Notes: Wrote this from the scraps and ashes of an Anastasia-inspired Itahina which I hated because it had Scrapgut-orphan! Hinata, Sophie!Neji, Vladimir!Shisui and Rasputin!Danzo which was very, very funny in my mindview. I merely took out the crack. Nothing crazy like "the uchiha family reunion" - that was my meltdown.
Thin Air
Discontent was a terribly funny word, he thinks, and something that never really goes away.
Like hunger, except deeper. As deep as the chasm at the end of his first name.
Discontent made him feel like he was always running away from something, and never towards anything.
Sometimes – when caught in the thrill of theft, having too much fun skidding down mountainsides, holding on to the purloined pigs for dear life, or when hanging on with ragtag bands around a muted fire, too sloshed to even care about where the next meal comes from – he could barely feel it.
Being maudlin was for idiots and ninjas. Not for orphans, who are too busy being sly and scrappy and grappling to be balls of ugly words like 'need' and 'want' and who, besides, may call the millions of other kids littering the country their brethren.
But occasionally –
Like that funeral. It hit him that he'd never been invited to a funeral before. (Or a wedding. Or a festival. Or a party that did not involve seedy characters and bar fights.) Not to be insensitive or anything, but hundreds of people die every day. Was there really no one he needed to say goodbye to?
Talk about not having roots.
"Ah well, you know, I came out of thin air," he would say a bit sheepishly (a bit slyly) when introducing himself to the groups of misfits he would tag along with every two weeks or so. It scares him how much it could be true, even when he knows that, most likely, he was not that special in a world of ninjas where orphans were common as dirt.
Wouldn't it be just great to imagine himself the last survivor of a remote village? Or that his parents – faceless beings they might be, he prays he didn't inherit his prominent ears from his mother, poor woman – hid him away because they were being hunted down by some shinobi overlord? Or if he was actually the illegitimate spawn of some real snazzy lost princess or a ninja hero who couldn't stay?
(Depending on the circumstances, he just might hate them. Or he just might love them unconditionally.)
He hates bloodline limits. (No, it's not because the last time he tried sneaking in a Hidden Village he'd had to outrun some kook with laser-shooting eyes.) He hates them because he gets so jealous he just might kill himself.
There you are! Instant tickets to ancestry!
Kami, he wants one, even the stupidest, most impractical, most humiliating kind like that one in Kiri where those poor, ugly fools could blow themselves like pufferfish. It doesn't even have to a bloodline limit, just anything removed from his nondescript self. Like in softhearted and very rich and very open-handed Konoha where you could practically see who's related: Uchiha cheekbones! Hyuuga poise! Yamanaka sass! Nara smexiness!
Ah but he's got nothing of them. He has cheekbones he's never seen in another face, non-existent poise, no small amount of snark and airheaded-charm for every occasion and forged his own brand of smexiness as though it really mattered.
All his.
Its kinda really lonely.
"Your father's a man who taught you who you are
Mine was never there
So how can you say I don't come out of thin air?"
Out of Thin Air, Aladdin 3
End.
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