Moon Devourer

Of A New Time

He stared at the stars twinkling above on this moonless night, and huffed, kicking off the sheets of his lonesome room.

At least Mitarashi was somewhat tolerant enough of his... screaming, Kami knows everyone could hear it in the communal bedrooms with walls as thin as paper.

But each day, more of those nightmares came, and the more he saw, the more it effected his life.

People started flitting around street corners, ducking past rooftops and low hanging signs before he could catch a glimpse or shout after them.

Day after day he slept less and less until even a street kid would have slept more than he did.

An hour a day. Then sitting alone in a dark room to beg himself to fall asleep until morning comes and he had to start doing his job again.

A whole week of this.

It was worse without the snores of others around him to ground him down, to tell him that the girls that he slaughtered mercilessly with precisely thrown kunai or shuriken wasn't him, because he was five.

Kami was it disorientating. He felt five and thirty at the same time, jaded yet still hopeful, grounded to this sense of peace in the village yet darting around, paranoid of something that loomed over the village.

He stared up at the full moon, and shivered back from how bright it was on such a clear night.

He looked over the rooftops of Konohagakure, and shrunk back from the red illuminated by the bright, white, almost-too-much light from the moon.

It was an eerie feeling, to fear a peaceful village. It was like being afraid of jumping into a still pond just because it felt scary.

And perhaps it is that that makes him so wary of everything, more observant, more twitchy and more paranoid.

He noticed things, unlike how the rest of the kids ignored them.

He noticed how the Matron wasn't so bad, just... frazzled and tired, with kids his age asking for things back and forth, every moment, every time, and she couldn't do anything about it than to help them.

He saw how Mitarashi went silent when a kid got adopted out to civilian parents, how his eyes would flicker to the heads of those civilians before turning away.

In turn, he felt the world had become more vivid, more large, more encompassing, and then he felt so small.

Small as a mouse running through the kitchen at night, small as those birds that had to fly away every time the rest got too noisy and smaller even than the words upon a scroll, insignificant unless paired with the rest.

He then realized, that what he suffered, was... not important in the Matron's eyes.

The Matron was too busy, the Matron couldn't care for every head in their population of two hundred and she sure couldn't take care of every need with how little adults there were running around doing the same job as she did.

And, he looked at the Matron just yesterday, staring at her frazzled form and eyebags as dark as his own, and he let her go.

The Matron couldn't care for him anymore than she could afford, so he'll stay quiet, he'll do everything silently, and he won't do anything against the rules.

That's good for her. He agreed.

But deep in his mind, a little voice told him the opposite, it was an escape from the eyes of authority.

If a wolf could wear a sheep's coat, then so can he.

So can he divert gazes from him and meld into the background, so can he become faceless amongst the faces of many others.