Notes: I am merely a mindless soul-sucking peacock. Don't mind me.
This is about a shinobi-turned-civilian, and the way you can't really escape your past.
Warnings: Dark, horrible stuff.
Shadows
She grew up in a world vaulted by hatred and double-edged loyalties, grew up strong, grew up feared, and yet ...
...babies make her cry.
In the town where she resides unknown, she is famed for her aversion the younger generation. Children down the street whisper and giggle about the cranky spinster who alone does not invite gangs of kids into her house. Well-intentioned women often try to ease her into their circle – you're still young, dear, and very pretty – and ply her with all sorts of motherly objects and babysitting things and she will feel as broken as a piece of glass crushed underfoot.
Tears run in tight rivers down her cheeks, curling quietly round a scar, bursts on the paisley-print dress that's almost too idiotic for wearing, and she –
I'm sorry, it's silly of me but I can't do this.
In the privacy of their weekly gatherings, the mothers wonder if she'd had a child at some point, whom she hadn't been able to protect.
But the truth is she remembers a nursery not a hundred miles away – the distance could be in lightyears, but she'd still feel the sticky palm of guilt on her cheek – and a pair of infant girls in matching baby jumpsuits, so beautiful and so dangerous for the bloodline they carry. In fifteen years, they will be revenge-seekers – probably – and if she didn't murder them as well, her mission will have failed.
...the way to properly hold a knife eludes her.
She still holds the gleaming blades like she's a hair's breadth away from stabbing something, keeps them sharp enough to cut through bone and sinew, buys them light enough to throw.
Her handwriting comes sharp and jagged as orders in a battlefield. She subconsciously counts the number of escape routes in a family restaurant. She sleepwalks like she's doing katas and acts like she's never quite known gravity.
She still trods on sand and earth without leaving the shape of a footprint, can't bring herself to wear the spice of perfume – Inuzuka, the words comes and doesn't quite hurt – and forgets to sink when treading water.
Because, even when the mind forgets, the body remembers.
...trashy novels and maudlin melodramas she can't seem to get enough of.
She had earned enough in blood money to buy entire libraries and does so with a zeal that surprises even her. She goes for it – teenage romance and paperbacks and fantasy and painfully silly things about people fighting and loving and concocting cheap revenge plots – smooth, shimmery covers and crisp paper.
People – other people who'd never had to live in the wet, clammy fear of the world and its hidden rottenness – look down on her for it, think her shallow and frivolous but –
But she loves these frivolous things, loves them enough to weep helplessly over the clichéd lives and fickle romances and unworthy deaths of fictional characters, even when she had stood dry-eyed over the graves of dead people whose love had been a blessing to her existence. It didn't make sense but for the fact that it made her forget the sacrificial nature of the things that had happened and had mattered.
... she's still jumping at shadows.
There are these things called hugs, which feels to her like the tip of a kunai at her back, tearing at vertebra and through her chest. Tension would sizzles along her skin and she would step out of the hug like she would out of hell, relieved that she had not ripped the throat out like she did the first time.
There are those cold nights at a lonely street corner reminds her too strongly of the freeze of death, of a storm at the edge of a Hidden Village an ocean away, huddled and singe-mindedly resolute. On those corners, she would jump at shadows and grasp at a katana that was no longer there.
There is a kitchen sink and an entire bathroom she had replaced the rainy, gray morning after she had moved in, purposely walking slowy through the rain to the local contractors, because the rust which looks too often like flecks of blood dried up.
It is both terrible and amusing that the things she'd never used to fear – the weak flare of chakra, meals made by another, friendly faces – could have her sitting up in her bed all across the night, gripping a metal pipe because all her shinobi gear were left collecting dust in the annals of an ANBU storage locker, paranoid out of her mind.
End.