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Sometimes, when it’s late at night and your team is asleep, sometimes you feel a strange ache in your chest. Sometimes you feel like your heart isn’t even there. Sometimes you can’t feel yourself breathe, and you think you’re dead for a second and then suddenly you can feel your pulse.
You think it’s weird, strange, insane that you don’t feel this way in the day. Around people. Sometimes you think you’re dreaming, so you bring a kunai to your hand and prick your thumb. You feel it. You bleed. You’re not dreaming.
Sometimes it takes more than that. Sometimes you cut your arm, because that’s the most sensitive part of your body and it’s easy to bandage up—and maybe because sometimes it just feels. Nice. Sometimes it feels nice when you hurt yourself. Your teammates think you train at night, and that’s where the injuries come from. You don’t. It’s not.
You think you should be panicking when you hurt yourself, but you feel nothing bad in those brief moments. You feel calmer than ever.
There’s a solution to the aching, burning pain you feel during the day. The hatred. Anger. Helplessness.
You think, sometimes, that—sometimes you think you shouldn’t feel this way. It’s your fault, after all. You weren’t strong enough. You weren’t fast enough. You weren’t even good enough to die with everyone else.
He took what little confidence you had and turned it to dust with half a dozen words.
—
Sometimes you think you don’t deserve your teammates.
They’re so nice. Maybe not always, and maybe they aren’t perfect, but they’re good. They have kind hearts. They don’t want to kill people. They get nervous killing cute animals—after the first animal Naruto had to kill for food during a training mission, he was vegetarian for a whole month. He went an entire month refusing to eat ramen because what about the poor animals?
Sakura was less stressed, she was upset that she had to kill a rabbit, but she did so easily and without complaint. She was the last to kill an animal during a mission—you think it’s because Kakashi thinks she’s the weakest because she’s a girl. You think she’s probably the strongest, even though she has that weird stalkery crush on you. She works on a farm with her retired parents. She’s gone a whole life having to deal with chickens and pigs and cows and—chickens are vicious. Terrible creatures, to the point you sometimes hope Sakura’s killed many chickens. She has muscles no child should have.
And that is what they are, really. You read somewhere that your brain isn’t fully developed until you’re twenty-five, and doesn’t that mean Iruka-sensei wasn’t even really an adult? He was, what, twenty-two? Kakashi must’ve only recently finished developing his brain, because despite his strange hair color, he’s only in his late twenties.
Sometimes you wonder about that. Adulthood.
Would you even make it to twenty?
—
Sometimes you want to kill yourself. Sometimes you try to, and someone always finds you and saves you.
They’re always assuming it was a bad training accident. That maybe you were testing a new jutsu and it went down badly. They always scold you lightly, always tell you to only train with someone of a higher rank. You don’t care.
You aren’t even strong enough to die by your own hands.
You’re so weak.
If you can’t kill even yourself—what makes you think you can kill him?
You can’t. So what’s the point in trying?
—
Sometimes . . . you thought you’d go to that therapist Kakashi recommended. He noticed all the scars, one day, when there were too many to hide. He glanced at them, just long enough that you’d noticed. He’d looked you right in the eye. He’d told you he used to go to a really good therapist, and he’d handed you a card seemingly out of nowhere. He did that four times that month, then Naruto left and Kakashi left too, and Sakura went to Tsunade-sama and—
One day, you looked at the card, sitting on your dresser next to the picture of your team and the glass was broken, shattered and all over the dresser and—you looked at the card and you thought that, well. Therapy would’ve been a really good idea. A better idea than . . .
You never did go to that therapist, but you probably should have, because—
One time, when it was late at night and your temporary teammates were asleep, you felt a strange ache in your chest. An emptiness. One night, you took a kunai to your arm and—and despite how much it hurt this time, it felt so, so good.
It should’ve been the worst day of your life. But as you close your eyes and breathe out slow, you just feel.
Calm. Happy.
You smile.
That night was the night you finally fell asleep, and you didn’t wake up.