Title: Before I Wake
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: None
Word Count: 444
Warning/s: Contains implications of murder.
Summary: As an operative for Konoha's ANBU, young Yuuhi Kurenai lives in the darkness of the life behind the mask.
Notes: I thought I got this out of my system with Sanglant. Apparently not. Applying to play Kurenai at an ANBU RPG, I was struck by an unusual sample RP prompt…and the line from this poem. In an attempt to exorcise both, I wove them together. Now that I'm finished I recognize that the epigram really works better with Sanglant, but oh well.

The title is another allusion, to the familiar child's prayer: "Now I lay me down to sleep / I pray the Lord my soul to keep / If I should die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul to take."

Thou hast not lived, why should'st thou perish, so?

Matthew Arnold, "The Scholar-Gypsy"

-

The moonlight slipped through the slats of the shuttered window, puddled across the floor, and climbed the side of the bed just far enough to gild the tousled hair and limn the curve of a chubby fist tucked under a rounded chin. It was not so very late—the moon had just climbed above the imprisoning branches of the garden trees, and muffled voices still chimed together in laughter somewhere in the manor's vast halls, and in a little while perhaps the child's nurse would come sleepily to look in on him before she stumbled to her own bed—but already the boy was deeply asleep, round face slack, shadowed eyelids flickering in dreams. A tiny smile still clung to the corners of his lips.

He was, Kurenai tried very hard not to think, about the same age her little sister had been when one of the Kyuubi's burning tails had swept the Yuuhi house into flames and fallen timbers. Three years old, still round with the remnants of baby-fat, but still so small; she could have held him easily in her arms. Perhaps, in another life, she might have. In another life she might have married at sixteen, like plump and happy Keiko-chan, the daughter of the dango-maker down the street from Kurenai's apartment; she might already have one child tugging at her hem and another nuzzling at her breast. She might have borne this child, nursed him, rocked him, praised his first tremulous steps and kissed away the tears when he fell…

In another life, she might have been merely an ordinary kunoichi, a smiling and enthusiastic girl who never thought of any mission darker than guarding a worried merchant or stealing a treasured scroll. She might have turned down the missions another young kunoichi would have to take; she might have closed her eyes and gone on laughing, teasing, retiring perhaps at nineteen or twenty to marry her Academy sweetheart and raise a new generation of bright-eyed little idealists.

In another life, she might not have joined the ANBU. She might not have taken a mission Kakashi or anyone at all really might have completed much better, simply because they were away and she was there when the mission crossed the Hokage's desk. She might even have crept into the room and looked down into the boy's sleeping, smiling face, and said the hell with a man who could order a political enemy's tiny son murdered as a warning to the boy's father, and crept away again.

In another life, she might have wondered if donning a mask meant shedding your soul.

But in this life, she knew it was true.