The Blood in our Veins

Hide and Seek

They were running up the hill, reaching for the tree at the top as if all of their future rests in the bark of that mangled and carved in trunk, holding a heavy load up to the sky as if a sacrifice for the burning beams that decided death or life. The children scrambled and swerved, trying as hard as they could, and some not so much, to reach the top of the hill first. A pile of candy was left behind, laying in a mound on a broken and scarred trunk that had been chopped down and gutted for its insides, an involuntary organ donater.

I sat on a fence, whistling a tune my parents often sang and danced to, giving good memories to the somber music. Shikamaru, a young boy of twelve, stood with his hands in his pockets and stared at the quickly disappearing backs of the future ninja Naruto, Kiba, and Choji. He had been too lazy, and instead decided to keep time.

I stared at him for a while, wondering at what he was staring in the sky, and to which he was thinking. I often liked to imagine what people around me thought, not just about me, but about themselves and the world in which they lived.

Perhaps he was imagining shapes in the clouds, or wondering at what velocity a kunai would fly if thrown up. Perhaps he was thinking nothing, or everything. My wondering soon ended however, when he asked me a question, at first I didn't hear.

"MItsu?!" Shikamaru was staring at me worriedly, and I realized I had been staring at him for far too long. Bad me.

"Hmmmm? What's up Shika-chan?" He made a dis-pleasured face at my new-found nickname but otherwise didn't say anything.

"How old are you?" He still stood there with his hands in his pockets, head only slightly tilted, making his pineapple shaped hair stab the imaginary ghost behind him. I still sat on the edge of the fence, one leg tucked underneath me and hands held in my lap in perfect balance that had been carefully ingrained in me.

"Don't you think that's kind of a rude thing to ask Skika-chan? You never ask a lady her age!" I teased, a smile easily making its way to my lips as I noticed a few birds fly up from the hill of trees the boys had been swallowed by.

"Just answer the question will you?" He sounded annoyed. I didn't like annoying people, or angering them, it felt as if an ice cold knife had plunged itself into my abdomen.

"Thirteen, turn fourteen in a month." I answered simply, turning my face away to watch a young boy play with another hide and seek. I already knew where the other boy was hiding, could easily see the small tuft of hair trying its best to escape the sight of the world, but it didn't seem like this boy could find him.

"Aren't you a little old to be graduating the Academy? I mean, when did you enroll? And did you fail or something?" I chuckled at his wrong guesses.

"No, dorkus, I enrolled in the Academy a year ago, meaning technically I should be behind all of you guys. My parents decided it would be good to be with someone my own age, to better socialize you know?" I directed the question towards him, my face tilting and causing fresh waves of red hair to move with the motion and probably creating dozens of knots mom would later have to carefully untangle with her gentle hands. My hair easily became a rats nest.

"But that doesn't make any sense, why not enroll you earlier?"

By now the first boy could be seen making his way through the forestry, coming to collect his hard won treasure, and the boy seeking the hiding tuft of hair was still searching, causing me to bite my lip in confusion. Couldn't he see that piece of brown clearly different from the bush it was hiding behind?

"Umm, well, I was in a special program since I was seven, and it took up most of my time, so going to the Academy was kind of impossible for me." I answer offhandedly, my vision still focused on the two other boys, one of which searching for something he would never find, and the other so clearly heading towards his goal.