is, and he never tells her anything, no matter how often she asks.
She never asks on a bad day.
ii.
She doesn't look right.
Everything about her is wrong, wrong, wrong. Her hair is black-brown, dark like calligraphy ink, but it never shines, instead choosing to absorb the light. Her skin is too pale, not the dark shade it should be. Instead of round circles and black centers, her eyes are chocolate brown and look like teardrops.
Her body is thin and wiry, with long fingers and strong wrists and loose limbs (but her father is tall and thick with muscle, and they look nothing alike, not even close, though she is young yet). Something about her screams danger and cuts and cold steel, while he seems strange and barely contained, as if he might explode into movement at the slightest provocation.
She does not look like her father.
(She looks at the people who whisper, and her eyes seem to look right through them, so the rumors become worse.)
When she is six, she asks her father what "bastard" means.
iii.
Once, a white-eyed man came to their home before she went to school. He and her father sat in the private room, the room where she wasn't allowed inside, and they had tea and sat and talked in low voices about things that she wasn't supposed to know. They were in there for two hours and thirty-seven minutes—she knows this because she counted every second with the flip of a kunai, and not once did they leave the forbidden place or begin to argue (she would know, because her father becomes agitated and raises his voice whenever he feels strongly about anything.)
When she tried to eavesdrop, the man knew immediately.
iv.
After she took the aptitude tests at seven, Iruka-sensei sent a letter home to her father, one that she couldn't slide open and take a peek at, because Iruka-sensei knows her. (She only stopped at the summoning jutsu that would have sent infinite barrages of shuriken straight for her head.)
Her father reads it for a long, long time, staring down at the characters marching neatly down the page, and for an hour she makes a game of seeing how often he blinks as she toys with the kunai he gave her for her birthday. He is statue-still, which is strange, because her father is never still, but yet he isn't moving and staring at the paper for a while before finally telling her to go work on some target practice. (She sends kunai in to trees and senbon into leaves, stitches up sixteen cuts, and cleans everything in her pouch before giving in and going to find some other form of entertainment.)
After a time, when she comes back in for curry, her father gives her a pat on the head and tells her that she'll like being a kunoichi, won't she, maybe they'll practice with some leg weights and a jumpsuit or two, but he seems to be staring at a point above her head instead of looking her in the eye.
v.
She is twelve now, she can shoot shuriken into targets and make strings out of chakra that cut and bind. He always says he's proud of her, her father, always says that it's amazing what she can do—but of course, she has the fires of youth, of course she will prevail. Shikamaru-sensei will be wonderful, he says, she'll like her teammates, even if the Inuzuka boy is loud and the Hyuuga boy doesn't ever talk. It will be a good team, he says, strong and brave, but not stupid, and they will work together as if they had been made to fight together.
(He looks above her, as if telling someone who isn't there, and if he stays like that for a long while, she doesn't quite notice.)
vi.
Training has taken over her life, and she spends every waking minute thinking of new weapons and ways to counteract genjutsus and practices the sweeping kicks her father taught her so that she could slam her foot into an opponent's face, so she almost doesn't notice when the Hyuuga boy's mother comes to meet him.
But she does, and when she looks up from the fuuma shuriken she was cleaning, she sees the Hokage's wife for the first time.
She's a quiet woman, dainty and large-eyed, with thick dark hair and a calm manner. When she talks to Shikamaru-sensei about her son's chances of being chunin, she holds herself with composure and a sort of elegance that seems to fill space like a lady would. The Hyuuga boy stands like his mother, she realizes now, stands with that air of someone who should be filling this area, that it is their right to be there. They maybe don't even know they do it, it's just in the blood (in Konoha, everything is in the blood).
After the woman spoke with Shikamaru-sensei, she turns around quietly, barely making a sound, even in a yukata that hangs around her ankles. She watches the girl for a while, sees her movements, and it is like watching pictures overlapping, memories fading over reality.
(Her son asks her why she watched the girl so long, and she sighs, and says, "She looks so much like he did." The conversation ends after that.)
vii.
Preliminaries have come and past, it's the big exams, and there is blood in the dust underneath her feet—it might be hers, even. Her face is wet with something and her hands are slippery with sweat, and her opponent is an outright bastard of a Cloud-nin who takes advantage of her loose grip to slam another couple senbon into her calf. It isn't long before she's panting, frozen with cut muscles and running out of summons and unable to find the strength to use the kicks that she's practiced over and over.
(She knows her father says that she should respect the enemy, learn his name, treat him like he is an equal, but she wants to say all the words that made her father dangle her upside down and refuse to serve her any dinner, because this opponent is a son of a --)
And she is in a genjutsu.
This is a nightmare world, and she can't see anything (she hates being blind, in the academy they would blindfold her and see if she could find the target, but she would shake and bite her lip until she bled) and the enemy's voice comes into her head. He calls her things, labels her a slut and a bastard and tells her that her father is lying and that her mother was a whore. Words echo and echo in this nightmare world, and the voice is monotone and disdainful, as if they are true.
It is horrific, and she can feel her body shaking, and maybe he's coming in to slit her throat while she stands here, because she's just blind, she's always been so blind. Chakra is building up behind her eyes, she can feel the pressure like a river hitting a dam, and in a second it might just burst and then—
And then it does, and everything becomes clear, because now she can see.
viii.
Inuzuka tells her, in his loud voice, as they sit in the hospital (she is in bandages and a bed, and he has a scar on his arm, showing her with pride as his dog barks), that she had pokey veins coming out of her forehead and white eyes like Hyuuga-loser here, and that she was scary and jeez, can't you tell us when you're going to do weird crap like that? So they smack each other (feebly, because her arms hurt bad and his hurts worse) and she is smiling and he is laughing, a big barking laugh.
Hyuuga tells her, quietly and methodically (her father always wondered how her teammate could be the Hokage's son, he was so quiet), that after she broke the genjutsu, she attacked the enemy, screaming words and shoving her hands and her kunai into any part of him that she could reach, and when he was finally unconscious, she fainted. This makes her quiet, and she fiddles with a senbon and looks away, because this is strange and frightening and she wishes she didn't have to know.
Shikamaru-sensei tells her that she'll be training with Hyuuga's mother sometime soon, because she needs to learn about the Byakugan and chakra points. He has his hands in his pockets, and drawls at her, and though her eyes hurt and she's on her merry way to a massive headache, she smiles and nods. Before he leaves, he tells her to drink some tea, that it'll soothe her headache, and she's baffled (as always), but does as he says, because he's sensei.
Her father tells her nothing, but sits with her and lets her lay on his shoulder, and they stay that way for a time, until she is asleep, and he is quiet.
ix.
It has been nine days since the exams, seven days since she was in the hospital, and three days since the bandages have come off, and she still hasn't stepped into her father's room.
She feels like a coward, a dirty coward, and she is shinobi, she should be able to step through the door—but she doesn't, she doesn't at all. So she stands there for a while, and it's only when he unlocks and opens the door that she realizes her father was there.
There are hitai-ates on the wall, two of them, hanging over the two ANBU masks (one is a bird, and the other is a dragon, and both are watching her). Photographs are lined up in neat little rows on a desk, and there are weapons on the wall, katanas and kunai and fuuma shuriken, things that she would love to hold and use. She stands and stares, because she didn't know about this, didn't know it existed.
Her father hands her a photograph. It is worn, and has been folded and creased and torn apart and taped back together. When she unfolds it, a girl with buns and a sunny smile and a boy with a glower and a disdainful look are watching her from behind her father (he is smiling, it glints in the flash from the camera, and she wonders why she's never seen it before.)
She stares, and stares, and after a time, she asks why.
Her father is quiet, and his big eyebrows knit (another thing that she wondered about when she was young, but she knows better now), and he turns away before he speaks.
"Things went badly."
children don't know grief
FIN
Review.
…Ja.