to the divine, mischievous hope in you.
If there was one thing she wished for, it was for the world to be less cruel. Less dark. Less stained with sorrow. Yet, how could she dream of such a thing when her very existence was birthed from the depths of that cruelty? When her bloodline, her legacy, was nothing more than an eternal dirge—a symphony of madness, sins, and curses—shadowing her every step?
The Uchiha name was both her heaviest burden and her cruelest inheritance.
The snow fell in quiet whispers that day, veiling the world in a blanket of white. As if it, too, wished to cover the stains of blood and regret that marred this earth. Beneath the ashen sky, an old man sat cross-legged under a gnarled tree, its branches clawing at the heavens. His hands rested on his knees, gnarled as the roots of the tree itself, and his eyes, though clouded with years, bore the weight of a thousand stories.
“Tell me, child,” he asked, his voice soft, a fragile warmth against the chill of winter, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
She stopped walking, the snow crunching softly beneath her small feet. Her blue-onyx eyes, deep as turbulent seas, rose to meet his gaze. In those eyes swirled a storm of emotions—anger, grief, and something deeper still. Her tiny fists curled at her sides, trembling with the weight of emotions she could not name. Yet, as the moments passed, her fingers unfurled, and the tension melted away like snow dissolving into the earth.
Her answer came, soft yet unshakable—a single word, fragile as a whisper, heavy as a prayer.
“Kind.”
It slipped from her lips like a desperate wish, a fragile hope she clung to in the suffocating darkness of her life. A dream cradled so tightly that it felt like it might shatter if she let go.
But dreams are fragile things, easily torn apart by the jagged edges of reality. Her dream of kindness was no different. It floundered against the merciless tide of the Shinobi world, where kindness had no place. War—unforgiving, insatiable war—consumed everything in its path. It devoured families, futures, and fragile hopes, leaving only hollowed souls and empty graves in its wake.
She thought of this as she stared at her hands, trembling and stained with blood. The metallic scent clung to her like a shroud, thick and inescapable. Around her, bodies lay strewn across the battlefield like discarded dolls, their lifeless eyes reflecting the void growing within her.
In that moment, a question clawed its way into her mind, relentless and sharp: Are dreams nothing more than the delusions of a madman?A desperate lie spun by broken hearts to make sense of a world carved from violence and despair?
Her fists clenched again, tighter than before, as if trying to hold onto something that was slipping through her fingers—something fleeting, something fragile. But the blood, thick and unyielding, dripped from her trembling hands, pooling on the frozen ground beneath her. Each drop felt like an accusation, a reminder of what she could not escape.
Perhaps dreams were foolish things. Cruel lies whispered by desperate souls trying to keep the darkness at bay.
But what could she do against the darkness when it was stitched into the very fabric of her existence? When it was the foundation of the Uchiha name?
Namida Uchiha hated it. Hated the curse that flowed through her veins, binding her to a legacy of destruction and grief. Hated the endless shadow that followed her every step, whispering to her of hatred, vengeance, and despair.
And yet—she cherished it, too.
To bear the name Uchiha was to carry both love and hatred as inseparable twins. It was to hold the aching beauty of devotion in one hand and the suffocating weight of sorrow in the other. Not all Uchiha were destined to hate what they were fated to love, but for those who did, it was a torment beyond words. A torment Namida knew too well.
She closed her eyes, the silence of her curse pressing down on her like the weight of hell. The prayer that she whispered in the quiet moments of her life, so often that it had become a mantra, rose to her lips once more.
“Kind,” she murmured, her voice barely audible over the biting wind.
The word carried the weight of her pain and the faint flicker of hope she refused to extinguish. For the world. For herself. For the broken pieces of her soul she still dared to believe could be made whole.
Kindness was her rebellion.
Against the darkness. Against the sins of her bloodlines. Against a world that told her it was impossible. Against the foundation of the Shinobi world.
Because even in a world carved from sorrow and steeped in blood, Namida Uchiha dared to believe that kindness could be the spark to light the way forward.