Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by UmbreonGurl, drowsyivy, petrames, and fishebake.


"Emptiness is all, it raised me as I am"

— Zoltán Böszörményi, "The Dust of My Existence"


It tried Utatane-sensei's venerable patience to deal with the hysterics that came from the merchants discovering that there were dead men in the underbrush. It is unclear exactly if the merchants had particularly noticed that there were bandits out to kill them, but I suppose that is the way of attacks in the real world.

They happened too quickly for one who wasn't aware of them to figure out, especially when one side were trained soldiers and killers — however young we were — and the other side were…farmers. Previously farmers, by the choice of their weaponry.

It did not seem to matter that if Shinku and I hadn't killed the attackers, they would likely be the dead men in the underbrush.

Really, what was most shocking about it wasn't the killing and carnage that we'd engaged in, it was them acting as though they had no idea that this was a logical outcome of hiring shinobi. Sure, spices were attractive, but hiring shinobi implied money. It implied that there were things to steal and things worth protecting while traveling.

The flash of Konoha metal was enough of a lure for men who didn't know any better, didn't know that shinobi themselves butchered regular men for money and carved up the landscape in ways bulldozers only dreamed they could.

Most civilians...don't understand shinobi on a fundamental level.

We're like square pegs being fitted to round holes. It doesn't work unless you lop off our corners.

Shinobi are killers, and even if I was just blooded this afternoon, it hadn't made me any less lethal before that.

So yes, it'd tried Utatane-sensei's patience to deal with the merchants who'd burst into hysterics about something or other as Shinku, Dan, and I dug some shallow graves in the name of Konoha.

"I don't like this." Dan whispers. He keeps his head low, keeps the shovel moving, but he talks nonetheless. "I don't like the way they're looking at us now."

And to be sure, there was a sense of distrust about the caravan now.

Disillusioned perhaps that we were not a silent girl, a gentle boy and a grumpy boy.

That we are not children, not the way they know children.

And that they can't look at us with parental fondness and think of children they know.

"Can't do anything about it." Shinku says as we drag another corpse into a grave by the limbs. "The sooner we finish digging, the sooner we can get out of here."

He'd puked in the bushes after we'd confirmed that all five attackers were dead. It'd been the smell, probably. The stench of death is kind of a heavy one, even if all I'd smelled before this had been dead pigs at the butcher shop.

But now he seemed as right as rain. Heavy shovelfuls of dirt tamped down on the death.

I say nothing, having nothing in particular to offer Dan, in way of encouragement or otherwise.

I lived with emotional poverty on a daily basis. There is nothing to offer anyone.


That night, when we break for camp, Utatane-sensei gathers us all together, looks around at us questioningly before sighing.

"Debrief?" she asks, almost resigned.

"Targets were sighted by me on the far shore. I neutralized one through three and then Shinku and Dan reacted to dispatch the other two." I relay the information in the simplest of terms, with the fewest of words.

If more information is needed, it'll be given.

But other than that, I've said all I need to say. Two sentences were enough to sum up the lives, and more importantly, the deaths of five men.

Suddenly, I am tired. I hadn't been tired all day, even though my hands kept stinging, even without touching the hilt of my sword, even though nothing was wrong with them, even though I hadn't hit anyone for hours now.

None of it truly mattered.

We'd left five corpses in some shallow graves about six or seven miles back.

And I'd scrubbed the blood off of me, and my hands in the river as well as I could, but the raw sting of it stuck under my fingernails likely wouldn't be going away any time soon.

Shinku had scrubbed his hands raw and red in the murky river water.

Looking at him do it, I could only feel something in my hollow chest, moving.

I wanted to do the same, wanted to rub my whole body raw, but I didn't.

I don't.

It wouldn't be enough.

Utatane-sensei looks at all of us some more, this time, the boys silent and as tense as I felt, and almost sighs. "You did what you had to for the mission, but that doesn't mean you're not allowed to feel badly about it."

We are silent for the most part.

She continues, "if any of you want to talk, I'm open. At any time."

It's a nice thought I guess.

Nice in the way only thoughts could be.


It takes me a good while to realize that my hands are shaking. It'd likely started slowly, when I was distracted, stealing into the room like a ghost.

Like branches in a high gust of wind, I shudder in time to an invisible chill, a fever flush breaking across my cheeks.

I should put the dish I'm washing down.

I should put it down, put it down before I dropped it, but my fingers are curled to claws, unable to bend to my command.

My feet are rooted to the floor, knees locked so tight they ache, and my whole body shakes.

I watch it happen, completely detached from what was happening, as though staring at my hands from three feet away, watching them shudder like my bones want to crawl out of my skin.

The plate slips from my fingers and crashes with a sharp crack, porcelain shards spinning every which way across the floor, and all I can muster, staring at myself so far away with no energy at all was a tired oh.

I should pick that up.

I should clean.

I should, but as suddenly as the shaking had begun, it stops, and leaves behind a deadly stillness.

I brace my back to the counter, but that doesn't matter. My aching knees give out, and I slide slowly onto the floor.

There sitting on the floor back at home, I shatter like the plate that'd slipped from my nerveless fingers and crashed into the wooden floorboards below.

I wonder if there's still a girl buried here underneath all this scar tissue.

I wonder if she can even breathe.

When was the last time I breathed? I don't know.

I force myself to take a gulping breath.

Hungry. I'm so goddamn hungry.

I'd died so young last time, and it'd been unfair.

There'd been so much I didn't do. So much I'd never be able to do, now that I'd died and been reborn.

I never wanted this. Not the rebirth, not the new life, not the blood, the rust, the sin. I'd wanted to be someone once.

I'd wanted to be someone once.

I would never be her again.

And in this life, I'd been born so goddamn hungry. Hungry for every goddamn thing I'd lost.

A younger sister for an older brother. Black hair for white.

Cantonese for a foreign language that had never fitted right on my tongue.

The old world, the old world, and everyone I'd loved and who loved me for this family of shattered pieces, never to be put back together whole.

What I had, what I hadn't appreciated enough, what I'd been — it will never be again.

I'd felt it in the blood running hot and sticky over my hands, felt the crack of bone, felt the jolt ringing its way up my wrists when I smashed in that man's skull.

It all pressed in close, thick and cloying. You get to live, the ghosts whispered. But this is your price.

You get to live, but how are you any better than the men you left in that clearing?

They were stealing likely so they could eat.

You were killing for what? The idea of a city? A place to be safe? What were you killing for?

The price of living was other people's lives.

I feel a scream crescendo in my throat.

I kill it in its cradle, another expression extinguished before breath could give it life.

I sit there in the empty kitchen for a long, long while, before peeling myself off of the floor and sweeping up the shards of broken pottery.

Always the practical one. Always the one to shoulder a burden.

How many years will it take to wear me out this time?


"One day," Utatane-sensei tells me, "you're going to meet a problem you can't cut through with a sword, Tsutako." She looks like she disapproves of something that had happened during our "team bonding activities" in training ground sixty-nine.

The irony of the number is not lost on me. However, training ground sixty-nine was, in fact, its own sort of fresh hell. Located a little ways outside of Konoha proper, it was a small, fenced in part of the badlands, deep gullies and rushing streams and a land pockmarked with dead ends, sinkholes and deceptive looking safe havens.

A proper natural maze for an obstacle course filled with traps, explosive tags, trip wires and other sharp pointy things to take our heads off.

What she disapproves of though, I have no idea.

"We completed the mission objectives." We'd completed the mission in relatively fast time too, carrying the three frail eggs through a landscape hell bent on getting rid of us, without nary a hint of a crack on any of them.

We'd survived some five days inside the hellscape that was training ground sixty-nine.

And somehow, despite everything we did, we made it through, eggs uncracked.

"I know you're intelligent enough to consider other possibilities." Utatane-sensei pins me with a hard look. "What was the real purpose of this exercise?"

Getting to know each other. And I certainly knew enough about Dan at the end of this, through his chattering and my own observations if nothing else. Shinku too, had provided at least a little more of himself.

He has an older sister. Who knew.

"Spending more time together. Getting to know our skill sets better."

The boys and I haven't really been able to fully showcase our skills before, even though we've been a team for nearly four months now, slogging through training and D-ranks and the occasional C-rank mission.

And now we did, I knew exactly who I was working with.

"You didn't say a word more than necessary to either Shinku or Dan during the whole five days you were stuck in training ground sixty-nine." There's a frown trying mighty hard to not work its way onto Utatane-sensei's face. "How are they supposed to get to know you?"

"There's not much to know," I tell her. I wasn't going to start talking about my life while sitting outside with two boys, children really, and just hope that they would understand.

What could I even begin to say?

Hello, my name is Hatake Tsutako. I have an absent dad who's never refused giving his country anything, a distant mom who works on projects I don't have the clearance to know about, and an up and coming elder brother who's going to make chunin this year.

Before I was Hatake Tsutako I was — someone else with a life and dreams and — a whole world.

A whole world gone.

What could I even begin to attempt telling anyone?

Not speaking unless spoken to. Not speaking unless it was necessary.

I didn't really see the point in talking.

"Your refusal to get to know your teammates or let them know you will get all of you killed." Utatane-sensei pins me with a look. "Why did you choose to become a shinobi, Tsutako?"

I wasn't aware I had much of a choice.

I just had to look at where I was, what family I'd been born to to know it wasn't a choice. It was never a choice at all, even if it looked like I had options. There are no options.

There's only a cruel god penning lines and inevitable disaster in the future.

I took this path to save my own skin, a chance of a better future for the brother I adored, something to hold onto that I knew how to do. I'd liked swords well enough in my past life. So why does it feel like a slow damning of faith all the same?

I shrug. "Why not?"

I turn the question back to her. Why not, indeed.


Sakumo-niisan hasn't been home for a while now, and I had too many zucchini to know what to do with, having planned for him to be home when planting the second and third batches.

I hate almost everything about zucchini, from the texture to the misfortunate prickles that come with the plant leaving angry red rashes on my arms.

But now I had too bountiful a harvest and not enough apathy to just start binning all of them.

They're still edible. Maybe someone else would want them.

But who would?

I didn't know anyone, weirdly enough, despite living in this world for some eight years now and counting.

And I doubt that Kobayashi would really care for seventeen zucchini winding up on his doorstep.

One or two wouldn't be unappreciated, but seventeen is too much for one man, even if he is younger than he looks, late twenties at most, even though his eyes were far more tired.

I have no doubt that he did eat, even if I never saw him do so — I only saw him for half an hour a week at most, of course he ate — but at the same time, I have seventeen zucchini with more on the way and absolutely nowhere to put them.

One man does not seventeen zucchini need.

But if one person did not, in fact, require seventeen zucchini, perhaps multiple people all at once would prefer something like seventeen zucchini.

With a slight sigh, I rummage around in the cabinets beneath the kitchen counter searching for a collection of wicker baskets that I'd seen under there, although we never had any occasion to use them for much of anything.

But then, that left the wonderful question of — how many zucchini per basket? Four? Five? — and then still further — how far did I really want to walk to give away these items of very little value anyway?

Seventeen is not a number evenly divisible by anything except one and seventeen.

With the belated realization that seventeen is, in fact, prime, I end up just stuffing a random assortment of zucchini into each basket until I run out of baskets.

The singular zucchini that sits on the kitchen table can go straight into the trash when I get back.

Gathering up the five baskets and their uneven number of zucchini, already a thought that gives me a headache, I resolve to sneak as many as I can onto porches unnoticed until I run out.

Did any of my neighbors even like zucchini? Well, I'll find out.


Mom comes home that night. Strangely, this time, she seems to be looking for me, because instead of crashing into bed, or making herself more coffee and cooking enough food to last us for the week, she pauses by the door of the dojo and waits for me to notice her.

I do notice her midway through a kata as she opens the door. I'd noticed her when she came into the house, but dismissed it as a typical thing for Mom to do when she either ran out of instant coffee in the lab or needed an actual bed to sleep in.

But now she's paused here, at the actual doorway of the dojo and stands there, even now, in silence.

I finish the kata, sweat dripping from my brow and turn towards the doorway, where Mom stands.

She's not really that young either, now that I have a chance to look at her fully under the bare electric lights. It's been at least a few months now since we were face to face like this.

There's a few iron gray locks snaking their way through her braid.

With a jolt, I realize that they'd been there for a while now. Mom's hair hasn't been just dark brown in a long time.

The blue of her eyes still cuts sharp as a knife though. Hatake Ume is no fool.

"Mom," I muster a smile for her. "You're home."

It's nice of her to come see me. I hadn't expected it with how busy the work at the lab has been. Even in peacetime, and this is only a temporary peace — people could see that now, tension frittering throughout the gatherings, civilians becoming withdrawn — the Research and Development sector of Konoha's forces could not afford to stop.

"Tsuta-chan," she begins. "Your sensei mentioned something to me in the lab today, and I thought maybe we should talk about it."

Suddenly, the warm thought that Mom had come home to see me dissipates.

It isn't about me after all.

"Oh." I sheathe my sword, drop it onto the rack by the wall and roll up my foam practice mat. "I didn't know Utatane-sensei went to talk to you."

"She drops by on occasion." Mom leans against the doorway, her arms crossed, white of her lab coat in the corner of my vision. "She tells me you have attitude problems."

Attitude...problems. I have attitude problems? My sensei had gone and disturbed Mom so she could gossip about how I had attitude problems?

Whatever shreds of trust I have for Utatane Koharu vanishes like dew in the morning sun.

"I didn't know that." There aren't any more tasks I could distract my hands, with, so I clasp them together before me to stop them from fidgeting and turn to face her again.

"Apparently she has had a hard time asking you to share your thoughts and feelings with your teammates." Mom runs a hand through her hair and sighs. "Tsuta-chan, you're going to have to learn to work with people you don't like, you know?"

Something starts sinking in my stomach. Like stepping backwards off of a roof, my spirits free fall, no bottom or end in sight. "What am I supposed to be sharing?"

My voice sounds so small.

The first conversation Mom and I have had in so long, and it's about how much I've failed to live up to expectations.

"What are your teammates sharing?" Mom comes to sit down on the floor of the dojo in front of me, her legs crossed, standard blue shinobi sandals catching the light. "She's not asking for too much, just that you blend in a little more, Tsuta-chan."

Somewhere, my grasp of self keeps falling, falling, falling, falling. I dread when it has to hit the bottom.

Blend in.

But I don't know how to blend in. Dan and Shinku, I didn't even like them.

We're a team because we were assigned together, but I have nothing in common with them besides that and nothing I wanted to talk about with them.

"Oh, okay." I hear myself say instead. I want to ask how I should blend in, what I ought to say, but I don't. The words smother inside me, and drown, choking on the invisible smoke in my lungs.

"That's it," she says, patting my shoulder once or twice. "It won't be that hard, Tsuta-chan. You're a good kid."

"Mom, can I ask you a question?"

She's already rising to go, checking her wristwatch. "Another time maybe. There's something in the lab I have to check up on, and it won't wait."

And before I could say another word, she was gone.


A.N. In which, the angry girl with gardens deals with her zucchini and learns she might have attitude problems. Oh boy.

In other news, I hope everyone has been doing alright. I'm in a state that's under lock down orders, so guess who hasn't been outside in two weeks and has to face all of her screaming works in progress? You guessed it. It's me.

Thank you so much to everyone who's reviewed, followed, and favorited. Y'all are great. Stay safe out there.

~Tavina