Chapter Text
“Nothing
in the world
is usual today.
This is
the first morning.
Come quickly — as soon as
these blossoms open,
they fall.
This world exists
as a sheen of dew on flowers.”
— Shikibu Izumi
Hitomi is a quiet child. While this is a quality that most parents would be overjoyed to find in their children, it has the opposite effect among the Inuzukas. She sticks out like a steaming hot piece of stinky tofu left out to ferment in the summer sun…and she lives with a clan of trackers.
The Inuzuka clan is loud and brash and the pack grows up jumbled together in a mess of playful tussles and flailing limbs. Children are raised by the entire clan and, given that eagle-eyed babysitters are accompanied by the equally watchful gazes of their canine partners, this is even more true. The solution to an Inuzuka child that would rather relax outside under the nice, cool shade of a tree instead of participating in a growing free-for-all?
“Get over here runt!” A hand shoots out and snatches her up by the scruff of her neck.
By this point it has happened so many times that Hitomi has resigned herself to her fate. She gets all but punted into the growling, brawling group of children rolling around in the dirt.
Truly, she loves her clan. She does. She loves their straightforwardness and how they will always bluntly say what’s on their mind. She loves the kennels and puppy piles and okay, yes, on good days, she can admit to herself that she loves the addictive feeling of adrenaline that zips through her blood during a fight. She is Inuzuka after all.
But on the bad days, a small voice in the back of her head tells her that this is wrong, that girls are meant to be docile and submissive, seen and not heard. She exists to serve her family, or in this case, her clan first and, once she is of age, to serve her honorable husband.
(The first time she saw her mother punch her father so hard that he practically flew through their shoji doors, she had almost fainted. He had rolled back up onto his feet, unconcerned about the blood trickling down his face, and bared his teeth in a feral grin before pouncing.)
In her dreams, she remembers flashes from a time where things like running water and paved roads were instead replaced by wells and dirt paths. She remembers children and babies (her own? She tries not to think too much about it), so small and fragile, clamoring for her attention.
Are the dreams memories from a past life? Or is she just slowly going insane, fracturing inside and splitting into different haphazard identities? She’s not sure. Everything is tinted by a feeling of surrealism most days. What she does know is that she is hungry. There is an emptiness that gnaws at her insides. One that has only grown and grown within her for as long as she remembers existing. It is perhaps the one and only thing that she is sure of, that she carries over from Before. It rages within her, so much so that she feels like it has replaced the blood in her veins with living fire.
Above all, Inuzuka Hitomi wishes to be free.