#its like back when i was !!! about haru's development from someone who just drifts through life to someone who's found things | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sazzafraz · 3 years

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dropped a cup of coffee on myself at breakfast lets gooo

nodus tollens is my favourite chapter its not even close

like i actually LIKED writing it. i like writing in general but its about being someone represented with all the scary sword cards in tarot readings not actual fun. still annoyed i didn’t think of anything better than fucking HEMMINGWAY

A year and a half into working for Giri and Sasuke is sitting cross legged on top of a boulder looking out at a clear blue sky. They’re sitting by the edge of a huge cliff in Fire Country resting between assassinating some small time village leader and their next mission which promises to be heavy on full contact fighting. The sun is dipping towards the horizon, warm air ruffling their hair. Yumi is trying to throw Hiki off the cliff into the lake below, Haru is defleaing his dog and Sasuke is debating his next move in the long distance tactical game he’s playing with Juugo and Karin. It’s an Uzushio classic, like shogi but the board is made of three interlocked spirals and the movements of the pieces are based on the tides. Karin is slaughtering him.

fun fact: literally started designing that uzushio game because i’m a psychopath. it’s also the first of three references, two in the same chapter, of sasuke and his teams, and then one at the end where everyone gets together. to make fun of sasuke. as they should.

There are seven graves by the edge of the sea with a bright blooming flowers planted in the centre spilling over the cliff. Tall markers stand as high as three metres in the air wreathed with ribbons in the colours of dawn and day... Sasuke spares a look back as he enters and sees those graves and flowers. The flowers have colonised the side of the cliff, growing strong and sure halfway down the rocks, slipping into crevices and tangling around each other as they race towards the ocean. Huge blooms of colour, bright reds, light pinks and creamy yellows are knocked about by the waves crashing against the cliff.

if fuyuki even knew how much this colours sasukes opinion of her she’d beat the shit out of him. i think this was the second bit i wrote for her, after a few pieces of her and itachi. actually if she knew how much both of them are coloured by knowing her past she’d commit a crime. its pretty apparent to sasuke that these are memorials to children/those that died young and unfair. how would he know haha. i always intended the hashira and the uchiha as parallels. i think the lack of depth given to other clans sucks, especially when they have literally a thousand years of interaction. the only other one we have are the hyuuga which might have been an intended one but like. i’ve never bought it.

anyway, back to sasuke. dude loves kids. he doesn’t figure it out until he has nine of ‘em, but he has a view of children that’s incredibly sincere. i pretty much decided that on my own cause: a) its funny, b) he was fucking SWEET as a kid and i’ll kill you before i let you tell me that kid went away, c) he’s from a huge close knit family/community and liking kids is the only way to get through that,

oh. also fuyuki does cotton on to his emotional compromise and IMMEDIATELY lies so he likes her more. morals who?

“It seems,” Fuyuki says into the silence, “that Sunagakure has decided we have a problem. I sent Mamoru as a goodwill ambassador to Wind a few months ago. It went well, and as Suna is a largely neutral player in most conflicts I did not see the problem in allowing a small ambassadorial group into Oto to further the relationship. At the fourth meeting one of the Suna delegation proved themselves to be a puppet and assassinated Mamoru. They were in the process of trying to loot us when they were killed.”

haha oh my god gaara fucks himself so hard here. we’re gonna talk about it.

Now it’s leaving time and Sasuke is walking fast downtown, faces passing him as he’s bound for home base.

only two people ever commented on this. vip behaviour.

Shikamaru raises a hand and waves.

Sasuke waves back.

Shikamaru looks at him expectantly across the crowd. Distantly Sasuke notes that he’s the taller of the two. Head’s bob and weave around the marketplace, someone drops an avocado which is swept up a child and her friends, the scent of cooking spices drift down from the top of one of the buildings. Sasuke and Shikamaru stare at eachother.

i never wrote the short for this but this is shikamaru’s nightmare scenario. finding sasuke when naruto is not with you is the k12′s personal hell. because konoha and giri are tentative allies it would be poaching to bring him back and thats something people still take seriously. shikamaru goes and gets FUCKED UP so no one trusts his report and he can claim that it was ONLY MAYBE THE PRETTIEST MAN IN THE FLEA MARKET. naruto finds out like a decade later and is extremely pissed even if he gets it.

It’s a tale as old as the dust of the desert or the mountains that divide the nations. There is a boy who loses something. His honour, a cow, a sword. He has to leave his home to find it. He has to grow strong enough to do what has to be done. In the Son of Nobody the titular Son has to journey to the city to meet the princess and while he is away his family is murdered by a group of wandering bandits. Along the way he meets a beggar girl, the princess in disguise, and he allows her to tag along. There are many twists and turns, the Son becomes a noble shinobi protecting the princess and falls in love with the beggar. He finds the bandits that destroyed his home and avenges his family. But! Disaster strikes! The samurai have been told a lie about the princess and feel that their honour must be avenged. A group sneak into the princess’ room one night and defile her. One of the samurai is late to the scene and feeling so sick and ashamed of their actions kills them and ignites a real war between samurai and ninja. The disgraced samurai takes his own life in front of the princess as appeasement. When this doesn’t work the Son goes on to win the war and marry the girl.

this is just hatake sakumo. some creative liberty but its just the story of how he died embellished. i think some shinobi stories filter out and become like folk tales? like we’re gonna get to it. but there's no way they can have that kind of presence and no cultural impact.

‘Heart, liver, eyes ’ Kabuto says when he’s done, ‘and put the rest in the garbage.’

for sensible reasons kabuto is the scary one.

. Illuminated in the light of the lone flickering candle, bundled in odd cloth and grime, Kabuto looks faceless and formless. His skin has no color, his hair is limp, his eyes are turned completely inward searching himself for an some answer, some lodestone for the next leg of his journey. He looks like an orphaned version of himself. Sasuke has a brief moment of complete self-awareness. He stands above himself and looks down at the length of his hair, the uneven tan on his hands. His own eyes look at his boots, his non-descript travelling coat, the way he is never carrying more than enough money to carry him to the next town. He recognises nothing original, nothing remarkable. He’s as interchangeable as any soldier capable of swapping hands at a moment's notice. Many tools, many masks, many uses. He realises that that shifting formlessness is as much a part of him as his burning rage. It forms him just as fully.

i remember having a moment like this and it was so shocking it took me years to write about it. this nearly got cut, even though i now think its important. becoming ‘just a knife’ is important to sasuke’s development towards being just a guy. relating to kabuto is so personally disturbing that its sort of his turn towards leaving giri. kabuto actually disgusts him. unlike orochimaru.

“We called her the Fruit Eater after the foul seeds she planted in others which grew into giant poisonous fruit trees. When they’d plundered and destroyed the world enough for her foul tastes she’d eat the fruit from the trees and crush them to bone and blood under her feet. Her own children plucked out her organs one by one and cut them up into pieces. What they couldn’t eat they threw to the animals who turned into nine ravenous demons. They brought the demons together and sealed them into the form of a beautiful princess who was coveted by all.”

goddamn space aliens. i hate it less than most. i think i was still deciding if they’d show up at the end. either way i thought i’d just put them in in case i did. again, there SHOULD be a cultural footprint.

The problem is that the Uchiha are predisposed to have thick hair and the main branch, the one that descends directly from Madara’s betrayed brother Izuna, comes with a tendency for...unruliness that Sasuke has gotten threefold. At this length it seems to be largely growing up and out, gravity be damned.

aww my loving rendition of his stupid duck butt. i have unruly hair so his maintenance is essentially mine. its such a distinctive thing i think people should take more advantage of. i wrote in crashing tides that he’s just an awful fashionista and i think that holds true. he tries new hair oils ALL THE TIME.

#the author is present #part one part one

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youngster-monster · 4 years

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New eyes and extra colors

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”

― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

Haru has changed. Not that much, considering. She just seems… calmer. More sure of herself. More mature. More punctual. But she’s gotten weirder, too, in a way that would be unnoticeable to anyone but Hiromi, her very best friend in the whole world.

It wouldn’t be so jarring if the change hadn’t occurred basically overnight. As it is, Hiromi finds it so odd, she starts keeping a list of all the weird little things Haru does, starting with not caring that her long time crush has broken up with his girlfriend.

Machida isn’t an isolated event. Haru just doesn’t seem to care about boys anymore.

“I don’t know, I guess they don’t seem that interesting anymore, compared to...” She drifts off. “Anyway, I think I’m a little young to be in a relationship.”

“It’s not like you’re going to marry any of them- wait, compared to who?” Haru doesn’t reply, but her blush gives her away. Did you get into romance novels?”

She giggles. “Something like that, I guess.”

Well, if her new romantic ideal is a prince or a gentleman saving her from danger, it’s true that she doesn’t have much to hope for in teenage boys.

She stops when she meets a cat. She’s always found them cute, and of course she did throw herself into traffic to save a cat last week. Even Hiromi stops to pet friendly cats sometimes. But Haru does it constantly, even when they’re late, greeting them politely as if they’re acquaintances or neighbors. She bows to the few cats who won’t let her approach. She asks the strays if they need anything.

They don’t tell each other everything, but surely she’d have noticed if Haru had been that much of a cat person before.

She buys food for the strays around the neighborhood. Sometimes, when she finds particularly young or sick strays, she buys fish-shaped cookies for them. It’s a lot of money to waste on a cat that’s not even her own, but when Hiromi voices that opinion she simply replies,

“That money doesn’t mean a lot to me, but you never know how much a good meal means for them.”

It’s not just cats, though. She keeps nuts and dried berries for when they find crows, and thanks each and every one of them when they come to eat her offerings. Hiromi can never tell what she thanks them for.

When they go out for sushi, Haru stares at the chef cutting a whole fish behind the counter and looks… thoughtful for a second. When asked about it, she says,

“I forget we eat raw fish, sometimes.”

It doesn’t make any sense — who forgets sushi is made of raw fish? — but she still eats plenty of it, so it can’t be that important.

Jelly, on the other hand, she refuses to touch. It’s not as if they eat it often, but her faint look of queasiness whenever they encounter any in a shop’s window or an ad is enough to be of note.

When she doesn’t want something, she doesn’t pretend otherwise. She refuses, politely but clearly, and doesn’t leave any doubt whatsoever.

She says it’s easier than dealing with the consequences of people misunderstanding her hesitance as tacit agreement. Hiromi wonders what kind of consequences she faced in the past.

When Hiromi aces the test she spent weeks studying for, Haru brings chiffon cake with homemade whipped cream to celebrate.

“It’s good,” Hiromi says around a mouthful, surprised. “I didn’t know you could bake.”

Haru licks cream off her fingers and says, conspiratory, “I got the recipe from a friend.”

She gets really into miniatures. Hiromi has an aunt who collects them and makes incredibly detailed dollhouses with them, so she knows a few shops who sell them from past gift-buying efforts.

“I just think they’re cute,” Haru tells her after buying a collection of small tea tins with colorful patterns painstakingly painted on them.

Hiromi never sees any of them when she comes to her house. She doesn’t ask what Haru does with them — maybe she gifts them to a relative as well.

Sometimes she looks at sculptures and says, “Someone put a lot of heart into this one.”

She’s right, most of the time. They’re not always the most perfect or beautiful works of art there is, but they’re always painfully earnest and very well loved — you can tell if you truly look at them. There’s a sense of lifelike energy in them that’s lacking in less passionate works.

Hiromi never knew her to have an eye for art, but maybe she never found the kind of art that speaks to her before now.

When they go to the park, Haru always takes a moment to sprawl in the grass. She always looks a bit disappointed for a second, like she expects it to feel softer and nicer than it actually does.

When she doesn’t know how to get out of a bad situation — when she realizes she forgot to study for today’s test or when the school’s bullies turn their attention to her for a moment — she doesn’t panic. Instead she sits down calmly, and she waits.

“Things are never as hopeless as they seem,” she says. “Sometimes, they get better on their own.”

Sometimes, they do. If not, she gets back up, and she does her best to fix things herself.

She runs up stairs like there’s a prize waiting for her at the top. At least it’s good cardio for Hiromi when she has to catch up with her.

When a ball or a frisbee gets stuck in a tree, she’s the first one to climb up walls and nearby roofs to get to it.

“Couldn’t you just take a ladder?”

“Where’s the fun in that when there’s always another way up?”

Hiromi is afraid of heights. Haru, when she tries to help, tells her to look down.

“It’ll be alright,” she says, “Just look down. You’ll be fine.”

It’s still terrifying, but she knows Haru would never let her fall, so it’s easier.

Sometimes, Hiromi meets her at the Crossroad and finds her sitting next to an enormous white cat. In light of recent development (read: her sudden transformation into a cat lady), it’s not that out of character. But she talks to it. That’s the weird part.

Once or twice Hiromi got close enough to listen to what she was saying, and just stood there, increasingly dumbfounded as Haru told this cat about her day. It’s always sleeping, or it seems to be, but its eyes are perked up, like it’s listening to her. Then it gets up, jumps off the chair it was sleeping on, and waits patiently for her to rummage through her bag and takes out a small box. It’s definitely from the bakery down the street, the one they go to for special occasions because it’s not posh but it’s definitely not cheap either. And she gives that box to the cat.

“Tell Baron and Toto I said hi, hm?”

The looks it gives her is downright unimpressed, but maybe it’s just what its face looks like. Then it takes the decorative bow in its mouth and takes off, surprisingly quickly for such a fat cat.

Hiromi walks up to Haru and greets her as if she hasn’t seen anything out of the ordinary, mostly because she’s not sure any of it really happened. Maybe she’s the one going mad. She just says,

“Was that your cat?”

“No, he’s just a friend.”

That clears up absolutely nothing. At this point, she doesn’t know why she asks.

#writing #the cat returns #Yoshioka Haru #neko no ongaeshi

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