It starts off...

Well, it starts off like every other traumatic event, she imagines.

It starts with shock.

It starts with thoughts sloshing wildly between her ears, then draining until her head is empty and hollow. Her mind turns cold, sterile, detached from the world around her, completely separating from what little emotion she retains.

It starts with a wail as loud as any before, and then heavy sobbing and hiccups and more screeching. It's a mess in there but there's nothing that can be done. The shrill screams die out slowly, and all that is left is the low, sorrowful wheezing of a man left behind.

It starts with infinite pools of poisonous purple, surrounded by skin a shade too light and topped with a head of thin, flat strands of cream-colored hair. Everyone calls her names or shys away from her, no matter age or occupation.

It starts with…

It starts off with pain, sharp and dull, burning and icy, deep and superficial. It crawls through her bloodstream and sinks into her bones before rising to the surface and staining her too-light skin dark. Her chakra whips wildly around her but no one from the packed marketplace below seems to even notice, not even the shinobi.

It starts with a kunai which fits too well into the palm of her hand, an endless energy flowing through invisible veins and rising too eagerly to her call. She excels in every class and they crown her with a terrible title: prodigy.

Truly, though, it starts with a young girl of twenty-six stepping off the edge of the curb right in front of a speeding semi and taking the budding life in her stomach with her.