His maniacal grin. Her gentle smiling eyes. 

At that single moment, everything fell apart. All I had worked for, all I had lived for. Shreds. 

Kurei…onii-san…I will take away your all…click…click…click… 

My eyes flew open, the words a thick heavy mass of screaming sound, clogging me up…settling all over me…piercing me with tiny insistent needles…all over…all over… 

It took me a while to realise that I was the one screaming. I sat deathly still, panting in the ominous darkness, just only heavy with sound, now mockingly silent. I could hear those echoes so clearly, reverberating through my entire consciousness. 

I could feel the cold, all the way down my back, through my veins, my bones. 

Everywhere. 

“Kurei-sama…” Neon. 

“I’m so happy…thank god…I thought…I thought you would never open your eyes again!” She clung to me, I could hear the immense hurt in her voice. My throat, my heart, stretched to its breaking point. I swallowed that all. 

“This is an abandoned construction site. You’ve been unconscious for ten days now, Kurei-sama.” My breathing had slowed, my heart had stopped pounding, the voices had disappeared, vanished into the thin evening air. All I heard now was Neon’s voice, soft and clear even through the tumultuous cacophony that my mind was making. 

She smiled, tears streaking her lovely face. Tears for me. 

Don’t you know, Neon? I’ve been running from those tears. I’ve been running so fast, so far, but I never seem to escape them. And those voices. And the faces. And everything else just fades away like smoky illusions, because none of it is real. 

I glanced out of a demolished window, and saw the soft luminous face that was the moon. Yes, the moon was still there, among the stars and the velvet spaceless sky, and then a calming quiet shrouded me. I was here now, where the moon and stars still shone, where Neon was to smile at me. Not anywhere else. 

“There’s water here,” she said abruptly, interrupting my train of thought. 

“And food too.” 

“I’m okay, you eat it.” 

“I’m fine! Don’t worry about me—you have to eat.” 

Then she giggled, a single wisp of mirth amidst the black desolation. The sound itself seemed to spread around me, warming me, closing over me protectively. 

She lifted the spoon to my mouth, forcing me to open my parched lips. The warm sticky liquid passed my lips, tongue and teeth. It rolled around, a small ball of taste and revival. 

Click…click…click… 

That single sound swathed my being with hot fire. It roared in my face, showering me with a deluge of licking tongues. It passed as quickly as it came, leaving crimson tendrils caressing my god-forsaken being behind in its wake. 

But they came immediately after that, bombarding me with their harsh weighty truths, slamming into me, inflicting on me wounds, scars that blackened me like scorching sticky tar. O-kaasan…Kurenai…everybody’s gone…everybody’s gone…I don’t want to fight anymore…I never did…everybody’s disappeared… 

Her voice came back to me, somehow making it through all my crackling consternation, all the crowding thoughts that hammered on my skull, demanding to be let out. 

“Then don’t fight anymore. You’re hurt everywhere. All these battles have brought you nothing but pain…this cannot go on. Let’s live a peaceful life together from now on, nobody will blame you…we’ll start afresh, somewhere where there’s no one we know, nothing we fear…Kurei-sama…?” 

I had gotten over her. Why had I done that? I wondered dimly. But in the deepest part of my heart I knew. She was here, she was real and tangible, I could touch her. She wasn’t gone, like everyone else. The pain swamped me in torrents of lashing ice. Repeatedly. Cruelly. She reached both arms around me, and I felt them trembling with warmth, with…humanity. How long had it been since I had felt—all that? And all I could see were her eyes…shining even in the shadows, bright with tears. They made me want to be able to cry too. 

Her quiet regular breathing soothed me. I could not see well, in the sombre twilight, but her presence, warm and slumbered, was still beside me. She was still here. 

I went outside. 

I could not stand it in there—so hot, so smothering. Outside was not much better, but at least moving around gave me freedom from the oppression of my thoughts, the confines of my darkness, if only for a fraction of eternity. It was a dreary night. I ventured out of the backyard, where the shadows lurked, into the front where I could see the moon clearly. There was something in the air tonight, a fluttering expectancy of some kind. It was so thick it was almost palpable. The trees seemed to know it as they whispered it to the wind, which carried it in their soft folds of cool silk, caressing my face, my hair. I wandered further, my step now strong and sure. I was walking quickly now, fast approaching the edge of the thick forest which surrounded the site. I wouldn’t—couldn’t stop, not even if I wanted to. Because the wind was ushering me now, urging me forward, deeper into the forests’ shady forbidding depths. 

I could hear the secrets. The secrets the trees had told the wind. I could hear them clearly as I walked, the soft murmurs dancing over my skin a waltz of refreshing tingles, flirting with my freshly awakened senses. I came to a clearing where the trees obscured whatever the shadows hadn’t already cast their thick dark cloak over. Here, the wind stopped. I stopped too, anxious to see what the secret was. 

The secret…? 

A woman. Coming toward me. I leaned forward in anticipation, trying to get a glimpse of her face. And when I did, all the air within me felt like it was being sucked out in a vacuum of violent reaction. “O…O-kaasan…” 
Her black hair fell down her waist like cascading silk, I dropped to the ground in utter shock. Her sweet red lips curved in a smile of welcoming, I floundered helplessly. “O-kaasan…” The trees watched on. 

“Kurei-kun…oh, my Kurei…” She came to me in an at once graceful and ethereally beautiful motion. All I could do was watch her, this unspeakably unsettling sense of surreality engulfing me even as I knelt, motionless on the ground.

“I can see your soul is emptied now. My son, you have turned away everything in your great furious sorrow. Can you honestly say you are living, now?” I could see light now, emanating from her being in soft eerie wisps. No words came to me, only these great rushing emotions, a tumult of flaring feelings, swallowing everything in its path. Hurt. Joy. Anger. All at once. 

My voice hurt even as I spoke my words shakily, “But you told me yourself, you told me that I would be the leader of Hokage and so I had to live on! And so I did…I did it only for you…I’m living for you now! All…all I wanted was some happiness for my own…and even that has been taken away…” 

“Kurei…you are as dead as I am now…your soul is nothing but blackened ash. I’ve been watching you, Kurei, I’ve been with you all this while. Nobody took your happiness away from you except yourself. Look around you, Kurei, and see all the people who love you so much! They’re willing to die for you, to kill for you, is that not happiness?” The painful truth of her quiet words tore away at my soul. 

I could not breathe—I could not speak. All I was aware of was the great sinking of my being, the sense of being drowned in immeasurable pain. And then her voice once again, so quiet and so—soft, a sharp contrast with the weighty and deafening truth her words carried. “A woman loves you, Kurei…very much. She has been waiting a long time.” 

I got to my feet now, giddily. I found that my vision was blurred and then realized I wasn’t surprised that I had been crying because I had known, in some distant part of my mind. She smiled. There was a silent finality in me now, a certainty that had never been there before. If I dared, I would almost have thought it to be peace. 

“The time that stopped when you left for the present day from the village moves now…” I could hear the smile in her voice as she faded away softly, in a whirl of wispy filaments of light shaping patterns in the thick night air. I smiled too, welcoming the lightness that shrouded my being. 

It was even darker, if that were possible, by the time I arrived back at the site. 

A crooked half smile came to my lips as I remembered Neon. “I love you, Kurei-sama…” she had said. Those bittersweet emotions that always stung when I thought of the word, now clamoured for release within me. 
Her endearing voice, so heartrendingly gentle, floated back to me. “We’ll start afresh, somewhere where there’s no one we know, nothing we fear…” 

How nice that would be. 

A sudden forcible change in the air disrupted my thoughts and warned me of another presence. I glanced up sharply, to be met by a hulk of a man, towering over me, grinning ferally even in the raw twilight. “I’ve found you! I’ve found Kurei! Boy am I lucky tonight!” His uncouth voice made my lips twist in distaste. 

I had no time to think, however, for in a swift vicious move, the scumbag had dealt a harsh blow to the side of my face. “Uru Uruha…Mori Kouran’s underdogs?” The pain gripped me, where my tender wounds had not yet healed. I clutched my wounds, trying to gain some semblance of control over the situation, when I was slammed into the ground and pinned down by a meaty foot. 

“Kurei-sama!” The scream pierced the night. I felt the foot lift in hesitation, as he caught sight of Neon. I was petrified for her safety. 

“Don’t come over! Neon!” As soon as the words left my lips, however, I saw a blur of motion, his fist meeting her delicate face with a sickening thump. 

She fell to the ground like a rag doll. 

An animalistic fury took hold of me then. Something inside me struggled as the calm detachedness, the icy facade I thought I had put away inside me began to resurface rapidly. I could feel the part of me that had solidified when I had held Neon in my arms and when I had seen my mother, now dissolving at an alarming rate. 

“Get your filthy foot off her.” 

He turned. His white pasty face distorted in an expression of confusion utterly sickened and disgusted me. The heat in my body intensified as I felt my flame being resurrected from its dormancy, rising within me in a storm of raging torpidity. “Of course—there’s no way for me to live a peaceful life after all.” 

I said this more to myself than to anyone else. 

In a dizzying array, the dancing tongues swallowed the body with a sickening roar. I knew I was running away from them, even as I burned him. I knew I was taking refuge from them under the shelter my blazing flames had built, even as I picked Neon up. 

Yes, I was running from those tears, after all. I was running from those tears because they were my own.