Leaving
Shikako leaves the village.
After every plan is executed, every fight won, every god laid to rest, it is an unavoidable end. She is not a missing nin (not this time). Lady Tsunade has given her permission to take an unlimited sabbatical leave. The permission was not necessary, she was leaving either way. It is there to let her know she is welcome back, a reminder that people will be waiting.
No one had dared asked her to stay; It would have been a cruelty because she would have. As the villages had geared up for war, in the quiet of a Akimichi dining hall full of family and friends, she had unfurled a crumpled piece of paper. Her voice was small as she described the house she’d drawn. It would have high ceilings, a stone arch in the garden, a library in the attic. It was going to be far away. It was where she would go, when it was all over. She would build it herself.
Shikako had never held a dream of her own. Everything was for other people’s futures. She had dedicated her life to protecting her people and it was a terrible truth they all knew. Something they had learnt a little too late to change it. Had she not thrown her childhood away into Root to protect her brothers? Had she not schemed and plotted and risked being singled out to bring the Uchiha closer and closer to the clans? Had she not lived in fear her whole life- feeling safer outside the village in foreign lands than in the thick of the forest ruled by traitors? At least out there, everyone knew to watch their backs. It wasn’t all down to her. She had worked and worked and worked for their safety. She was strong and formidable and capable and so very hollow. Yes, it would have been a cruelty to ask her to stay.
With a little time and space, maybe what had been carved from inside her would reform. She had made so much space within herself for others that there was no room to regrow those valuable parts, not while within the village that had cut her first. And, when it did, maybe she would come back. Or call for them. If she called, they would go and see the little janky house with a stone arch in the garden. They could see her dream for themselves. A place safe and hers and real.
Those comforting thoughts did not make it hurt any less when she left without saying goodbye.