>>5793570>>5793625>>5793661>>5793667>>5793670>>5793683>>5793689>>5793704>>5793752>>5793859>>5793865>>5793962>>5794210Home is just not good anymore. You don’t feel safe there. Your mom is back to normal, albeit no longer supporting you in any way. Food doesn’t manifest itself, your laundry doesn’t get done out of nowhere… Well, you guess that was basically it. You still had a place to sleep, but your nights were starting to feel long.
A couple months ago and you liked your room. Dim lighting, but it was comfortable for you and you could unwind carving your figurines, or even just observing your growing pile on your windowsill. It was a bit spartan, but quiet. Calm.
There’s nothing calm about it now. Half the time you go to sleep you have to struggle against your body’s urge to have a panic attack. Would she actually just kill you if you shut your eyes for too long? Maybe she killed Izumi? Sometimes you have waking nightmares, thinking you see your mom lurking in your doorframe, watching you. A trick of the eyes to be sure, but it was getting hard to take.
You attempt to rationalize everything.
The bloody sword. Alright, it may not be unusual for ninja to keep war trophies, even if they look a little grizzly. It’s kind of scary but not necessarily threatening or outside the realm of something a normal ninja would have.
The scroll. Who knows what it was, probably a secret jutsu that needed protection and you weren’t worthy of trust. Kiri-nin are notorious for their secrecy, maybe your mom was just being careful?
The unfathomable bloodlust and intent to kill you sensed. Maybe just trying to intimidate you? If she legitimately wanted you dead, you just would be. It was pretty obvious at this point that despite never talking about it or overly displaying it, your mother was clearly a jonin level ninja, maybe it was some kind of technique to intimidate the shit out of you so you wouldn’t go rooting through her hidden scrolls again? You did honestly step out of line…
But no matter how you try and slice it, one thought keeps coming back to you: ‘I may not have the right to feel loved. I may not have the right to feel cared for. But I do have the right to feel safe in my own home. And I don’t.’
Your mind turns over what Naoki asked you. ‘Don’t you want a place of refuge from all that? A Separation?’
You have to get out of here. You have to escape this place, its cold grip that’s been squeezing your heart since the day you were born. You couldn’t live like this.
Eventually you just stuff all of your stuff into a sack and leave. Your mother doesn’t even bother looking at you as you go, her hands wrapped around a cup of water as she sits quietly in front of Izumi’s shrine. You’d have to make a shrine of your own for her. You’d never seen her, never talked to her, never learned a single fact about her, but you knew that you loved her. You wouldn’t leave her behind in this hellscape.
