#i just feel like an exceptionally wise 21 year old /j

[hotsugarbyglassanimals]

okay but I genuinely do feel "I'm only 25" deep in my heart. as an excuse

[stormears]

Snippet of a Fic

Super-abridged context: after escaping a disaster, she goes looking for other refugees, and she searches for years. 

Pages 17 - 21 on a 48-page Word doc and the first chapter is MAYBE half done. 

AU, drama, horror, monsters, adventure, fantasy, longass chapters, weird crackship, me learning to write regularly again because doing so makes me feel great. 

-

“Excuse me, ma’am.”

“Huh? What. Oh, you want the ham package? It’s four for the pound.”

“No, ma’am. Just a question. I’m Sakura.”

“Do you even have money? How old are you?”

“I don’t want any of the meat packages. I just want to know about the newspaper you have in this town.”

“Uh, Matima’s newspaper? Then talk to Matima, he does it right out of his house on Gorin Road.”

“I went there, he’s not home right now. I’m just asking around, okay? I’m not trying to solicit you or get my nose in your business. I just need…need answers.”

“O…Okay?”

“So can you tell me about his paper?”

“Uh, it runs ads for the market, mostly. In summer he writes the schedule for the weekend plays, so that’s in there too.”

“Did it have the news about Konoha in it?”

“Konoha?”

“It’s down south from here, the town with the deer farm? Mayor Danzo?”

“Oh, that’s the town that got, got burned up a few weeks back.”

“Yeah. Did Matima write about that in the paper? Or about Iwa, what happened there.”

“Yeah, I mean…some. Some of that stuff’s too awful to write about. All the evil wraiths that came at those people. In daylight. I can’t imagine.”

“And Iwa?”

“Iwa folks just packed up and left, I think. They took their packs and all the lanterns and went north. That was in the last paper.”

“They did? They wanted to?”

“Yeah, they had some big vote and everyone decided living a couple days-a-ways from Konoha wasn’t a good thing.”

“That’s…I’ve never heard of that.”

“I’ve never heard of wraiths in daylight, either, but it just happened. We’re doing the same thing. The day after next, I’m packing up all this and going north with everyone else.”

“So, are lots of towns doing that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know much about any other place but for Iwa and Jytown. Nobody but Matima travels, really.”

“But, uh, Matima definitely wrote about Konoha.”

“Yeah, I just said.”

“So how did he hear about it in the first place?”

“I mean, everyone heard. They had refugees running all over the province.”

“They, they had refugees? Really?”

“Yeah, some of them even tried to go right down the road to Kumo, but I guess they didn’t know the same thing had already happened to Kumo. Like, just an hour before it got to them! Insane. It’s insane. Like hell coming up aboveground. Those things—”

“But they had refugees, people got out?”

“Yeah, some. I don’t know how many outta of the whole town, like percentage-wise. And, you know. Lotta people died. Their militia gave up and left them. That was definitely in the paper. ‘Cause one of ‘em told that to Matima as they came through.”

“Who came through? D-Did you see them?”

“Um, I think one family did? I don’t know exactly who was interviewed.”

“What family? Please! What did they look like?”

“Will you get out of my FACE? Mother of moons, you child. Just don’t tell me you’re from Jytown and you want to steal Matima’s business or something. I’ll report you to the militia. And he’s damn tired of Jytown idiots stealing headlines when he does good, honest reporting for the town.”

“I’m not a reporter. I lived in Konoha.”

“What?”

“I lived there. I got out. I never saw anyone else get out. I’m trying to find somebody else from there. Anybody. I need to know who in my town made it here and if any of my family and friends are okay!”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I am. That’s where I live. I walked for a week to get here. Please, just tell me what that family looked like, or, or where Matima is. I’ll leave you alone.”

“Yes, you fucking will. Take your hand off my table. Off my stand. Get away from me.”

“What?”

“If you’re not lying to me, you will not touch any of my things again. You had better get right out of here. Quick. Now.”

“What? What is wrong with you?”

“If you’re from there, you’ve got their taint on you. Something ungodly. Something awful had to be happening in that town for the wraiths to come down on you like wolves to meat. In the daylight. Six, seven of them! Eating people alive. And if you just brought this evil cloud straight into my butchery stand—”

“That’s not what happened at all! We do everything fine. We light the lanterns, we’re never on the street when a dark time comes. Never! Konoha did everything right.”

“I believe in the tragedy of that village more than I do your word, little girl.”

“Will you—j-just—tell me about that family you saw. I’ll leave. I swear.”

“It was some man with a little black beard and his daughter, I guess. Guy had pointy hair tied up in a tail and a deerskin vest. I’m surprised he wasn’t trying to sell his daughter to a brothel, the way the slut dressed.”

“Whh—? What was she dressed like?”

“She had a little, little skirt on like some of the young girls do these days, like she’s inviting every man around to run up and shove his cock up in her. She came out of that pit-of-sin town so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“Was she blonde?”

“Yeah, she was. Your age as well.”

“Where did they go? What town?”

“Like I know! Guren said they just bought some damn food and left and good riddance! Pestilence!”

“Thank you. Thank you, ma’am.”

“I hope you’re done. Get away from me. Plague.”

“Have a good evening, bitch. Bye.”

-

At the other end of town was Matima, out of his head from drink or drug. He invited Sakura in to sit on his couch, but he didn’t have a couch. But he understood her when she said where she was from, remembered and pronounced her name through his inebriation, and said that he learned of beasts coming from Kumo because a young man named Rock Lee had told him this. And Rock Lee went north. Sakura thanked him and thanked him, unaware that he heard her first exclamation and had fainted by her third.

Sakura walked speedily to Jytown, and asked the same questions to the two men who made the local newspaper. They did not know of any blonde refugee girl and her bearded “father”. But they knew refugees were out there. Konoha ones, and a few Kumo, too. The younger of the two gave her a free lantern, a skin of cold water and yesterday’s bread, and refilled her own bottle besides. They apologized for her treatment in the secluded village of Emmha.

Sakura walked halfway to Moroi, and slept in a maple tree. She hid in a tree once during the day, and a second time when she slept for the night.

(Mom, I’m getting really good at tree climbing, it’s like I’m a little kid again. And the things are so freaking stupid they never even look up. I read that in books a couple times. I’d rather be up in a tree than on the ground with a freaking lantern.)

She entered Jaiho and found a spindly young man vainly hauling a cart of furs. He had no strength and he had a hundred potholes and furrows in the road to tread through. Sakura did it for him. The man thanked her with lunch, and the man’s wife thanked her with a story of a Konoha refugee, named Hotaro, who passed in his sleep from illness five days ago. She didn’t recognize the name. The wife’s friends had talked of seeing Konoha refugees, a blonde girl or young woman, and an older man, perhaps her father. She left their home with her hands and shoulders shaking.

Sakura hitched a ride on the cart the man’s cousin owned, and his bay horses trotted her into Gellen Village, where they were hanging a man today. Sakura stayed to watch and wished she hadn’t. She dreamed of it the next night and the night after that, she dreamed her parents ignored her for days, boys at school threw dirt at her and called her a virgin-slut, Lee hated her, and that she hung them all out of spite. She woke up and pretended to talk to Lee. And Hinata. And then Chouji. Then she pretended that a man from the medicine school asked her to join their ranks and she politely accepted and there were articles about her in the newspaper, because she could perform brain surgeries faster and better than the great Tsunade. She adjusted her voice for each character in the skit. By the time she slept, and then woke, her jaw was sore from all the talking to no one.

The slow and heavy realization came that Ino and Mr. Nara’s trail was not as linear as she’d hoped. They seemed to have showed up in some towns but not others. Not Weissa, but in Moroi, four hours away by a horse’s gallop. And not Gellen, the next-nearest place to jump to, six hours west from that, though a nice mailman said that Lee’s description sounded familiar. Who knows if anyone she knew had ghosted through Iwa like she had. And searching for them was exhausting. Imagining where Ino’s real father was, or Shikaku’s real son, was exhausting.

She didn’t cry as much, but she did curl herself up tightly and hold hersel at night, and talk quietly. Her own hands were warm. When she was feeling nice she pretended she was eight and held Ino’s hand in the classroom and that she would soon go to lunch and then have math time, and then go home to her mother. And sleep in her real bed. Not a haystack or a barn or a gods-damned tree. Today, it was a barn. But the grain sack was hardly a pillow.

In a fit of spite, Sakura asked for work in this new town, Moroi (no sign of any refugees) so she could afford to sleep on a real, soft mattress. The grocer had her carry bags into people’s carts and take heavy loads from one end of the back storehouse to the other. She sweated and she sighed, but later she bathed and she ate and she slept in a barn with a real mattress and pillow. And cows.

She found a book in a trash bin once, about penguins on the southernmost continent, and read it in two nights. And lots of nights after. She hadn’t touched a book in…weeks. And now she was exceptionally knowledgeable about penguins.

Sakura left Moroi. The grocer owner thanked her and she embraced him before leaving. “If you need a job again, you come back here, kid! Bright crossing! Good luck, my girl!”

She paid for a ride to Saffur in a cheap two-horse carriage, yellow and ugly but allegedly designed for passenger transport. She’d never heard of that town before, couldn’t find it on the map she’d purchased.

The carriage driver lied. There was no town called Saffur.

-

(I want my blog to have more writing on it, and at least a LITTLE less “stuff that makes me inspired to write and full of ideas but I so rarely do anything about it.” Time to take more initiative, BITCH)