Frozen
A cold wind whistles through the trees, though she can't hear it. She can barely feel the tufts of hair it sends tickling against her cheek. There is a fight continuing around her, but the only sound she can hear is a laugh that grows louder as her blurring vision slowly fades out. It's loud and she hates it, she just wants it to be quiet because she's
so
very
tired.
The laughter roars in her ears, louder and louder until it is the only thing she knows and then it all just
Stops.
Nara Aika dies in the forests of northern Fire country, in the third winter free of the Second Shinobi World War. Her brother, Kouen finds it morbidly humorous that after surviving the War and constantly getting into ridiculously dangerous confrontations, she finally dies in a time of 'Peace'.
He likes to think the wind that blows through his hair when he tells this opinion to her grave is her way of laughing at it with him.
(re)Birth
On the twenty third of May, exactly thirty four years after the Second Shinobi War ended, a child enters the world, shrieking at the top of her little infant lungs.
Her parents smile and wonder if it is a preview of what their little girl will grow up to be, a little spitfire like her cousins.
It is not.
It is as the medic nin runs a diagnostic check over the baby that the shriek suddenly cuts off into a hum and she stares up at the woman holding her. The woman shudders as she catches a glint behind the child's eyes thatoo old for the face the body the mind-too old, too weary for a newborn and just shouldn't be there.
The child's parents don't see it or the woman's trembling hands, her back turned to them as their daughter lays on a padded table but it's right there in front of her and it's terrifying. The parents are chuckling behind her as those eyes that don't belong to a child but sit in the skull of a baby born right before her very eyes moments ago and they're still there child hums again and blinks at her slowly.
The child is handed back to her mother by a medic with a strained smile and shaking hands that are quickly hidden out of sight. The medic watches as the couple coo at the child and she wants to scream at them to just look, to see their child is already broken, that the child whose birth she just watched has eyes like her brother, the eyes of a soldier broken by the horrors of a war which ended almost three years ago.
The father is a Yamanaka and the mother was once called Nara, she knows they would see through any attempt she could make to control the fear that turns the blood pounding in her ears to ice, so she flees the room as calmly as she can.
The woman will not remember the name of the child for she does not learn it, but she will remember this night, three months later as the Kyuubi stands blocking the sky and she worries about all the children she has helped bring into the world, until the monster's howls echo intent to kill killing killed dead dying lying face down in a ditch itch in her skin thin like paper that won't protect her chest and she feels a thrum of malice in the air that seeps into her bones.
She remembers the child born with eyes that saw more than they should, and she feels no guilt as she wishes that if the Kyuubi must take a child's life this night, that the (not a) child be the lone sacrifice.
She will remember this night many years later when the child once more sits on a table in front of her, grey eyes that have lost their edgeyes like that don't just go away, they just don't trust it must be a trick but it won't work on her nowatching her face as she crosses the room. Her hands glow green and she sets to work on the child's arm. It's a clean break of the ulna, routine and simple and something she's done a hundred times over.
Why then, do her hands refuse to stop trembling?
The child is still small, five-ishe lies to herself, she remembers how long ago, knows how old the not-child is, she remembersixat the oldest. The small child with a broken arm sits watching her in silence.
Why is she the one with an urge to burst into tears?
She will remember this night, but she has time before those days come.
Tonight, a medic runs from a family doomed and a child unfortunate. She does not know this; she would only run faster if she did.
Yamanaka Aika, favorite flower of the mountain is born on the thirty fourth anniversary of the end of the Second Shinobi World War, and the shadow with eyes of steel screams because suddenly she's back when she had been nothing a moment ago and all she can hear is laughter fading in her ears.