Notes: I shouldn't have written this, except I did. Because it just refused to be ignored. (What I really want to finish right now, if my suddenly-existent-schedule permits – and it doesn't – is the Madara/Hidan mindfcky thing or the Vongola Primo genfic. Both will never see the light of day, of course.)
Also, people who know me, like we've exchanged a few PM's – you know who you are – I'm sorry for ignoring you and your posts – the alerts are accumulating in my inbox. I owe you all tons of reviews, but this mean thing called real life is catching me in a chokehold.
Disclaimer: Naruto is Kishimoto's.
Paperwings
"This is the best I can do for you, darling, I'll fasten you with paperwings. I pray it'll save you from the world, and save you from yourself."
In the watery light, the sight of puddles carry him back in time to the vast pools of Kiri, where he was stood enthralled upon the trunk of a mangrove half-drowned in seawater, watching streams of fish flicker gold in the torchlight. The nights there had been murky with fog and mystery, and the water half-whispered siren calls to men, and the sunrises – magnificent.
A thousand miles and a decade away, he finds himself painting them; his memory and his art are thin barriers of unbridled beauty against the harsh world of the struggling.
He dreamed Suna, and reached only as far as Amegakure. What an horrible compromise.
In canvas, he drowns out the freeze of standing in the rain for an entire half hour, stopped in his tracks by the most finely-crafted parchment he's ever seen, fingers aching to touch it, on a pedestal in a store window; forgets the broken shutters of his apartments, the cold seeping into his bones; ignores the despair of standing on a street corner, two weeks worth of watercolour running into the ground around him.
He's an artist, he tells himself, and so long as there is beauty, there is hope. But in time, leeched at by poverty and broken by a world that doesn't run on dreams, he loses hope, finds dope, and there are days he can't remember his own name.
He finds beauty again – she has a dancer's body, plastic pearls at her ears, charcoal-framed eyes that just cups his heart and steals it away at first glance. She is a study in fragile angles, and colours like the captured rain – translucent white and storm-cloud gray and hazy blue – he loves her, he knows he does, its burns bright in him, jewel-toned scarlet, soaring like a phoenix from the ashes of his miserable existence.
Hope, he realizes, has found him again. It offers him a place in the world, if he'll have it. He takes it without hesitation.
She's got flowers in her hair and spangles on her arms, and he kisses her one day under the flap of a bright-red umbrella, feeling clean for the first time in a long, long while.
He takes a job – he's not entirely incompetent, merely too much of an idealist – doing diplomatic relations, it pays well – most jobs that included handling shinobi would – and for once, his oft-relentless spirit is settling into a quotidian, content and peaceful, his wings folded, his empty spaces filled and his horizons no longer for chasing.
His daughter is the smallest, loveliest thing in his lifetime. His carved bones are somewhere there, recognizable, and his wife's colors, but she seemed to be made of something else entirely, probably heaven, he thinks. Not an hour old and he was already dead meat at her tiny hands, putty to be fashioned as she wanted it, an empty palette to be poured on and drawn upon.
When she is five, he tickles her cheeks and laughs and dreams and teases her about the boys – they won't love you like I love you – she plays too often with. She starts putting flowers in her hair, taking after her mother, weeds and wildflowers, and he chuckles as he pulls them out before tucking her in. there are angels by her bed, dozens upon dozens, small and ethereal – he painted them as she grew demanding, and crafted them out of old paper and wood, carving her smile on them, shaping wings spread out, made to catch the endless sky.
He'll remember the past, and think:
Because I love you, I'll let you soar, and raise you above all the pain and bitterness of this love-hungered earth. You'll grow up without ever losing hope, and you'll chase after dreams without fear of falling, as long as I'm around.
It is a gray and dreary year in Amegakure. Sheets of rain crash and explode on the rooftops, a steady roar that backgrounds the louder, more terrible sound of warbombs.
He is torn into shreds when his wife dies, a snuff almost unnoticed, caught in the unending exchange of blows between three hidden villages. He holds his daughter all through the sorrow-ridden night, hugging her to his chest, whispering words full of faith, but empty of certainty. He fastens her paperwings like he'd always done, like things hadn't really changed for the worst, like it'll save her when he can't, an angel of used paper and the desperate hope of a young father.
This is the best I can do for you now, darling, I'll pray it'll save you from the world.
And, with a feeling undefined – the same feeling as when he catches her huddled in the doorway the first months of war, eyes too focused on the rain-swept remains of their village, on the shinobi, her hands fisted in what seemed too much like that dangerous brand of determination he once had –
He adds this: I pray it'll save you from yourself.
The last dawn, and he's leaving his daughter alone, if only, if only, if only…
The light fades, colours stripped away, and through a stream of dew and fog and tears, his and hers, he carefully memorizes the feel her face – it is the fine paper admired through a pane of glass – the tranquil blue of her hair – it is perfect shade of the deep seas of Kirigakure – the smile like warm, streaming sunbeams on his soul.
I love you, I love you, I love you so, please, remember your paperwings and fly. It won't matter if they're rain-soaked or pain-soaked, because you were loved, Konan, so deeply loved, and I pray that will always be enough to carry you through.
And he is ripped away.
End.
Notes: A specific civilian! A life-story that is, in all likelihood, wrong.
I apologize for the excessive imagery, but my job is very technical and this is the only venue where I can play with words as much as I want.