II.
I learned that the world I was born into was not the one that I had departed from.
It was different, and yet at the same time familiar.
Of course I had known this since the beginning. It had always been a niggling thought in my mind, but with how blatant it was in my new life's everyday life was...it wasn't subtle. I had started three feet to the left of where I should have been, but that fact wasn't as uncomforting as I thought.
I wasn't stupid. I noticed the differences between here and Before.
The architecture echoed something that panged in a way that could only be a distant memory. Most things were when it came to the Before, but the way that the roofs sloped, or how tatami mats and rice paper walls were common brought back something that I couldn't place.
It was hard to sort my emotions despite my mental maturity. My mind was in the body of a toddler. A baby.
Besides, there was an energy here that did not exist There. It buzzed in the air, the people, animals, and even the plants. Rocks buzzed, dirt buzzed, even metal buzzed. It bent the rules of what should be normal, and made the extraordinary into ordinary.
I later learned what it was called.
Chakra.
We were in a war.
This fact had quickly settled in my mind the moment the words came tumbling out of Madara's lips during dinner. Yoshihisa had quickly shushed him, dark eyes glaring at our brother as Yoshihara babbled softly into my ear as I clumsily fingered my chopsticks around a ball of rice he had neatly rolled for me.
It made sense though. It explained why Father was frequently absent, why Masajirō was absent. They were the eldest men in our family. Didn't men usually have to fight in wars? It was required, right?
Wisps of knowledge that shouldn't be mine curled over my mind with whispers of something called a draft. Something that required the able-bodied men to fight in times of crises. We were living through a war that made Father a closed off man. A war that showed itself on Masajirō's face.
It's as I finally, finally manage my chopsticks around Yoshihisa's ball of rice that it happens.
A scream rose from somewhere in the compound, followed by the sounds of smashing tiles and twins quickly snatched the rest of our close family up and carried us to an open field away from the compound I had come to associate with home, pressing one of those dark knives into each of our hands before vanishing.
I had stared at the weapon in my hand and had quickly thrown it down. I would not kill.
I was foolish then.
I paid for my idiocy with one of my brother's own lives.
—"that's your name, see that?" He smiles and I beam at him—
"It's your fault."
—"silly imōto, you need to be careful, okay?"—
His voice has so much anger in it. I can't bring myself to react.
—his hands are warm, I press back into them as the chill of winter settles over the compound—
"You're pathetic."
His dark eyes are rimmed red. He looks so angry and hateful, that I automatically curl into myself. His lips curl up into a snarl, and his eyes flash red.
"If you had only—" He cuts himself off with a click of his teeth, and his face slackens into a tired grief once more.
I can't say sorry. There is no sorry for what I have done. I am barely out of my toddler years, my face round with baby fat, my fingers soft and pudgy, putting the fault in my hands when it's too big to even hold it is foolish. But when he looks at me like that I feel like the age I'm supposed to be, the age that I was in the Before. The age that I have forgotten.
Yoshihisa's legs buckle into the dry grass of the yard behind our home. His shoulders shake with silent sobs. I seat myself next to him.
We sit there together even when he is done crying, and the sun sets. We both grieve.
Yoshihisa grieves for the twin he has lost. He grieves for his other half.
I grieve for the loss of my naivety, and the kind brother that is no longer here.
Yoshihara was now one of many corpses with a battlefield as a grave.
Masajirō is the next to die.
It is unexpected. A shock from the dull lull I have settled in since Yoshihara's death. A shock that shakes not only me, but the rest of our family. Of our whole family.
He wastes away from an infection that makes him too hot to touch. It burns through his body with the determination and strength of an ox. It doesn't go away no matter what remedy the healers try.
I visit him twice.
He isn't lucid the first time. His fever makes him muddled and confused. He calls me 'Mother.'
I leave after that, unwilling to be called after a woman I had never met.
The second time I visit, his cheeks have hollowed out. Only three weeks have passed, and he turns into a skeleton. The moonlight peeking through the crack of his room sliding door casts shadows that makes his face even more gaunt.
He is coherent this time.
"Takara."
Dark eyes meet each other. He stares at me for a minute before he returns to stare back up at his ceiling.
"Let this be a lesson to you." He says.
I replace the damp rag on his forehead with a new one. I do not ask what lesson he is talking about, but I know it's one that holds importance.
"Yes, ani-ue."
Those are the last words I ever share with him. Masajirō dies later into the night.
I meet Manaka a week after Masajirō's death and funeral.
She's one of the few elderly persons that I have seen within our large family. Her hair is gray, and her skin is wrinkled, dotted by winking liver spots. She teaches me the basics in my education, my class being small and inhabited only by Manaka and myself. I do not bring myself to question where my brothers who are close in age are; questions like that rarely get answered properly here.
It is under her wrinkling, shaky hand that she tutors me about our family, the family that I was born into. It is a clan, filled with around two-hundred of us. Our numbers have dwindled since Manaka's younger years, but we are still a large clan. Larger than most.
Our history is long, very long, spanning back years and years that I think my head spins with the number. It is amazing, truly. A thousand years of history, meticulously recorded by numerous clansmen whether it be their own private journals or official historical records by our own scholars.
The Uchiha are noble, this is true. A Daimyō some centuries ago had given the Uchiha acres of land that stretched to the Naka River all the way to the very edges of Sora-ku. They had landed us, and we have occupied the land since then.
It is over a thousand and one things that she teaches me, and out of that number there is one thing that stands out to me like an arrow hitting bullseye.
The War.
It's a war that has spanned back generations, continuous and bloody with no real reason on why it began. It just was.
Whatever reason that started the War was gone; replaced by feelings of revenge for our lost loved ones. There are rivalries that span back generations, and grudges held for years, our wars paid for by greedy nobles trying to one-up each other by dragging us into their petty squabbles and furthering our generational hatred for those who are not us. Who are not Clan.
I finish my education quickly, it is full of names, descriptions, and traditions that don't stick quite yet. I would get there, however.
Manaka praises me with a small smile, and a sad gleam in her slowly blinding eyes. Manaka lost all her sons in the continuous war.
"Be safe, Takara-chan." She tells me. I only nod and bow to her in thanks.
"Thank you, Manaka-obā."
Hello all,
I know my chapters are shot, I apologize. I struggle sitting down and typing so many words. Im a very straight-forward person with things, so I have a lo to respect for writers who can pump-out 5k-10k words a chapter.
The writing here for the beginning of the Stolen Regrets is purposely vague and short. We will get to the present at some point, but right now she is recalling/reminiscing her earlier memories.
Originally, this story was supposed to be formatted like a flash-fic. Five short chapters per one chapter posted, until we catch up to the "present."
As Always,
M.B. Westover