>>5900838Your heart rate increases as flashes of your childhood flow through your eyes: Bleeding out scared and alone in a field, shrieking for your mom, shrieking for ANYONE to save you as you panicked, dying in the dirt, the dull static numb of your missing arm radiating through your body, through your heart, into your brain, the creeping death, the loss of consciousness, the sensation of grim certainty when you realize that you’re going to die alone, forsaken and pathetic. The prescient knowledge of how your parents would find you there, curled up, rotting, dead in a pool of mud, blood, piss and shit. Filthy. Dead. Dry eyes, pale, staring at nothing. Your life amounting to nothing more than an explosion of devastation to torment your family. The sad, senselessness of it.
And all because you were stupid.
‘I’m scared of shuriken.’ you would say.
The pitying looks as they stare at your arm and realize how much of a broken child you really are.
The recognition of how bizarre and stupid your life must have been to squander all of your potential on the lunatic idiocy of trying to catch your own shuriken and failing. Something neither a normal villager or a ninja would ever do.
Caught between two whole worlds of inexplicable failure.
She was targeting you for a reason. She was going to enjoy this, this little dominance game. It rankled your pride and pissed you off. Your wooden fist tightens involuntarily. There’s no way you would be embarrassed here. Logically speaking you may have already lost, but the blood in your veins commands your victory. You had to have a win here. At all costs.
It wasn’t just your pride as a ninja, or a boy being pestered by a little girl. It was the fact that she was deliberately trying to make you feel helpless like that again. You’ve spent your entire life making sure you never had to feel like that again. To know for an absolute fact that you have become strong enough to protect yourself from that kind of fate, and, more recently, to protect your friends.
The moon was full.
Visibility was good.
You stare her down as she hovers there, standing on a bed of stars reflected off the night sky.
Your teammates and comrades gather on the edge of the woods like carrion birds.
The hate and anger that comes from this girl, who should be your friend, deliberately stabbing at you when she’s in the list of the top 10 people who absolutely should not be doing that.
At best she was selfish and just wanted to fight without considering what it meant to you. At worst, she knew what she was doing and doing it anyway.
The grief of senseless betrayal.
A tenuous grasp on victory.
