A Hatred That Will Never Bloom Into Friendship

Screams erupt throughout the Leaf village, fires rage over rooftops, and blood spills into the air. A massacre was ensuing; Leaf ninja against one traitor.

“Mama! Mama!” a young boy yells out, caught in the middle of the brawl. The boy cries out in terror as a line of fire races past him to its intended target. He continues screaming when someone grabs a hold of him and picks him up, running away from the battle. Tears stream down the boy’s face as he snuggles closer into his mother’s arms.

They didn’t stop until they were halfway across the village. She collapses down onto the grass, still clutching onto her son.

“Are you okay?” she asks him over and over, checking his clothes and hair. Her own tears fall onto his face as the boy looks up at her with his own big blue teary eyes.

“Why, mama?” He continues staring at her. “Why did dad do that? Why was he killing all those people? He put the house on fire. He’s destroying the village.”

“I don’t know, baby.” She couldn’t bear to say any of this to him. He was too young. He was too young to witness the horrors his father did. They were going to be lucky if they could still stay in the village when this was all over. She clutched harder onto her son; it was going to be so hard for him to grow up with this on his shoulders. It was going to be a hard life for him; the other children will reprimand him for what his father had done. She bit her lip in anger and sadness.

“Are they going to kill him?”

Hana looks back down at her boy, and her heart wrenches in pain. “No, your father is going to leave the village. He doesn’t want to stay here anymore.” Her eyes narrow. “He wanted to leave a mark in our hearts before he left.”

“He’s leaving?” He could feel his mother’s body tense up, and he knew she was mad. “Good.”

“Oh, Rakuyo. I am so sorry about all of this. I’m so sorry you had to got through this,” she says whole-heartedly. “I promise I am going to make this go away. I’m going to take care of us. I’ll make this all better.”

She didn’t keep her promise though. Things didn’t get better, and she didn’t take care of him the way she said she would.

The Hokage was kind enough to give the two of them a house close to the outskirts of the village, even after almost everyone wanted them gone, fearing that if they still were in the city his father would come back with more shinobi and try to kill them all.

His mother went into a state of depression shortly after they had moved in, and she refused to talk to anyone, even to Rakuyo, and shut off inside herself. Over time, Rakuyo became the same way. He isolated himself from society and kept his emotions bottled up. The other children only added to this behavior. The way they shunned him out of everything because of what his father, Botan, had done, had helped quicken his solitude seclusion.

So much suffering, too much suffering for a young boy to bear alone…

~~*~~

No wonder he acts the way he acts; separated and quiet. He went though so much sadness.

“Kimina,” Rakuyo says, shattering me of my thoughts. It took me awhile to realize that I was staring at him, and I hastily look away.

After Rakuyo had told Naria sensei and I his story, I had told Naria sensei about what happened to Lloyd. Now, we were all jumping down the ragged rocks of the cliff dpwn to the river below. I just hoped that we would find Lloyd’s body and maybe I could heal him. But that would have been too good to be true.

We searched and searched for hours but all we could find was his Leaf ninja headband. I fall on my knees in defeat near the water’s edge, holding the headband in my lap, my tears falling on the engraved leaf in the center of it.

“There’s no doubt. His body was swept down the current,” Naria sensei concludes, coming to stand beside me. “You have to understand, you both do, that death is a part of a ninja’s life. It’s a grave reality that we all have to deal with.”

I close my eyes. I wanted so much to just yell at her. I wanted to just take out all this frustration and melancholy on someone, but deep down I knew she was right. I take a deep breath. Lloyd was gone, but we were shinobi and we had to deal with the death of a teammate. It was part of a shinobi’s life.

Naria sensei puts a hand on my shoulder comfortingly. “Come on, let’s get on out of here. We need to go to the Sand village.”

In that small bit of contact, resent coursed through my body at Naria sensei. It was wrong of me, but in a small part of my mind I couldn’t help but think that Naria sensei had caused Lloyd’s death. It seemed pretty silly and maybe Lloyd’s death was really inevitable but Naria sensei had hid the fact that these brothers were following us from the moment we left the Leaf village. It she would’ve told us from the beginning, we could have been more ready and had a strategy set out from the start, just in case something like this occurred. We would’ve been more prepared. Instead she kept it with her, for whatever reason, and Lloyd paid the price for it… he was gone and nothing was going to bring him back.