empathy (rewritten 2019)

うちは一族

うちはイタチ

Itachi Uchiha never lived to see her funeral, but he wouldn't have cared nonetheless. Sakura never played much of a pivotal point in his life, for she was just a blur in the background--pink and too bright for his eyes, so he moved her to his peripheral.

Pink and bright and far too ambitious for her own good, he described her, and it fit just right. She dreamed big, so big that when she stretched her arms to reach and grasp and pull she would lose her footing and fall.

She entered the Academy with the dream of becoming a great kunoichi but she soon proved its impossibility the moment she dropped everything and everyone for a boy. She marked him as her next dream, the dream of marrying and loving him, and proved its impossibility the moment he pushed her away. He remembered her, small and loud and arrogant, and marked her another senseless failure, just budding her potential but lacking desire to keep growing.

And then two years passed. The wind blew stronger but there she stood, tall and proud and new. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe she had help.

She looked in his eyes and narrowed her own and he saw the strength, the growth and the dream. And he looked in hers and, deeper, he saw the pain and the fear and the loneliness. He alone watched, red eyes and dark with death, her morph into something more.

For she was budding, budding into beauty, and no one could see her bloom.

うちはサスケ

Sasuke left her as a genin on the bench, her--crying, small and weak. And he came back to her standing before him, stance wide and her knuckles scarred, her--strong and knowing and smiling.

But despite the rest of the years they spent together, she never really changed in his eyes, always as that young girl he left on that bench so pitiful and needing. Despite all the tests she passed, the battles she fought, the place she held in their team, he paid her little mind until he needed her.

And so, gazing down at her coffin, her body cleaned fresh of her blood, he looked and remembered and walked away. She laid, frail and weak and thin and tired, laid as tiny and saddening as that girl on that bench all those years ago. He could see no difference and so he scoffed as he watched Naruto cry and beg.

Why would you end yourself like that?