It often feels like I'm falling. It's slow at first, just a tightening in the chest, an increase in anxiety. As it progresses I start to go numb. It starts in your toes, fingertips, and nose and spreads inward, through the same veins that were just pumping so fast. Though my skin is numb I still feel a sharp pain in my chest when I try to inhale. As I'm gasping for breath, it feels as though I'm drowning. The air gets thinner and harder to breath as the temperature increases. This is how I've shed my humanity, figuratively speaking. Though it is only in dreams, I still feel the effects when I wake.
My skin has the familiar tingle as when a sleeping limb is waking. My breath comes in deep gasps as I feel I have not been able to breathe. I rise, up into my body, whereas before I was sinking beneath it into the mattress. I feel my heart slow its pace and all regularity return to me.
They make my excuses for why I am so detached. They make up reasons to tell the others in the clan, but can't ask me why. It is as though I've been cursed since birth, to be the genius and the outcast. Everything comes naturally to me, all but this ability to… care? I never sought out the compliments I received. I did as I was told.
I can only conceive that something has been severed in me, connected by a single thread. The only one that ever elicited a reason for a synapse to pass through from what I'm becoming, to what I have barely known, is him. He is the only one who can trigger this humanity in me. How can one analyze their self, and deduce that they are on the brink of insanity? The truly insane do not believe themselves to be any different.
I feel no pull or connection with any of those around me, except him. I've become cold and calculating. I've become the Shinobi they've asked me to become, in every sense. I am perfect now right? Shinobi are supposed to be emotionless, to carry out duties without question and formulate strategies to strengthen their village. They hold to their ideals of honor and mercy, but what good does that serve a warrior?
I could feel the split inside me, and him the only bridge across the gap. His innocent eyes, that bright smile, reaching through the darkness inside me. Little fingers touching my face as I slept, tiny body snuggling close to me.
"I love you nii-san," whispered softly into the air. I knew that I had to destroy this weak place, but its weakest member lay here beside me, the only one I cared for. I think I lost the grip on my sanity the day I committed the massacre. I woke numb, and remained that way all day. As I saw him, asking who had done this, I wanted to lie. I wanted to tell him I would find this evil and destroy it, hold him close as he cried but… the soldier in me refused.
The Shinobi in me told me, I would be promising to destroy myself. If I coddled him, he would remain weak. He was the only promising member of this clan, and I had created a reason for him to strive for strength. As he cried, spewing questions I could not find words to answer, I found my resolve weakening. I wanted to reach out and wipe the tears from his eyes and tell him lies until he calmed. I wanted his little fingers on my face, and his tiny body curled up next to me, because he knew I would protect him.
I suppose the problem was, how do you protect someone from yourself, when you can barely control the mental switch? The Shinobi in me told me that he would make me weak, and I could not stay with him. The humanity in me told me that he needed me more than anything, and would force himself to believe the lies if it meant I would stay.
"I love you nii-san," a whisper I would never hear again. So I lied. I told him things that could reasonably account for what I had done. What other answers could I give him? I was not given the answers, just urges. I was told to become what I am, and somewhere in the process I lost what I had been. I have lost my innocence on this path, and I have stolen his as well…
If any should punish me for this act, it should be this boy. The small boy before me that I stare at with cold uncaring eyes.