.
It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.
The young man kept his chin pointed straight at the campfire while his eyes and shadow wandered, on alert for shapes amongst the darkness.
He suspected they were being followed.
There was no sign of it, not yet, but the young man would be surprised if nobody was on their trail—Kasumi was running from something. That fact raised questions, in and of itself. How did she make it so long without being caught? What kind of assassin couldn't keep up with a child?
That didn't even touch on the questions that bounced in his head around why there was an assassin after them in the first place. The mother was dead, he was confident of that. The father he was pretty confident was dead too but had no proof other than that there was no sign of him thus far.
The most likely situation was that the father served as a distraction. Perhaps he sent Kasumi off while he led the assassin on an opposite course, which could explain why the assassin hadn't yet caught up to them. Though, that the distraction was not only necessary but had seemingly worked, made the young man think the two were on equal footing combat wise. Either both were civilian or both were ninja.
All he could do was speculate.
The young man shook his head, pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
Smoking wasn't something he did during most missions. Nothing signalled your location to your enemy quite like a little tower of smoke dancing up through the air, the scent of burning tobacco.
That was exactly what he wanted. If this was a bandit, they deserved to be put down for harming citizens of the Land of Fire. If this was a ninja, then there was a whole other slew of reasons for the young man to kill them.
It was his duty as a ninja of Konoha to draw them out and deal with them.
He set up camp in one of the more open areas he found. He placed Kasumi a bit away from him, let her seem vulnerable, easy. A fire going and a cigarette in his mouth, which served a dual purpose: point to their location and give the attacker a false sense of security because no ninja worth their salt would dare try anything as brazen as this.
With all that in place, he also decided to take advantage of their position and had a stick covered in rabbit meat roasting in the corner of the fire. Kasumi didn't respond when he asked her if she wanted any. That was a theme, he found. He would ask her something. She'd meet him with silence. He didn't expect much else from her. There wasn't much he could do for her other than keeping her warm and get her somewhere safe.
Emotionally traumatized kids weren't his specialty. Emotionally traumatized adults he could deal with because, for all intents and purposes, that was his job, but kids were a whole other story. When they got back to Konoha, she would be somebody else's problem.
Still, he felt for her. Violet eyes just a bit too wide to be natural, a blank face that could put any infiltration specialist to shame, long auburn hair that was nothing but knots, and clothes stained with what was probably her mother's blood. She was a sad, pathetic little image.
The young man blew a cloud of smoke out of grit teeth.
There was nothing he could do for her except get her to Konoha. Past the gates of the village, whatever happened to her happened. He hoped the best for her. Really, he did. But he couldn't get caught up in those thoughts right then.
He had to keep watch. He needed to make sure that they even got to Konoha in the first place.
.
.
I sat in a cocoon of blankets and stared at the figure across from me with blank eyes.
His eyes never stopped moving, though he hadn't changed positions in at least three hours. He sat with his right leg curled into his chest while his left leg stretched in front of him. One hand settled on his left hip. The other, in his lap, kept grasped around a kunai.
His name was Maen Nara and he was, in fact, the man who Mama and Papa hired to see us safely to Konoha.
When we didn't show to our agreed upon meeting time he took the only developed path out of the village, the obvious choice for our trip—the same path Papa sent me down. Our meeting was inevitable. Now, he was taking me back to Konoha. There was nowhere else for me to go.
I had no relatives. There were no close family friends I knew of. It had always been Mama, Papa, and I on our little farm, removed from the village proper unless we trekked half an hour through the marshes and fields; none of that was left for me to go back to.
I pinched my eyes shut. A breath shuddered from me. Tears were near but I held them off—later.
Our little campsite was still and silent.
A small fire flickered underneath a makeshift cover made of tarp scrap and sticks. There was nothing over my head but the sleeping bag that made up the outer layer of my cocoon. It seemed to be waterproof, since I felt no hint of dampness. Maen, however, was soaked; he had just the meagre canopy over his head as shelter.
I gritted my teeth. I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to go to Konoha, either.
I wanted to go home. Everything in me cried to go home, back to the farmhouse, with the little hand-made rug right in front of the door and the ragged, dusty curtains that blocked out the rising sun and cracks of lightning during storms alike. With dishes older than Mama and Papa combined, cracked and chipped and stained.
With Mama and Papa.
There was nothing glamorous about the farmhouse, or the work that went along with it. Papa and Mama worked long hours to keep it running and they had begun to slowly introduce me to the various chores that I'd help with when I was old enough. Feeding the chickens. Brushing the horses. Picking out in the fields. I would have learned every aspect of running the place, eventually, because the farm would have been mine one day.
That would have been my life: settle down, have a family, work the farm. It was simple, wonderfully simple. I wasn't ambitious enough to desire anything else.
The fact that it hadn't been my first life was a truth that sat in the back of my mind; I had vague recollections of Buddhists preaching about reincarnation during my last life, so the leap of logic that they had been correct didn't give me much pause. I assumed that I had been reborn into rural Japan until this body was two-years-old—that belief had been shattered when a squad of Konoha ninja came through the village for the first time.
The memories of my old life were covered in one layer of fog from switching bodies and then another layer due to the rampant infantile amnesia which tore apart any tentative memories it could get its hands on. That hadn't stopped me from putting together the dots. Language barriers had been the biggest factor that prevented the truth from hitting me sooner; the visual proof was impossible for me to misconstrue.
While the reality of my situation had given me something of a shock, it hadn't done much to alter the path I thought my life would take. The news that we were moving to Konoha a couple of weeks back had done that.
At least at that point, I could take solace in the fact that I would have my family with me. I had Mama and Papa. I thought I would always have Mama and Papa.
A single sob tore out of me, against my will, and I hurried to bury the rest of them, should more try and follow.
Maen turned his eyes to me. He watched me for a second. His gaze moved up, to a point beyond my shoulder, and his eyes narrowed—then they widened.
There was a whistle in my ear; all I registered was a blink of silver that whizzed past my head. Something thunked to the ground behind me and the stench of blood, the sharp and metallic tang, unmistakable to me now, overtook the petrichor that hugged the air. A black shape slithered across the ground, back towards Maen.
I jumped, any sobs in my throat expanding into a garbled scream. I tried to scramble away but found that I couldn't, tangled in the blankets.
Maen was beside me in a blink. He grabbed a fistful of the fabric and hauled me over to the tree where he had been sitting. I went in between the trunk of the tree and his back, angled in such a way that his body created a barrier.
"Just the one," he muttered. He adjusted the kunai between the fingers of his free hand. "What on Earth…"
A couple of minutes passed before Maen moved away. There was a distinctly ruffled aura about him, from the more apparent stress lines in his still neutral expression and the added tension in his shoulders.
I turned to look at the body. My gut told me that it belonged to the person who killed both my parents—there was no way he'd be here if Papa was alive and kicking.
Maen flicked the top part of the sleeping bag over my eyes to block my view. "Don't," he said. "Just give me a couple of minutes to clean up, then we're going to get moving."
I didn't answer.
I wanted to look, to know the face that took away my family.
I let my body fall to the ground in a heap. The wall of fabric hid my face, masked the hot tears that burned down my cheeks and muffled the handful of whimpers that left my mouth.
I couldn't do it. I couldn't look.
All I could do was cry.
.
.
Maen walked over and crouched beside the body—he fought off a wince at the stiffness in his left hip at the movement.
He flipped the body, ignoring the stench of blood and feces that grew stronger at the movement. Maen's kunai jut out from the neck. A waterfall of crimson leaked out of the jugular vein and marred otherwise pristine pale skin. Maen wiped the dirt from it and saw that the face, as well, was unscarred, clean-shaven, blemish free. No headband adorned his forehead. No weapons on his person.
If Maen didn't know better, he'd have passed the man up as a civilian. Whatever cloaking jutsu the man used told Maen otherwise.
It was the first time he felt something like that during a shadow possession. He almost failed the jutsu at the initial point of contact because of it—he hadn't failed with the jutsu since he was a boy, if even then. He didn't like it.
He'd never encountered a cloaking genjutsu like that before, period. He almost didn't encounter it this time around. If Kasumi hadn't made a noise he wouldn't have looked over and noticed the hint of a blur over her shoulder, like a painting that somebody smeared with their thumb. It could easily be missed by those not alert.
A mop of brown hair so dark it was near black sprouted out of the head. Maen moved up his eyelids and saw that he had eyes of a lighter brown, closer to the colour of chocolate. Neither features were special. On a whole, the body appeared plain. Not handsome or with an uncanny beauty to it. Nothing that would stand out in a crowd.
The longer Maen examined the man, the more he didn't like what he was looking at.
Maen pushed his fingers through a couple of seals and carved out a chunk of ground in front of him that he kicked the body into. He covered it with dirt again. He didn't have any jutsu that could incinerate the body. And besides, it was possible for the village to recover the body at a later date and see if there's anything useful they can find from examining it further if he buried it rather than burned it.
He grabbed his rabbit from the corner of the flames. It was a bit burnt but better than nothing. He kicked some dirt on the fire and moved away the canopy to let the rain finish off the job. Maen got the rest of the camp cleaned up while the smouldering embers of the fire sputtered out, turned to nothing but a hissing pile of black sticks by the time the clearing was as good as never touched.
Kasumi was still crying by the time he picked up her bundle and broke out into a run; she went silent at the movement. A head poked out from behind the fabric, wet cheeks and red eyes. She gave the situation a quick look and retreated back into the blankets, curled in on herself.
Maen felt a twinge in his sore hip, protesting the pace, but he ignored it.
He just wanted to get back to Konoha.