There is a voice screaming in her head that won't let her give up. For once, she can't hear the numbing reiterations of shinobi mandate - there is only fire, blood, and a desperate, desperate will for vengeance.
...
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Something is wrong. But what?
The war is over and justice served, the monsters in human skin stripped of their wealth and rotting alone. (In the end, they all bleed the same way, and the only immortals are the dead. But between Uchiha Madara and Sannin no Orochimaru that fact could never be accepted as the inevitable truth that it was, and therein lay their demise.)
And, yet - something is wrong.
It persists in the back of her mind, a dizzying echo of wrong, wrong, wrong. Her hands still in the middle of signing documents, flinching away from the cool metal of her pen like she would from an errant blade. She leans back in her chair and lays the back of her hand over her eyes, peeking through her fingers at the high ceiling. Desk jobs are tiring enough without inexplicable whisperings of old and new mistakes.
She's so tired of something always being wrong.
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Her surroundings are a blur of painstaking detail. Her eyes strain to catch every detail, every scattered leaf and every speck of blood. Chakra she can't spare surges to them, tugged away from plugging her wounds to keeping her eyes active. (What is this? Where am I?) Her arm aches but she doesn't care. (You or me?)
The trail is fresh with new blood, spilled hardly moments before. Dripping off uncleaned blades. The shame of a swordsman.
I'm not a swordsman, someone says. Who is it? I am—
The voice stills and her vision clouds over with red. There, the faces from her memories are taking form. (Whose memories?) They stand with proud backs, smirking faces and leering eyes. Trapped between them is a child- irrelevant.
She closes her eyes and the abyss quiets, long enough for her to focus her energy to her hands and feet. She pushes off the ground and hurtles towards the nearest of the men, right arm drawn back (and bleeding again, but it's okay; soon the blood won't be just hers).
