Here's the seventh of The Language of Flowers series. This one features Kurenai and her thoughts about her childhood.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.


Rosemary means remembrance.


Kurenai does not go to Konoha's memorial stone. There is no one on that stone for her to go to.

It's not that her parents were civilians. Her parents were shinobi, proud and patriotic, and they did die in the defense of their village.

It's just that they weren't Leaf shinobi.

Sitting in the window, staring at the sunset, Kurenai remembers that her mother kept vases of rosemary, several of them. She lived in a big house with her parents and her neesan. It was a huge, beautiful house, sparse and austere in the style of a traditional house, with shoji and tatami mats and beautiful flowers and paintings.

She and her family were happy.

Kurenai's parents were Sand shinobi. In Kurenai's eyes, they were everything shinobi should be. Bold, courageous, cunning, kind with their daughters and brutal with their enemies. Kurenai's mother was a puppeteer, her father a genjutsu wielder.

Kurenai's mother would lull her and Akemi to sleep with snake puppets and spider puppets, her father humming soft, soothing songs. Life was idyllic; life was bliss.

The sand got into everything. Kurenai remembers that much. When she would run around the house in dark brown dresses and bare feet, there would always be sand between her toes and in her curly dark brown hair.

The sun was torturously bright and hot. Kurenai's moon pale skin was once touched with the golden tan of the sun, and she was blessed by the sun as long as she lived in the desert.

Her parents died horribly. One was eviscerated by a Leaf nin, the other choked by nerve gas. Her sister died from the nerve gas as well; Kurenai suffered from the effects of the gas for weeks afterwards in a Konoha hospital. She still remembers the sight of her mother's dark mop of hair as she laid facedown on the ground, still and unmoving. She remembers her own terror as she pleaded with her mother to get up, to just get up.

She still dreams about her life in Sunagakure. She still dreams that if she closes her eyes and keeps them closed long enough she will find herself back in the Village Hidden in the Sand, and that her parents and older sister will still be alive. She dreams that she herself would be a Sand kunoichi and not a Leaf.

Kurenai, who creates illusions to torment her enemies, can not keep up the illusion that it is alright to forget her roots.

She remembers, because as far as she knows, she is the only one who is left alive to remember.

When Hinata, bewildered, asks her sensei why she is telling her this, Kurenai smiles strangely.

"Hinata, there must be someone to remember the past. Otherwise, the past might as well not exist. My parents, my family, they were real. They are real. But if no one remembers them, how can we know they ever existed? That is why I must remember. Because if I don't, they may as well have never existed."

Kurenai closes her eyes and sighs. If she shifts from the present world for long enough, she can smell the rosemary flowers her mother always loved…


R&R.