Memories
At the beginning, remembering their faces is difficult. Yet, she refuses to use her sharingan’s photographic memory. Chieko doesn’t want to forget, but she doesn’t want to remember only the tragedy her eyes keep immortalized.
A long time passes until she gets their factions right. When her mother enters the room, a memory of Itachi walking with Sasuke is already done. It’s strange… to see his face filled with peace. Since she died, her memories have been tainted. It feels as if her life before was only pain. While the shinobi world and her own uselessness brought her great anguish, there were good times. She can’t remember one without the other, but everything is part of who Watanabe Chieko was.
Uchiha Hatsu did not know her parents. They died in the Third Shinobi World War when she was four years old. Sometimes, she remembers flashes of a smile and long black hair, but then again, every Uchiha had black hair. Although she doesn’t remember them clearly, she does remember the pain when a clan member left her at the orphanage. War is not kind to anyone, so there were other children, and since the orphanage was inside the compound, everyone was an Uchiha. She wasn’t supposed to feel alone with so many people, with the family around her. Still, as her eyes settled on the matron’s tired face and the crying children around her, she knew for a fact that she was alone and her parents wouldn’t be coming back.
That was the first time she experienced loss, yet life went on after that. Her young age let her pain slowly go away. Obviously, she knew something was missing in her life, but it ended up feeling normal to live in the orphanage—there were times when life felt grey though, times when loneliness ate her—. Even if the matron was overworked and the war turned the economy to shambles, life wasn’t that bad. Hatsu never went hungry or cold, and there was no safer place than the Uchiha compound.
Hatsu didn’t have many friends. In a shinobi clan within a shinobi village, you are expected to be a shinobi. Some children wanted to protect the village, some others wanted revenge, and the most childish thought it was cool. Hatsu, on the other hand, never felt even the most remote desire to be a shinobi. Consciously, she hated the pain training brought. Subconsciously, she knew shinobi life took her parents away from her. That fundamental difference in ideas always separated her from other children in the orphanage. Any other profession would have worked better for her, but the village was at war, the village needed assets, and the Uchiha were always proud to provide them. Like that, she was forced to enter the academy with all the other orphans. There was no other path to follow. That didn’t mean she would walk through it obediently.
Hatsu would sleep in class, and put as little effort as possible in training. Had she not been an Uchiha, a child of shinobi, her attitude would have been overlooked. After all, there were many civilians who joined for the propaganda and many children who simply didn’t show promise. But she was an Uchiha, a child of shinobi. Although the pressure and expectation were just as strong for every Uchiha, the difference was that Uchiha Hatsu truly had no ambition. The continuous reprimands from the matron and her teacher had the opposite effect. She started skipping classes. Thinking about it now, it is ironic how an action taken to avoid shinobi life would instead stick her firmly in the path of a soldier.
As her pencil moves through the paper, defining a face, she remembers.
It was one of those days when the teacher’s lecture bored her out of her mind, and like so many times before, she used lunchtime to skip school. Like so many times before, she ran towards the forest at the village's outskirts, towards her secret spot, a hollow tree where she spent her time reading or playing. Unlike so many times before, her place was clearly occupied. Her eyes couldn't see anyone, but she knew someone was… running around? The same fire she could feel in all clan members was “flying” around. It felt weak and small, but it was fast. It was unusual to feel such a weak light going so fast... She smashed the curiosity as soon as she felt it and started walking away. It was already too late.
Chieko has some difficulty drawing the eyes. One second they look too young, then they look too sad. She has to erase and start again.
“Woah!,” a crash, a yell, and faster than her eyes could perceive, a boy fell in front of her. The little desire to help him disappeared when she saw his face. Uchiha Shisui. The clan’s emerging genius. Surely someone like him would be okay after falling off a tree—and wasn’t he supposed to be a genius?—. Someone like him wouldn’t need her help. “Sorry! Are you alright?,” his smile was disgustingly bright and she hated it right away. That’s what little Hatsu told herself anyway.
“You are the one who fell, idiot,” insulting him was the worst decision she could have made.
“Hey, no need to be mean—” an exasperated huff and she was out of there.
Some days later, she was back. Although the possibility of seeing him again irritated her, that was her spot. Her secret place. She wouldn’t avoid it just because someone decided to train there one time. Hatsu sat inside the tree and continued reading The Tale of the Utterly Gutsy Shinobi. She would have finished it if it wasn’t because of a certain someone. That time, she didn’t feel his chakra and his sudden presence startled her.
“You owe me an apology,” and that’s how it started.
That meaningless insult made her a target of his increasingly bothersome personality. However, each time he asked her for an apology, his words were playful and lacked anger. Either by asking for an apology, running around in the trees without hiding his presence, or training in front of her tree, it was obvious his only reason for coming there was to annoy her.
…
“Leave me alone”
“Apologize”
…
“Do you have to train here?”
“Shouldn’t you be at the academy?”
…
“My name is Shisui by the way”
“I know”
“...”
“...”
“So what's your name?”
“Why do you care?”
“Come on, I gave you mine!”
“I didn’t ask”
...
“What are you reading?”
“...”
…
“Did you know the author is a shinobi? He is one of the sannin—”
“I don’t care”
“He has other books, an entire saga, that’s actually the least famous”
“...Seriously?”
“Yeah, I tried to ask about them in the library, but the adults all told me I shouldn’t read them under any circumstances”
“Weird…”
“So what's your name?”
“Leave me alone and maybe I will tell you”
“Apologize and maybe I will leave”
“I’m sorry”
“I want an honest apology”
“Sucks for both of us then”
…
“Are you seriously not telling me your name?”
“You are a shinobi, figure it out yourself”
“Too much work”
“Too much work is how much time you spend training”
“So you actually pay attention? I’m honored!”
“Difficult not to when you are such an eyesore”
“Come on! Now you owe me two apologies”
....
“Do you hate the academy? You skip a lot”
“Maybe I’m not in the academy”
“You don’t have a headband”
“Maybe I’m a civilian”
“You have calluses though. Would you want to be a civilian?”
“Ugh, leave me alone”
…
“Are you okay?”
“Aw! You actually worry about me! I knew there was some warmth in that—”
“I’m serious”
“What’s your name?”
“You are a shinobi and we are in the same clan, shouldn’t you have already figured it out?”
“We can’t be friends if you don’t tell me yourself”
“Who wants to be your friend?! I would have to go crazy”
“You will have to be faster if you want to hit me!”
“Ugh!”
…
“I heard about what happened”
“Look at you, now you are even trying to learn more about me”
“I’m sorry”
“...”
“My name is Hatsu”
“...”
“...”
“So did you go crazy?”
“Maybe”
…
“Why do you still want to be a shinobi?” Shouldn’t that have been a lesson?.
“I want to be strong enough to protect everyone”
“I see”
…
“Do you think I can be a shinobi?”
“...I thought you didn’t like it”
“I don’t”
“So?”
“Just answer my question”
“You shouldn’t do something you don’t like”
“...”
“I know you can do it if you try”
…
“Train me”
“Hatsu…”
“I want to see if I like it”
…
“How was it?”
“...It wasn’t that bad”
“Pfft”
“What are you laughing at, huh?!”
“You are a terrible liar”
…
“Why the sudden interest in training?”
“I want to protect someone too”
“... You will have to tilt your wrist a little bit more if you want the shuriken to hit the center”
…
“I’m sorry for insulting you back then”
“Yeah, no problem”
“... Didn’t you want an apology? What’s that stupidly disinterested answer?”
“I just like to annoy you”
“Idiot”
“I love you too”
…
As her pencil strikes the last details, a sigh leaves her. In the journal, Uchiha Shisui looks at her with a big smile. Her heart will never stop hurting, but that’s not the only thing she remembers when thinking about him. Besides, he would never forgive her if she only remembered him with sadness.
....
The clash of kunai and shuriken echoed in the forest, in that same spot they met when they were seven years old. As the sun shined brightly in the sky, the leaves around them moved with the wind, and Shisui defeated her for the who-knows-what-time-th, she asked him a question.
“Why did you keep approaching me all those years ago?”
“Promise you won’t hit me?”
“Shisui”
“Okay, okay, I will tell you…, you promise though?”
“Shisui!”
“Hahaha, you have so little patience,” he then laid down on the floor next to her. The shadows of the trees made a beautiful pattern on his face, and his eyes looked like black jewels. “I thought you looked lonely”
“...”
“I didn’t approach you for pity, okay? I—”
“I know. Thank you, Shisui”
…
“His name was Shisui” and he is the person she loves the most in the whole world.