𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐒𝐮𝐤𝐢 | ɴᴀʀᴜᴛᴏ

Kumo Kazumi

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✧˖*°࿐

There's a tree in all of my memories. Although I never went to it, never touched it. But my eyes did. I could outline it, measure it to be taller than me from the farthest distance. It's thickness both ancient and comforting, like there was a protector inside of it. Or at least, that was how my old man would view it. He'd never say it, but I just knew it in his faraway gaze.

That I knew the tree meant everything to him. More than my own itching existence.

When I come back to my senses, the eyes of servants fall to me. I was never one to constantly make demands, but their hawk-like eyes made it feel otherwise. 

Like a computer screen, they never once shown genuine emotion. I'd catch them obeying every duty and order from my old man for all the hours of a single day. How easy they could wear a smile then so suddenly turn their backs and drop their smiles into attentive frowns.

Perhaps they had been through a lot, or at least seen too much. My old man made it clear with his stern eyes that could silence even the Hokage. And not just because they were close, but because even the Third left him alone.

Overall, Kumo Sanjiro is a miserable old man with a reclusive energy that seems to latch forever in the air. However, something about my deceased mother's uncle gravitated me to him. It wasn't just his strictness that could earn the respect of God's, nor his intimidating aura that makes a child begin to tear up, but the littlest of cracks of his tough persona instead. 

I only watched him from afar since he never came to me first unless necessary. As young and small as I was, I assumed he had no idea how to care for a child that was abruptly dropped onto him. I thought of it as confusing, seeing as he happened to be the only clan head in the village who never once married.

Did he ever get lonely? What even counted as lonely? Our signature frowns? Our blank stares? I pieced a lot in a short amount of time. Kumo Sanjiro was just like me, Kumo Kazumi. But not because of our shared name. No... rather the longing.

He longed for that tree as much as I longed for his gaze. I wanted him to look at me, notice my existence. I grew tired of staring at the familiar tall wall of his back. Although I knew such wishes were selfish since I, myself, had walls of my own.

Then there was the thought: 'Perhaps I exist to cease his loneliness?'

In time, I found a way to slither myself through the cracks in his walls. Sometimes without even trying. I commented on anything I could find of him. How his fingers twitched against the old cane after every traditional meeting. Or when he'd sit on the wooden steps outside, never once looking away from the tree. Even his firmness when protecting me from marriage offers.

 He held such a strong negative view for arranged marriages.

I never knew why. Part of myself couldn't help but feel grateful for that. And that seemed to attract me more to the grumpy, lonesome old man. At least I still remember the first sentence I spewed that had his eyes on me for the first time ever.

"Is that woman my mother?" Kazumi stood behind the kneeling old man, his hands intertwined together. 

Sanjiro had his eyes on Kazumi over his shoulder, although her gaze slowly turned to the frame. A smiling beautiful woman next to a man she seemed to cherish. The emotion in the frame was a complete contrast to the dull, pale world around Kazumi.