Her legs dangled over the edge. There was a slight misplacement of air and then he sat down next to her.
"Come here often?", he asked with a wry grin, senbon bobbing up and down as he spoke.
"Sometimes," she said, eyes roving the distant horizon. He sobered at her tone, checking her over for possible injuries.
"Did something happen?" That concern of his was sweet, but she shook her head, no.
"I'm just... thinking." She looked to the side, and he met her gaze steadily. She studied the way the shadows of the setting sun danced on his face; the light reflecting off of his senbon.
"How dangerous." He wasn't joking. "Enlighten me?" She obliged. She always did, when it was him, and as time would tell, only him. Her eyes returned to the sky but his didn't.
"I wonder... How long will my footnote be?" He didn't interrupt. "Because, in the end, that will be my legacy. Will it be my entire name, my maiden name? Or the name of a husband, with a reference to their family rather than mine?" She smiled, though it was flat and brittle. Her tears had long dried, somewhere between yesterday and today. "It was always what I was meant to be, always what I was set up to be, but I was ignorant and never realized. Until now." Her smile shifted into something bitter, emotions raging across her face once more.
His focus was unwavering and he clearly held thoughts of his own, but he was willing to let her speak her mind first, as always. When nobody else listened to her, it was him that did. It was him that lent an ear, a hand, a senbon, a hug. It was him that heard her voice, always. He would brave any storm if he imagined nary a whisper of familiar cadence.
"Look at the sky." He did. The clouds were tinted pink by the sun. "If I weren't here tomorrow, it wouldn't rain. Or maybe it would." She stopped smiling. "But I couldn't change that even if I wanted to." His eyes were back on her face, cataloguing her minute expressions, no doubt. She knew from staring into mirrors for hours (and wondering if anyone saw her as her, anyone at all,) that her eyes were devoid of much anything, simmering with fury and grief like when she spoke of her- teammates.
"I should be happy. I'm going to become forever in ink, however little it may be me. I'm not Asura or Indra or anyone, really. I should be honoured." She looked into his eyes, then. "I don't feel honoured."
He was sad, maybe, or just resigned. They shared an unremarkable fate, as he was but a footnote at his sensei's feet. (Like her.) Three families and fifteen generations finding their zenith in techniques taught to and as their legacies. Poison and infiltration and sabotage at the hands of one man was little when compared to the grand and vivid future of sixteen generations. (Not to her, never to her.)
They shared a fate. A destiny, if one was in a philosophical mood. Forever overlooked in spite of everything they built with their own fears and lives as the foundation. What was blood and grime and success under chipped fingernails in the wake of men-as-dragons that made god pause and bleed as any mortal could?
"I don't feel honoured," she repeated then, words spilling from her lips ever-faster, to the sky and whoever may hear. But there was nobody but him at her side and they knew it, like she knew the acidic taste at the back of her throat. She didn't ask if he felt any sort of honour as an already-present footnote referencing back to his clan. She knew his thoughts like the back of her hand. (And she was a shinobi and her hands were her lifeblood and business and salvation.)
"If I were to leave, would they spare me more ink at all or save it for someone's husband's name?" His gaze didn't waver. It never did, when she was the one to speak. Oh, how she adored him, self-made just as she was. (Too bad nobody cared for self-made. Too bad that the sun and the moon and the sixth outshone what could have been. Too bad that she was about to find out how colourful the world was without their shadows banishing her into omitted courts.)
"Do you want to find out?", he asked. He knew her answer before she could have ever made it, just as she knew his favourite neurotoxin's chemical composition; with ease of long practice.