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The blade edge was somehow still sharp despite it being clear the kunai had not been used since the Yondaime’s death. Genma had been on the man’s guard, Natsume recalled and wondered what dedication—what level of devotion it took for a dead man’s weapon to be so well preserved by his guard. Blade still sharp, polished and gleaming—it felt wrong to not dedicate the same level of care himself. After all, he was trying to crack the seal.
The strokes of the ink were careful, clean. Sometimes, Natsume found himself holding the kunai in his hand and staring at it. There were days where the shorthand felt impossible to decipher, to pull apart. There were times he felt like he was looking at too many strokes and then not enough. What led to what being shortened and what couldn’t be shortened. He found himself wishing he could speak to the man sometimes, if only to ask about what went on in his mind that led to him perfecting the Hiraishin. What did he have that Natsume didn’t? What was he missing?
Was it skill? No, Natsume was good. Like he had told Hyuuga Hiashi years ago, when he started to teach Hinata, he was running circles around the Hyuuga’s best Fuuinjutsu-shi. It wasn’t skill, nor talent that he lacked. Maybe he lacked essence. Maybe he couldn’t crack the seal because he was simply not the man himself and his death had been too sudden for any contingencies. There was nothing substantial about the Yondaime past his status as a war hero and his achievements during the war itself. He had only had the hat for a little over a year so had never done anything that would tell Natsume which direction he intended to take the village in. No one had anything on the man and if they did, they refused to tell Natsume.
Natsume sometimes wondered if he should feel like he had the Yondaime’s blood on his hands, with the Kyuubi inside him. If he should feel like he had the village’s grief on his shoulders, or if he should feel nothing. Most days he just felt rage.
Whenever he attempted to perform a Suiton jutsu, felt the wetness of the chakra and was suddenly back in the river, he found himself thinking of the man whose face watched over his shoulder from the mountain’s face. Late at night, Natsume would sometimes stare at the mountain, laying down the colour from the portrait in the now empty office on the man’s visage for himself. Sometimes, his eyes would trick him, and he would find the curve of his own cheekbone, slightly more defined in the stone. Sometimes, the golden of his hair would be something like Naruto’s. Sometimes, he would look in the mirror in the morning and find the curve of the lips carved into stone on his face. Sometimes, late at night—when the village and the house were asleep and the clan’s name felt more like a shackle than anything—in his own face, Natsume found a father.
He wondered what their parents had looked like, when the exhaustion caught up to him, when he wanted the weight off his shoulders, when he wanted nothing more than to be held and sung to sleep. Would his hands have been tainted this red if they had been alive? Would the burden of the village’s hatred been easier to bear when he didn’t have to carry so much of it alone? Would the slope have been so steep?
Perhaps, he could have been a brother.
Natsume wondered if the man had been afraid, when the Kyuubi had been before him and the world had been ending around him. What had gone through his mind when he looked at a pair of brothers, likely hours old, and chose to entrust them with the village’s fate and its hatred.
He put the kunai down. The headache was setting in again.