ー for @soliskage [ kushina! ]:
dawn casts dream-like colour on konoha, the amber light of the waking day phantasmagorical, its shadows purpled and strange, oddly-sized. It’s a temperate, still day; a rich silence seems to veil the village ( though the fact it is a village strikes her as oddー even from her vantage point of Konoha’s entrance, its vastness is obvious, its wealth even more so ). Not those macabre silences that follow after death, acrid with sulphur and the dead, those present absences. It’s a serenity only found in the liminal hours diurnal and nocturne, changeling times where the world is made a myth.
Perhaps it is because she’s hardly slept, but Karin’s grip on reality is tenuous, her mind sluggish and naive: she sees Konoha as some chimerical faerie-land, some false kingdom conjured by her slumbering psyche. Still, though she has retched and sobbed across the soils and sands between the ruins of Kusagakure and here, her jejune heart refuses to believe that her old life has died, a new one set before her. Blinking away the heavy tiredness only nightmare-ridden sleep can bring, she adjusts her glasses, peers over the carriage they’d rented in some mid-way village. They’d done the better part of the journey on foot, ‘til Karin’s soft, pained cryingーshe had tried to hold it, but she couldn’t have held onto anything, so fragile was she in the aftermath of deathーalerted them to the swelling, the blistering, the supernova boils of blood and broken skin. She wouldn’t let any of them touch her, but when the carriage had been rented, she had obediently moved into it, an automaton, and lurked in its corners, stayed there, silent as the grave. Some of the nicer ones had tried to talk to her, but in between fragmented sleeps she was not in the most conversational mood, nor could she be if she triedー words turned to slush, mixed around in her eardrums, as if her head had been dunked into water, baptism, bathing, your mother’s hands through your hair moving the soap around, your dead mother’s hands in the ash of your family house, alien and grotesque.
Her thoughts are taking a turn down a dark and eternal labyrinth, so she does the only thing she can do: try to think of something else. The silhouette of Konoha is new and she thinks that it must be very exciting to newcomers. Excitement is not something that comes easily to her, hasn’t for a while even before her world turned to dust, but she can sense the unease in her guardians. Kids her age were built for deathー the sight of a child destroyed by grief was a garish reminder of how bad an idea that was in the first place. So she tries to perk up, move her face manually with cold, calculating thoughts, if it cannot move on its own. Widen her eyes, peer over the edge. Like playing pretend, juvenile theatre, playground performances: now all the actors have died and she is alone on the stage, so all eyes are on her. It must be convincing, it has to be convincing.
In her actions, she catches a glimpse of red, hazy with approach; in its vagueness, Karin sees her mother, the alizarin of her hair, the paper moon of her face. Then it sharpens, comes to life, her eyes adjust, and the face is not her mother but a stranger. A stranger who looks, if you squint, kind of like Karin. Like the foggy recollection of an aunt you saw only as a child, details put together by a child’s mind. A dull spark of recognition.
The carriage rolls to a stop. They’re here, the journey is over, their interlude comes to an end, signalling the moment where she becomes something else. She makes a show of getting herself out of the carriage, though her soles are still bruised, hoping that the guise of confidence looks something like trust. A shinobi whispers about good behaviour, another is warmer, clarifying, says that the not-mother woman is the Hokage.
She’d never met a Kage before. Doesn’t fully understand what it means, really, though maybe she did once ( a half-formed memory of the Academy, of village politics, some dry book-heavy class that she, naturally, excelled in, comes to mind; she dismisses it immediately, sensing that the past is a bad thing to linger on ). What did one say to a Kage? Was she meant to say anything? The village heads hadn’t spoken much to her in Kusagakure. But there’s a pregnant pause, a growing balloon of tension, the hush before the play. Someone is expected to talk. Might as well be her.
❝You...❞ the barest flicker of a considering frown, not a shape of distaste but almost of confusion, of muddled recognition, ❝have the same hair as me.❞ An anticlimactic conclusion, but not for her. Karin’s eyes soften, somewhat, from the glassy look of repression. The colour makes her think of home, and though that certainly is a dangerous path to tread, for now it feels good, the tepid safety of a bath. Warm. Cleansing.
