#sometimes it’s hard to change these weird inherited brain patterns

[umemiyan]

how are we in this society supposed to have health/dental/etc. appointments during the fucking day when so many people work like i’ve just never been able to understand it 😭

[the-coda-project]

The Coda Project | 1.02 - Inherit the Flames

After reuniting Tommy Collins with his family, Dean and Sam stop for the night in a town called Rifle.

They’re about two hours out of Blackwater Ridge, at a dumpy motel on the edge of a town called Rifle, and Dean’s been staring at the tree-print wallpaper for so long that he’s started detecting patterns in the branches.

A cheap plug-in air freshener in the bathroom has the whole place reeking of artificial pine. Between that and the walls, Dean’s starting to feel as though the wilderness they just barely managed to escape from has followed them here. Hell, maybe they didn’t escape. Maybe he’s still strung up in the mine; maybe the wendigo is still tossing him around like a ragdoll, scrambling his brains just enough that he’s dreaming of a motel that doesn’t exist.

Outside, an eighteen-wheeler passes on the I-70, close enough to make the windows rattle. Dean shifts in his bed as if a different position is going to be enough to distract him from how badly his ribs ache. His scratched-up neck feels raw as road rash.

No matter how hard he tries, sleep still feels so far out of the realm of possibility that he starts wondering how long he should lie here before he can cut his losses and call it.

But then Sam pipes up—“Hey, can I ask you something?”—from across the room, not bothering to check first if Dean’s awake, and immediately he wants to just keep feigning sleep until morning. He might have sought out his brother’s company only a couple of weeks ago, but right now, with the memory of Sam’s dismissive attitude toward helping the Collins family fresh in his mind, he doesn’t feel much like talking to him.

“Dean.”

He presses his eyes shut, ignoring the part of himself that’s berating him for being childish. Whether he can get to sleep or not, he’s too goddamn exhausted to talk about anything that isn’t life or death.

If he thought there was even a chance that his brother was angling to talk about Jessica, he’d be sitting up and listening in a heartbeat. But his tone is inquisitive, not hesitant, and Sam’s been so closed-lipped about his grief that Dean only knows how much her death is affecting him because of how loud and frequent his nightmares have been.

“Dean,” Sam says again, slightly louder. “I know you’re awake.”

With a huff, Dean tilts his head to squint at him across the gap between their lumpy mattresses. He grimaces as the motion pulls at the claw marks on his neck. He’ll be lucky if they don’t scar, but maybe it’d be better if they do. Maybe it’d help if he could see something visibly fucked up when he looks in the mirror. Maybe that would make it easier to explain away the revulsion he feels when he meets his own eyes.

“Dude, can it wait until after I get a solid four hours?”

Bullheaded as ever, Sam ignores the question, sitting up and tucking his shaggy hair back behind his ears. He looks twelve years old. Dean figures he always will, in some ways.

“Did something happen with Dad? Before he took off, I mean.”

“Like what?”

He’s not sure why he bothers asking Sam to clarify.

Maybe it’s just to buy himself some time; to give himself a second to come up with some version of the truth that doesn’t amount to Dad’s an overbearing, pigheaded prick, just like you’ve always said, and if I didn’t think he was in trouble right now I’d be glad to be rid of him for at least another month.

Even thinking it makes him guilty. Like he’s a bad son for being so angry with the guy. But he’s gotta believe that his actions are the important part here; proof that no matter how much he hates his dad sometimes, he still loves him enough to want to keep this family as connected as he can.

Still, a part of him is wondering if it’s really worth it anymore to keep up the act. If his clinging to John and clinging to Sam is just making things worse for all of them. Making John think he’ll put up with whatever he throws at him. Making Sam think he doesn’t care enough to take his side against John when he’s being unreasonable.

A part of him wonders—but it’s not a big enough part to win. The thought that something might have happened to him keeps him from letting the bile spill.

Because if they can’t find him—or worse, if they do find him but they’re too late—Dean doesn’t want Sam to have more reasons to be angry with a dead man than he’s already got.

It’s not as though Dean’s not used to keeping this shit locked down, anyway. There’ve been other disagreements, other fights, other circumstances over the years that he knows weren’t even close to being fair on him, but that’s just his life. It sucks, but it’s how it’s always been. No use complaining about it if it’s never gonna change, and after living this way for twenty-two of his twenty-six years, he sees no reason to consider change a possibility.

In the grand scheme of things, this particular incident doesn’t even make the top five list of awful things John’s put him through. The honors there go to that time with the shtriga, abandoning him at Sonny’s and then uprooting him as soon as he let himself get comfortable, the hunt he sent him on as a seventeenth birthday “present”, the night he told Sam not to bother coming back if he left for school, and the simple act of raising his kids into this shit in the first place.

This one might make it into the top ten, though. He hasn’t decided yet.

“Well,” Sam says, pulling him out of his thoughts. “You said you hadn’t heard from him in… what, three weeks before you got that message? Seems weird that it was so long, is all. You were on a hunt, he was on a hunt… it’s just weird that you weren’t checking in more often.”

Dean rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling. There’s a water stain on the popcorn tile overhead that almost looks like a cactus if he looks at it the right way.

Christ, he could use some tequila right now. Maybe he can find them a case further south while they wait for some sign of John to turn up. Someplace warmer than the mountains in Colorado. Someplace where he can roll into town, waste a ghost, and then knock back a few drinks on a motel patio without having to talk to anyone at all.

“I mean, you usually check in more than that, right?” Sam goes on, and Dean sighs. He lifts one hand to rub at his brow.

“Yeah, usually.”

“So… what happened?”

“Nothing you gotta worry about,” he says, and immediately knows it was a mistake. Sam zeroes in on what Dean didn’t say just as intently as anyone else would focus on what he did.

Maybe he should go to law school after all—he’s already got the artful-conversational-trap shit down.

“You had a fight.”

“Sam—”

“No, c’mon Dean. You asked me to help you find him. If you had a fight before he left, that seems like it might be relevant.”

“It’s not.”

“So why won’t you just tell me?”

“It was nothing,” he insists. “Dad isn’t exactly Mr Congeniality, Sam. We fight all the time.”

“No, me and Dad fight all the time. The two of you are usually on the same page.”

Dean suppresses a snort and rolls onto his side, his back to Sam now as he looks at the narrow strip of moonlight edging past the thin motel curtains.

“You know I’ll just ask Dad when we find him if you don’t—“

“Jesus, Sam. It was nothing. Just a stupid disagreement about the hunt we were on. You know how he can get.”

“What was the hunt?”

“A witch in Louisiana. We had different ideas about what was going on, but it’s done, the witch is dead, and it doesn’t matter anymore. Okay?”

“That’s all?”

It’s not all.

Thanks to a botched salt-and-burn in Kentucky the previous month, things had already been tense well before they checked into a motel in Souffran, Louisiana. It only got worse when they ran into a woman Dean knew on their second day in town.

She’d been a civilian, last he’d seen her. Said she was a hunter now.

John had been ready to leave as soon as he found out she was already looking into it, but Dean wasn’t so eager.

It wasn’t that he thought Marisa was helpless—far from it, in fact. She’d been teaching capoeira when Dean met her in Texas a few months back. Had the thing terrorizing her students been corporeal, he has no doubt that she never would have needed any help in kicking its ass. But she was inexperienced as a hunter. Green as they come.

Dean didn’t love the idea of her taking on whatever was killing kids in Souffran alone.

When he told John as much, his dad just gave him a sly look, as if he thought the only reason Dean cared was because he was looking to get into Marisa’s pants. Dean wasn’t, for the record. As he saw it, it was his fault that she’d decided to try hunting on for size in the first place. He figured he owed it to her to back her up while she was still so new.

At first, all they’d had to go on was two kids who’d gone missing and turned up dead a week later without any visible injuries beyond a circular burn in the center of their chests; a girl named Lucy Parker who’d disappeared without a trace from her grandmother’s backyard yesterday but was yet to be found; and half a dozen wildly inconsistent reports of strange lights being seen in the swamp running along the north edge of town.

John had been convinced that they were dealing with a fi follet—a kind of malevolent will-‘o-the-wisp known to enact vengeance and drain the blood of children. When Dean disagreed with him, explaining to Marisa that the whole thing felt witchy to him, and pointing out that neither of the kids who’d died had shown any signs of blood loss, John got pigheaded and petty.

He called Dean arrogant. Accused him of acting like John was an idiot ever since they left Kentucky. Spat, “You spend one day showing a civvie the ropes and now you’re an expert, huh? Well go ahead, kid. Handle it on your own.”

And then he bailed.

Left Dean and Marisa to track down a missing eight year old on their own, and made Dean feel about three inches tall when he did it.

It took them almost a full two days to track the thing responsible. A witch, like Dean had thought, who’d been draining the kids of their life force in a desperate, last-ditch effort to stave off some sickness that was eating away at him. But the spell he’d been using was unstable and ineffective, and he’d been haggard and jittery when they found him in a rusty little shack out in the middle of nowhere.

Lucy Parker was right there with him in the room, suspended in mid-air by some unknown force as pale, flickering light leached from the center of her chest and down into a copper bowl on the floor beneath her. Her eyes were wide and rolled back to the whites. Her mouth was open as if she were screaming.

Marisa shot the witch point blank, right between the eyes, and Dean had darted forward to catch Lucy before she could hit the ground. He’d spent the entire time terrified that they were going to get to her too late; that she’d turn up dead before they could figure out where she’d been taken or how to deal with the thing that had taken her.

When she landed in his arms, he’d almost been sick when he felt how cold she was. How limp.

But after a second, she gasped, and coughed, and then she was clinging to him. Shaking.

He couldn’t put her down. She wouldn’t let Marisa take her.

He’d been forced leave the shack while Marisa dealt with the witch’s body and destroyed all the evidence before some local could stumble upon it, and when she’d emerged gray-faced and bloody half an hour later, with the crackle of fire just audible over the steady croak of frogs in the nearby water, he’d known that Marisa wasn’t going on any more hunts.

Lucy still refused to let go of him once they got back to the car, so he’d let Marisa drive them back to town, sitting in the back seat with the kid clinging to his side and sobbing snot into his jacket. He hadn’t even minded. If he didn’t think it would scare her more, he might have let himself cry out of sheer relief at finding her.

Late that night--once Lucy was back with her grandmother, and Marisa was on her way back to San Antonio, and Souffran was far enough in the rearview that it was safe to stop for the night--Dean had called John. He didn’t pick up.

Just sent Dean’s call straight to voicemail, then texted him coordinates for a poltergeist case near Mobile, Alabama an hour later. A few days after that, more coordinates directed him to the voodoo hunt in New Orleans.

So yeah, a witch in Louisiana is not all. Not by a long shot. He doesn’t tell Sam that, though. What would be the point?

“Yeah, that’s all,” he lies, still staring at the gap in the curtains. Another truck rumbles past, air brakes hissing as it slows to take the town exit. It’s so loud that he’s not sure that he’d manage to sleep here even if he wasn’t a headcase. “C’mon, I gotta crash, man.”

For a minute, it seems like Sam’s gonna keep at it. Like he’ll needle at Dean until he spills everything out onto the pilled carpet between them. How scared he is. How angry. How resentful. All the ugliest feelings that seem to be pressing up his throat and onto the back of his tongue like bile.

But he doesn’t. Just sighs, sounding as tired as Dean feels, and says, “Yeah, okay. Night, Dean.”

Dean grunts in reply, and Sam starts snoring after a half hour. Another half hour after that, his nightmares begin. Low, helpless murmurs of Jessica’s name and high-pitched whines of terror that stick in Dean’s chest like buckshot.

With dry eyes and an ever-present lump in his throat, Dean pushes out of bed and heads for the bathroom, taking the laptop as he goes.

If he’s lucky, he’ll find them a hunt before Sam wakes up. He can get them back on the road as soon as the sun rises. Keep them focused on something that isn’t the complete lack of leads on John.

If he’s not, maybe staying up will wear him out enough to sleep tomorrow. He’ll take what he can get.

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[lazymilkshakecolor]

Inheritance

Chapter 9 : The birth of The Crimson Falcon

Beta-read by @kairi-chan

‘’Hold it together…’’’

Sarada repeated those three words repeatedly in her head, while her fists and jaw clenched. She couldn’t believe what she just read. It’s been a full day since she found out but she couldn’t get it out of her head. The words she read yesterday was still clear in her mind.

Charged with attempted murder of the five Kage at the time of the fourth shinobi world war, and of the death of multiple Kumo samurai. In addition the attempted murder of Konoha-nin Naruto Uzumaki, Kakashi Hatake and Sakura Haruno…

‘’Papa tried to kill Mama…?’’ She thought. Her head racing with excuses to explain this. Maybe she was controlled by somebody. Maybe he was controlled by somebody, maybe they were faking it to pull off some ruse, may-

She was startled from her thoughts when her ANBU falcon mask was torn from her face and pushed a mirror towards it. Sarada gasped as six tomoes swimming in a pool of red met her eyes. What the hell?! She thought, eyes widening.

‘’As I expected, you had no idea.’’ The blonde haired woman with the lion mask said as she handed her her mask.

‘’Keep it together,’’ she ordered, before she walked passed Sarada.

Sarada has never seen the face of her troop captain, not on purpose on either part, but in the month she was in ANBU, they had never gone on overnight missions and lioness was always the first to change and head out of the locker room. The black haired girl nodded in understanding, knowing full well that her captain was right.

Weird...it won’t turn off… Sarada thought after she tried turning off her sharingan. At the time she just shrugged it off, not knowing that that decision will backfire terribly and start a chain of events that will turn the next four years into a living hell.

.

.

.

‘’Alright round them up!’’ The captain shouted at her and her teammates, who were starting to round up the horde of missing-nin they found hidden in one of Kara’s old hideouts.

‘’Well that was easy,’’ Sashio, who was wearing the fox mask, remarked.

‘’Too easy…’’ Lioness said, looking suspiciously around her.

‘’Maybe they want to escape from Kara?’’ Toru suggested.

Weird… Lioness thought. They were sent on this mission to capture at least a dozen of outer Kara members, but instead they captured five hundred members, well not exactly captured, since they practically surrendered themselves.

‘’Well then, we’re close to the center of the village. We should get help from the authorities here,’’ Sashio suggested, waiting for the captain’s approval.

Lioness decided to agree on Sashio’s suggestion before she remembered that the usually outspoken member of the troop was unusually quiet. She looked at her to see that she was rubbing furiously at her eyes, struggling to take a breath and shoulders shaking.

She’s been like that ever since I caught her yesterday near the hokage’s library… but what could be there that could do this? Lioness was afraid that she had to file her behaviour in. Emotional instability is a huge liability for ANBU, but she decided to talk to her first.

‘’Hey, what do you think about this?’’ she asked, walking closer towards Sarada.

‘’I-I think something really bad is going to happen…’’ she answered, albeit tentatively, whilst looking around frantically.

‘’And what led you to that prediction?’’

‘’My eyes…’’ Sarada said, and that was the last thing she said before all hell broke loose in her head.

The man in front took a step forward, looking at them, eyes full of fear. He took another step. Lioness got close to him to get him back in line with the others, but the man opened his mouth wide and shouted. ‘’Kara shall rule over the shinobi world!’’

And then, Sarada, or the Sarada of another time or place,  saw a shift of his chakra and then a loud bang echoed, before a series of explosion sounds and blinding light. Sarada felt like she was opening the door to another universe, where the world blacked out, or where she blacked out, dead.

Suddenly,she was back at the real world. Seeing the man take a few steps forwards again. Her legs acted by themselves, and she suddenly found that her sword was bloody as her sword cut the man’s throat.

As she heard her teammates shout her name, she saw another future. Where the woman at the far left corner exploded. She ran as fast as she could towards her, managing to throw a kunai precisely on her throat.

She saw it again and again and again, as she saw multiple versions of her and her of her teammates dying, as she saw all the things she could have done to stop this, but none of them worked except this, except by taking their lives.

Her ANBU troop was trying to stop her, but they couldn’t even follow her, as she moved in an illogical pattern. Killing someone on the far left, and then suddenly appearing in front of  someone on the far right. She was completely unpredictable to them, and far too fast to catch.

Sarada has lost count of how many people’s blood was on her swords. She stopped counting at one hundred, finding that that will only weaken her resolve, and as her eyes proved, that will have dire consequences. She discovered that what these people were trying to do was not to kill them, but to make the explosions reach the village, where there are explosive hidden underground.

‘’Fucking stop her!’’ her captain screamed as she ran after her.

The explosions she saw in her mind got smaller, which means that the amount of human sacrifices was considerably lessening. Sarada didn’t know wether that was good or bad, she just kept going, killing them one by one, sometimes two, three, four, ten at a time if she saw who will follow who immediately.

Other than the alternative futures she was seeing in her mind, the fear in her victims eyes was stuck in her head, already shaking at her insanity, making her hands tremble and shake. But that isn’t the reason she stopped at the last one. It wasn’t because of what her eyes showed her either. It was because she could have sworn that the kid holding a trigger in front of her, cause of course he doesn’t know how to control his chakra to make it trigger an explosive, had pink hair and deep green eyes.

‘’Please drop it…’’ She didn’t recognize her own voice as she pleaded the little kid to drop the trigger. But he didn’t, he only held on to it tighter with trembling hands, as he stepped away from her, the whimpers of fear escaping his throat making her lose her resolve. But he, like the ones before him, had only two fates, it might have been three if he wasn’t standing over a mine of explosives hidden beneath them.

Sarada raised her sword in the air, trying to ignore the familiar sound of somebody calling her nee-chan, echoing repeatedly in her ears. But just as her sword was going to meet the kid’s throat, she was tackled to the ground roughly. She looked up to see a lion mask.

‘’What the fuck did you just do!?’’ Her anbu captain growled angrily.

Sarada didn’t pay attention to person straddling her, keeping her down as her sight was still on the kid, who was going to press the button in six seconds. So she did the only thing she could do from a distance, the one thing she hated more than killing.

Tsukuyomi!

The kid suddenly screamed before he fell unconscious on the ground, dropping the trigger from his hand.

Genjutsu… the captain thought as she punched Sarada hard on the face, trying to get some sense back into her and forcing her head to the side, so she couldn’t look at anybody.

‘’Captain, this is an explosion trigger,’’ Sashio, who was the most knowledgeable in technology in the team said, while holding the contraption the kid dropped in front of the captain.

‘’Inspect some of the bodies, see if there’s any trace of those things on them.’’ she said before noticing that the girl under her was convulsing violently.

It’s over, it’s over, it’s over… Sarada repeated in her head as her mind went haywire. Flashes of what happened and what could have happened flashed in her brain. And it only got worse when she raised her hands to her face, only to notice that they were red.

Red like blood. Like the color her swords were right now. Like the color of her eyes. Like the color of the streets of Amegakure if she let even one of those missing nin live. Even the kid? A voice inside her head asked, the kid…. The kid that looked like Saboro… And then the image of her little brother came into her mind, pleading her not to hurt him as his shoulders shook by the force of his whimpers. Sarada suspected that that image wasn’t because of her eyes but of her current loss of sanity.

‘’I inspected four, they all had some trace of explosive chakra triggers, not a physical trigger like the one with the kid.’’ Sashio said, looking at the captain as she rose up, which allowed Sarada to change positions so she was on all fours. And it wasn’t until she was puking that she realised that rain was pouring down hard. But the sound of the rain didn’t drown out the screams of the people she killed, the whimpers of the kid, or the whimpers of her own brother looking pleadingly up at her.

‘’Please nee-chan I don’t want to die…’’

And it was then that she heard a blood curdling scream. She wondered who’s it was before feeling something hard hit her neck, knocking her unconscious.

.

.

.

Sarada woke up to the smell of blood and vomit. She looked around, she was in a closed room, lying on wooden floor, where she could feel scratch marks were her hands are. She tried to get up, pushing on her hands to pull her up, but it didn’t work. She tried pushing some chakra into her hands. And it was then that she noticed that she didn’t feel a trace of her chakra in her body.

Just as her mind was rushing with reasons for that, she felt someone grab her by the collar of her shirt and raise her up roughly to stand on her feet.

‘’You able to stand?’’ she heard a familiar voice utter before she looked up at the owner of the voice. It was a woman with blonde hair and hazel eyes, she didn’t look that much older than Sarada, but she was taller, about as tall as the team captain.

‘’Lioness?’’ Sarada didn’t recognize her own voice, it sounded too raspy.

‘’No mask, Takira.’’ she uttered, letting go of the girl, but still eyeing her to see if she was going to fall down. Sarada wobbled a bit before taking a hold of herself, she felt a weight on her hand, she looked at it to see a chakra suppressor. She immediately tried clawing at it, but Takira grabbed her hand.

‘’I wouldn’t advise you to do that.’’

Sarada was confused, she looked around her, but she didn’t recognize the place. She couldn’t even see properly without her glasses, and not a single noise was heard. The raven haired girl was about to open her mouth when Takira beat her to it.

‘’There’s a bathroom over there, ‘’the blonde haired women said, gesturing behind Sarada, ‘’go take a shower.’’

Sarada didn’t answer, she just held her hand up, gesturing with her eyes towards the suppressor.

‘’When you talk, I’ll remove it. But first, you reek.’’

Sarada wanted to object, but the woman had a point. She did reek, so she walked towards her backpack and reached down to grab something to wear. She could feel Takira’s eyes on her, watching her every move, wariness apparent in her demeanor.

I can’t blame her… Sarada thought.

When she got in the bathroom, she moved to close the door, but Takira gave her a look. Sarada closed it anyway, not in the mood for arguing about a closed door. She found herself thanking whatever gods were out there when her eyes didn’t meet a mirror in the bathroom, not wanting to see her face. Which, judging from the sticky feeling, was still bloody. She felt numb as she got into the shower. She didn’t even flinch as the cold water hit her skin, washing away the blood of her victims.

She felt nothing. Not sadness, not fear, not madness or anger. She didn’t feel anything. At this point she thought of one thing, a very childish thing, a but a thought that brought relief to her mind. Home...mama and papa…

They were right. She was too young for ANBU, too pure. Before she joined ANBU, she had killed twenty people. All were killed because she had no other choice. A month after she joining, she had killed more than five hundred people.

She winced as she felt a dull pain from her nose, she reached and touched it, to realize it was broken. She didn’t even know how and who broke it.

Ten minutes after she entered she got out of the shower, only to be met with the stare of her team captain, sitting on the other side of the room they were in. Sarada grabbed her glasses, putting them on before looking either way of the room. It seemed endless, as darkness invelopped the path.

‘’It’s an underground hideout. It directly leads to where we were before you went lost consciousness. We hid here so I can know what happened peacefully, without the nagging of Ame officers.’’ The blond haired woman said.

Sarada gulped. She didn’t want to tell her about her sharingan, or to tell anybody about it. Because if it reaches the Seventh, then it will reach her parents. Which she didn’t want to tell about this whole situation at all before she made sure of some things.

There’s no way papa would commit those...those atrocities, right…?

‘’Now,’’ the older woman said, getting up and walking closer to Sarada. ‘’What happened?’’

‘’You already know what happened. The chakra triggered explosives would be clear upon closer inspection of the dead bodies, and Sarada found it hard to believe that Sashio wouldn’t inspect them.”

‘’I know what happened. What I want to know is how it happened.’’ The ANBU captain was close to Sarada now, cornering her against the wall, eyes directly on Sarada’s. ‘’Listen, you either tell me and I can clear this up here with the Ame authorities as ANBU captain, or you can explain this to the seventh when he’s sent on a diplomatic trip here to fix whatever you did.’’

Sarada thought about it, her number one priority was to keep this away from the seventh and her parents. ‘’If I tell you, who are you going to tell?’’ Sarada asked, still unsure about what to do.

‘’Nobody, if not, then a little details to the one responsible for this village, you’re lucky the missing-nin you killed were mostly unregistered, their origines unknown.’’

Sarada just gave her a hard stare, thinking about how she could get out of this situation.

‘’Choose, I either report this to the hokage, or you tell me.’’

Sarada made the decision that will give her less trouble later. ‘’I don’t exactly know what happened. But I could see possibilities of what could have been, and what will happen after that and…’’ Sarada trailed off. There was more, but how could she explain it? How could she explain what felt like looking into another dimension?

The ANBU captain, noticing the younger anbu’s confusion, and having what she thinks is enough to explain to the chief police here, decided that this was enough. Besides, she wasn’t really going to tell the chief that. Revealing special kekkei genkai of members could only be done by their permission or on Hokage’s order. She just needed to know her underclassmen’s abilities for future reference.

‘’That’s enough. Go pack. We’re heading out in about fifteen minutes. Sashio and Toru are waiting for us.’’ The blonde haired women said, moving away from Sarada.

‘’Takira?’’ Sarada questioned, unsure of the name she only heard Sashio mutter once by mistake.

‘’Yes?’’ She answered, looking back at the girl who was still leaning on the wall.

‘’You’re not going to tell about my eyes right?’’ Sarada asked, aware of the shinobi laws that restricted the reveal of such information.

Takira grinned before speaking, ‘’don’t worry about it, you’re secret’s safe with me.’’ She then moved towards her pack, to pack up the weapons she was cleaning while Sarada looked at her back.

That’s when she noticed that their was the extinct Kasai clan symbol on her back.

Her mother has told her once, while she was telling her about the importance of the clinic she founded, that she had many clan heirs that have lost their families during and before the last great war. She does recall her mother mentioning the Kasai clan. A clan that was the only rival of the Uchiha in their prowess in controlling the fire element.  

So she was one of the orphans mama took in in her foundation… Sarada thought.

‘’It’s weird to stare Sar.’’ Takira said nonchalantly, which shook Sarada out of her thoughts.

Sarada moved from her place and started packing her stuff, deciding to ask her mother about this later. While she was packing, she noticed the bloody twin swords in the corner.

How would mama feel knowing her daughter was the reason for a whole massacre?

An array of images of dead bodies flooded her mind, which made her recall the smell of blood and hear the sounds kunai hitting the ground and the terrified screams of her victims. Sarada took a deep breath. She already broke down once, she can’t afford to break again during the mission. She needed to stay in ANBU, because it was her only chance--her only chance of knowing the things her parents and the Seventh have been adamant on keeping from her.

Sarada recalled the things she read about her father’s past, the things she would have never believed happened if it wasn’t written in a Hokage’s report.

Papa...are you even the same person I read about?

[thegarden]

sometimes i think maybe i just have too little self esteem to ever experience mania? idk maybe i’m wildly confused about what a manic episode looks like but all those tests and shit say that like grandiose behavior is a criteria and like....idk friends i just have all this energy and know i should sleep but still don’t and can’t handle social media or netflix anymore but still keep using them and wanna buy shit but don’t have money and can’t stop moving and have a headache but won’t eat despite having a grand total of chocolate chips, ice water, and cheese to eat today and i keep impulsively texting ppl even tho they are all asleep and won’t answer and then tomorrow i’ll hate myself for being the person who texts at 3am like “are you awake” and idk what else what else oh yeah i know i should take my meds bc i forgot them yesterday (or was it the day before? who knows bc i’m in a “forgets time is passing” sorta feel) and remember when you were in the shower two days ago and you realized this isn’t the person you want to be?? and you thought about how you could actually just say fuck it and become the kind of person who you could actually like being and the kind of girl who deserves all these stupid people you keep falling in love with and the kind of human who has their shit together and doesn’t just let people down over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and i’ve typed this twenty fucking times and still cant get into a pattern of muscle memory where i don’t forget the space between “and” and “over” also i just remembered i had a dream last night and i was swimming and happy and idk i was talking to this guy who was doing a weird “bachelor” type dating game to like figure out which ordinary human girl wasn’t a fake bitch trying to date him only bc he was famous but idk he was nice and i wish the dream hadn’t ended honestly i wish i could live in my dreams even my nightmares where my mom is awful again and doesn’t love me as much as she says she does and i know she actually does care because how else would i have inherited a fucking genetic code for this much goddamn emotion like i feel everything and i hate it i hate it i hate  it i hate  it i hate it i hate it i hate it i hate it i hate it hate it hate it hate it hate it hate it hate it hate it i hate it why why am i this way why do i feel so goddamn much and why do i have to be this way when nobody wants someone who is this fucked up because they can’t stop feeling nobody wants me nobody really wants me and if someone does then i haven’t met them because everything just always hurts me in the end and i always end up sweating and covered in tears and alone and wondering why i’m not good enough for the people i care about why is it whenever i get to experience enjoyable things it’s always just a lie it’s a fucking lie it’s a one night thing i’m someone else’s fucking experiment and i can’t even be mad bc i let people treat me like this i can’t fucking stand up for myself and have some goddamn boundaries bc maybe if i let them hurt me maybe if i let people do whatever maybe if i let them kiss me and get me drunk and fuck me over i can pretend that it’s their fault for how i feel when it’s really just me it’s me i’m broken why am i so broken i finally set up an appointment with a therapist after failing to call for months and it’s a fucking re-intake so it won’t help and it’s not until next tuesday so i probably will be back to deluding myself that i’m fine by then but i’m not i’m not fine i don’t know if i’ll ever be fine and i don’t know how to be a normal human and i miss my friends even tho i have already texted one of them all goddamn day and seen one last weekend and one the other night (even tho it sucked i hated yesterday night bc i’m a shitty human and a shitty roommate and it would have been better for everyone if i just wasn’t there bc apparently i even suck at basic cohabitation) fuck i’m hyperventilating which makes it hard to type but honestly why can’t i have a fucking panic attack or something or a fucking heart attack why can’t i fucking die my lips are tingling and i don’t know why what is this feeling it feels like silent screams i don’t even know it feels like i just want someone to hug me and let me fall asleep in their arms so i don’t wake up feeling numb and alone like i always do i wake up from dreams and wish i could feel the type of happiness that only seems to be momentary in those few seconds where i convince myself i haven’t completely irredeemably fucked up our friendship bc i feel like i have i feel like i fuck everything up i should just drop out of school or fucking i don’t know walk into a street or just see how long i can lay in bed and do nothing bc if i tried hard enough i don’t think it would matter who tried to intervene if i could just admit that i don’t deserve anything and i don’t deserve anyone or happiness or kisses or wondering or all the what ifs i make up in my mind i don’t deserve to ask you why if it was just trying to get a reaction out of people did you kiss me in a fucking elevator and if you were worried about me why do you think showing up at 9pm and waking me up with fingers through my hair and making me drink with you because let’s be fucking real i don’t know if i’m capable of saying no to you bc i have no self preservation and i’m just so greedy i want whatever i can get even though i know it doesn’t mean anything and i don’t know if those are tears or sweat dripping off my cheeks right now because whatever i’m feeling right now is like a nightmare that wakes you up in a hot sweat it is violent it’s more violent than any blade i ever put against my own skin and i don’t know if i’m just blaming you because it’s convenient bc this is not your fault at all i can’t blame someone for not having as many fucked up fucking emotions about people as i do and i can’t blame you for being gay except when you’re not except when you’re making out with me or with one of my only friends here who isn’t complicated why did you have to pick maddy to be the one you joke about dating why do you have to pick the one person who is mine she’s my person to call she’s the person who said i could call her after i sat on that fucking bench two years ago wishing i had someone to call because i felt awful and i was 2451 fucking miles from home and everything familiar and my world felt like it was crumbling and we had made lunch plans and she told me to talk to dean L bc dean L is like everyone’s yale mom without being too involved why do you kiss her drunkenly and why do i have this ugly feeling of jealousy inside me even though i know she isn’t interested in you even though you act like you’re actually fucking in love with her and whenever i see you guys together i have to hate you so i don’t let all my own ugly feelings explode on her when she didn’t do anything other than be there for me she’s always fucking there when i need someone and she sends people to let me in fucking redlit doors when i’ve cut my own wrists open in the middle of a courtyard because i let my roommate take out their own issues on me and i laid down like a fucking doormat while they did it and you know what 

you’re totally right. i know you say it jokingly but i am so fucking weak. i’m so weak. you say that like it’s not true or like you’re just talking about an immune system or idk maybe you are talking completely seriously because sometimes i think my best friend is actually right and that i shouldn’t forgive you for turning my own fucking brain and its inability to be rational and produce serotonin like a normal 3 pound meat slab piloting an even bigger meat slab should because i know i’ve definitely felt less than that moment but wow it’s definitely top three when the gay guy you’re in love with because maybe that was just another violence i could inflict on myself maybe falling in love is just another way i self harm and honestly the most effective way because you’re not the only person i’ve ever felt too much for and it’s left me damaged every time of course that’s assuming i was ever not damaged in the first place lmao what a thought i’m pretty sure i was born broken but back to the point i hate when i realize that he’s right and i can’t even disagree like what kind of friend thinks that threatening to get me expelled or forced into a leave of absence bc of my mental illness is okay what human person with an actual fucking soul looks at someone who can barely keep their guts inside their body who fucking spews emotions at strangers in the street because they hurt so much inside and when they don’t hurt it’s because they’re numb and not in a painless way but in that “not wanting to exist doesn’t sound that horrible like ‘at least your not suicidal’ you think to yourself while knowing deep down it’s actually a horrible awful violent life altering way to feel” something you never really recover from type of numbness and i don’t know how i don’t even have the capacity to hate you for taking the one thing i hate most about myself the one thing i can’t change about myself even though i’m going to spend the rest of my goddamn life trying (and even if i fail it’ll still be the rest of my life lmao) how did you ever think it was okay to say that to me how how how how on earth i know you had good intentions but dammit do you ever actually think before you say shit like that do you think about what it feels like to be going crazy inside your own head while completely aware and unable to stop yourself like you don’t you don’t fucking know what it feels like to be sinking into a pit of self hatred and knowing that you could just take a goddamn pill every day like you’re supposed to and keep a routine and socialize and do meaningful work and it would mostly be okay but for some reason you get halfway there halfway to okay and things fucking explode all over again and it’s square one and it’s not that easy it’s simple but it’s not that easy it’s not easy to have to depend on a pill to keep you from replaying the first time you looked at your mom’s kitchen knives and thinking that you should really be in a different room than them because you’re wondering what it would be like to feel them split the skin on your wrists and your arms and your throat but not your thighs because they hurt just thinking about knives and what is point if no one can see what is the point if nobody fucking notices that you’re in pain i just want someone to acknowledge that i’m hurting this hurts i can’t live my life without it constantly hurting it hurts and it hurts and it hurts and it hurts and it hurts and it hurts and it hurts and it hurts and it hurts and i just wish someone would realize that i wish you would realize and hold me like it’s not an obligation of friendship and kiss me not on the lips and not while we are both drunk but kiss my forehead and stroke my hair and remind me that it’s gonna be okay tomorrow because sometimes that’s too much to imagine and i think the only time i’ve ever felt safe from myself was when you are next to me on a couch and not being weird about me being within 3 inches of you because I can’t read you on a lot of things but I can always tell when someone doesn’t want to touch me or be near or see me or be in a room with me trust me as someone who’s been fat as fuck their entire life I know what that repulsion of I Don’t Want to Touch This Girl Her Existing This Close to Me Makes Me Uncomfortable feels like I can smell it on people I can read it in the way you never reciprocate when you’re sober the way you treat hurting me in small ways like a game and I get it I really do because I spent so much of my life reveling in the little ways I could make someone flinch just by pushing the right button or phrasing something in the right way or pretending to know more about that thing that makes them obviously uncomfortable the things people hate about themselves and I reveled in it I used to be so goddamn expert at manipulation and you think I didn’t realize that you were manipulating me? I always knew and I let you do it even though I kept getting hurt and wasting time wondering about shit wondering if today was the day you would actually take this world and education and the only place I’ve ever been allowed to be myself completely away just because you didn’t know what to do when a girl comes to you with cuts on her wrists bitch you just gotta fucking care just fucking wrap me in a hug and tell me not to do it again and tell me that it’s not stupid when I thought about texting you before instead of cutting or walking into a street without looking or running full speed into a cement wall at midnight because maybe that would help you’re supposed to say that “even if i don’t respond right away you can still text me and say you’re having a shit night and then cry yourself to sleep waiting for a reply that won’t come instead of hurting yourself” you don’t even have to say that though you literally could have just actually touched me i just want someone to touch me i just want to feel like i’m not as disgusting as everything i’ve ever done wrong not as disgusting as i’m supposed to feel in a body this big not as disgusting as every horrible thing i’ve ever said to make someone else hurt 

i just want to know...was it to fuck with me? was it to see how i’d react? do you even remember doing it? what do you actually fucking want from me?? because I accepted that you’re gay and not interested and I tried....I tried so hard to just leave it at that but...i can handle you still holding my hand and shit bc that’s your sense of humor. i can handle that you’re gay except when you’re drunk. i can handle that i don’t have a dick so it’s a no go and that i’m not even attractive if you did like girls and i can handle you saying no and letting time pass and letting the part of me that cares too much about you shrink until we can be friends again. that was all fine. what i can’t do is the inconsistency. i can’t do the gaslighting not even with words but with behavior. because one day you’re gay and not interested and the next you’re making out with me bc whatever and apparently you’re bi and not interested in me but interested in what fucking a girl would be like but then the next day you’re telling ppl you’re actually straight and there isn’t much to contradict the point bc first you kissed maddy and then you kissed natalie bc apparently if i even marginally enjoy hanging out with someone who is female it puts a target on them or maybe it’s just anyone i have any single feeling for no matter in what capacity bc i thought arty was cute for like 2 days once and then the next week i find out yall fucked and idk if i’m more annoyed by your shitty taste in bed partners (seriously you’re gonna go from mr. control freak to arty???) or the fact that it wasn’t even enjoyable but anyway i digress back to your supposed straightness bc i guess what i’m trying to say is i’m just sick of guessing here. i’m sick of guessing whether you’re gonna kiss me again or whether you’re actually bi or whether you’re just repressing yourself bc being gay and religious sucks or if this is all just a fucking game to you. i like to think there is always a bit of honesty in what people do while drunk off their asses but sometimes i wonder if that applies to you because it’s honestly hard to tell what is honest about you when you aren’t drunk so fuck that 

idk i probably just need to take my meds and i’ll probably regret saying any of this in the morning if i can even bring myself to hit the post button because i think i blame you too much when i’m trying to work out my own problems and honestly you’re not a bad person you’re just you and tbh you’re my friend no matter what because i may be a basket case but i’m loyal if nothing else like you could literally shoot me in the fucking stomach and i’d still be like “yeah we’re friends you need anything bro” but like idk i keep thinking and trying to work my shit out and i know there is a lot of work i need to do on myself but i just keep coming around to one thing after i get through all the stuff that’s completely on me i finally get around to the stuff i can’t answer on my own or blame myself completely for and there is always this one nagging thing left ever since two weeks ago

why did you kiss me in the elevator? 

okay maybe two things...because there is the whole why kiss me in an elevator when no one is there to react and we are dangerously close to your room and it’s already been like an hour since either of us drank anything but there is also the question of why did i like it so much