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Asura grows up in the cold yet gentle hands of his older sister and under his father’s kind gaze; his uncle tells him stories as he tucks him in before disappearing from their lives, and no one ever spoke of him again. His ane-ue whispers to him stories about the stars that her grandmother — whom Asura has never seen — used to tell her, and he falls asleep with the sensation of stardust on his fingertips. His chichi-ue teaches him to be strong, teaches him to write and count, but he is gentler with him than with his sister, and Asura doesn’t understand why.
He grows up with this confusion, becoming stronger; his older sister is still the most amazing person he knows, even as Asura grows taller than her; his sister smiles at him, and he leans in so she can ruffle his hair, just like before. The world spins in her red eyes, like stars being born and fading in the night sky; Asura thinks it will always be this way. And then his father names him the heir, instead of his older sister, and the idyll crumbles as if it were worth nothing.
Ane-ue leaves; she doesn’t slam the door, doesn’t hurl curses, doesn’t burn her bridges; one evening she has dinner with him after their father’s news, and at night she vanishes like a ghost, like a vision; no one wipes away his tears, as in childhood, as hundreds of times since he became an adult; true adulthood comes with bitterness and his sister’s empty room, which he forbade the servants to clean.
(His sword pierces her heart; she did not flinch, though she should have; he catches her; his older sister seems small and fragile to him, as she never had before; she smiles, she is not angry with him, she looks at him as she did at the stars many years ago — the light fades from her red eyes, and he screams, screams, screams).
“You look like my mother”, her Chichi-ue says, even though she barely comes up to his hips; her little brother is sleeping in his crib, the night is moonless and quiet, and she doesn’t think it’s a very flattering comparison.
“As beautiful as she was?” Indra asks anyway; ji-san always said that her grandmother was very beautiful.
Her father is silent; the Rinnegan stares at her, the Sharingan looks back at him.
A chill runs down her skin; her father says nothing; Asura sleeps beside her.
It was the first time she had disappointed her father.
(She disappointed him every single time, whether she trained hard or didn’t try at all; whether she behaved with dignity or was extremely rude; whether she was kind or cruel to her allies and enemies — no matter what she did, Chichi-ue looked at her as if her very birth had been a mistake.)
The world tilts as the sister pushes the sword aside and the brother pierces her heart with it; the world spins, spins, and spins, while the full moon watches them in silence; the world holds its breath, and the man who never understood his own daughter — who was too afraid of her — intervenes in their fate.
The man, whose name will remain in legends as that of a god, takes his daughter’s soul with a care and tenderness he never showed her in life, blinded by his own delusions.
Perhaps next time things will turn out better.
(In any of her subsequent lives, his daughter chose to be born a man, and Hagoromo cannot help but think that he is to blame for this.)