Bjorn “Ironside" ((sutiliscor))
Vikings Ask | acceptingBjorn “Ironside”: For my muse shaken after their first battle@sutiliscor
His hands still shook, so badly that he could barely hold his chopsticks, and the unpolished wood chattered in the quiet that had fallen over their little shack. The food wasn’t particularly appetizing to him anyway, so he simply stared at it, trembling hand still poised as if to scoop rice from his bowl. The images of the battle played on a loop behind his eyes, like a nightmare he had just woken from but had yet to shake, and the soft clink of wood to ceramic transformed into the distant clash of metal.
War had always been a part of life in the Land of Rain, and Yahiko had learned to navigate battlefields long before he had even learned to read, but being an active participant, staring down a foreign shinobi as a shinobi himself, feeling that desperation, that fear, that uncertainty all at once — that had been new. And that had congealed into a heavy block of lead deep in the pit of his stomach. This was their life now. A fine, cold sweat broke out across his brow, dampened the cloth of his new headband, and made it suddenly uncomfortable and oppressive against his forehead.
He had fought as if against death itself, and twice, he saw the reflection of his own corpse in the blade of a kunai just a hair off its mark. He - they had been lucky. Or rather, fortunate that Kakuzu had been with them.
Yahiko lifted his eyes, first to Konan’s place, then to Nagato’s. Their cushions were empty, their bowls still untouched, and for a split second, panic seized his breath. What if they had—!
They hadn’t. They were still alive. They had all survived that battle.
They had just gone off to deal with the aftermath in their own ways, he told himself.
His eyes shifted naturally to Kakuzu’s place then, as if seeing his teacher for the first time that evening, and he envied his composure.
Sighing, Yahiko tried to set his chopsticks down on their rest block, but his trembling fingers knocked one aside and it rolled on to the table. He let it stay there.
“Sensei…” he began softly, staring distantly at the lines in the wooden tabletop. “Is this how battle will always feel?”
