Depth Perception
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AN: I never write drabbles, as I usually find it hard to end anything in under a thousand words. Whoops. I guess there's a first timefor everything.
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Sometimes, his hands hurt. They said it was all the years that he'd spent holding concentrated chakra, something about how it fried his nerves and gnarled his fingers and left him little better than a cripple. He isn't dependant on other people, because in a lot of ways, that's a fate worse than death. But it's hard, sometimes, to do simple things that should have been easy and aren't.
Ninjas don't live to be old for a reason, he thinks. When they do, their bodies are so broken and worn from years of use and abuse that there's no reward in survival. Really, what's the point? A ninja's life is fraught with the death of loved ones along the way. The inevitability of circumstance. Maybe a friend doesn't come home from a mission, or maybe your lover gets her throat slit in a dark ally somewhere, and maybe, just maybe, you survive it all. Life's a game of chance, a blood-tinged Russian Roulette, and he's been playing no holds barred since forever.
He'd never have thought that he, of all people, would survive. He was destined for death; it would have made a perfect freeze-frame ending to the life he'd lead. It had damned near scared him shitless when he was a kid, uneducated but so cocky. The first time he'd ever thought to himself 'I could die here,' it was little more than a half-whispered augury, subtle but consequential.
And then, over the years, somewhere along that beaten, rustic path, he forgot how to be afraid. Maybe it was that he stopped caring. Death changes people, and rarely for the better. There were times in his past, dark and shadowed like skeletal silhouettes against the moon, that he would have welcomed it. Now he just glowers at it, and hates it like he hates everything else.
Naruto never became Hokage. (Catch my hand and just hold on)
Sakura died on her sixteenth birthday. (She looked so pretty in red)
And Uchiha Sasuke, who's survived war, famine, lust, love and vengeance, barely recognizes himself when he looks in the mirror.
His depth perception must be off, again.