Title: Stories
Summary: The mundane lives of those left behind.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Notes: Written while lamenting my life as a struggling college student – to remind myself that there are people much worse off than I am so I should stop being ungrateful. Written within the one hour my experiment needs to finish and I must go off again.
The differences between faces and statistics.
Her childhood ends when a man clad in an animal mask and a breastplate that smells like iron stops by their house, carrying a story that has her mother crumpling in the doorway and words of condolence that could never make up for what they lost.
Her father had been an academy dropout – extraordinarily good as a soldier, but too slow and sluggish to make shinobi. In the skirmish, he never stood a chance, not when his opponents could breathe fire too quickly to dodge or make the earth jut out in spikes.
She doesn't cry. She never cries.
In one year she would have been eligible to go to the academy.
But that is a dream that was buried a day before her father's remains were.
She longs to go back to the times when her parents took them out for sundaes on Sundays, when all she had to worry about was school and friends and boys. Instead today her mind is filled with bills, bills, bills and not enough money and her sister's exorbitant school fees and a creeping, wracking cough that her mother facetiously waves away.
She squeezes two part-time jobs after school and lives on ramen everyday and it's still not enough to make ends meet. In one of her jobs, she waits on tables in a local restaurant favored by local shinobi. She looks at them when she's not scampering around for a tip and wants to bitterly ask if they enjoy making widows out of wives and orphans out of children. But she refrains because, hey, that's life and everyone does what they can.
She can always tell the shinobi from the regular folk. Not by clothes, not by manner, not by talk. She can tell the minute they saunter up the door, even with her back turned and attention averted.
In another life, she would have been an excellent tracker.
In her bag there is a bunch of scholarship letters, pressed carefully between her day clothes and the cosmetics that she uses to make a mask of heavy-lidded kohl-painted eyes and smiling red lips that she needs for her other job.
She will get to them sometime after she gets home and gulps down steaming hot ramen and adds whatever extra she earns into the meager nest egg she's been saving. She's always been a good student, forced as she was to be mature and diligent and resourceful at a young age, and if she wasn't always so exhausted she'd have gotten back to the sponsors days ago.
Tonight she writes essays filled with words like potential and ambition and benefit to society while gulping some watered-down coffee, listening to the pitter-patter of the rain and her family's soft sleepy mumbles in the next room. She wonders if the people who read the letters will even care to read beyond what is written down.
She wonders if they will see her.
One night she's sitting in the lap of a man who had perhaps half of her intelligence and a tenth of her determination but more than a hundred times her bank account, acting like a twittering airhead to encourage his already overblown ego when the shinobi walks in.
She freezes at the feel of him, turns around fearfully with red painted lips in a small 'o', shivering inwardly at the depth of power shimmering beneath the friendly exterior, wagging eyebrows and teasing smile.
He looks straight at her, makes a come-hither gesture that is riddled with seriousness. She wonders if he can see her and suspects that he does.
"Hey you, what's your story?"
She looks at the hand holding the pen, poised to write the anecdotes of her life, his big smiling face and somehow the tears just won't stop coming.
Everyone has a story to tell.
Owari
Notes: I have been rather dreary lately. Anyway – ten minutes to end of experiment!