As Tenzo bowed and asked for her forgiveness, Shinako once again scanned the area for signs of other people. Seeing none, she decided to make the best of the situation. She had her doubts about this man already. Tenzo was a shinobi. He was highly ranked. He was injured. Small conversational cues were enough to move him to yelling. All of the evidence added up to her conclusion. This man was hardened, possibly damaged, and certainly dangerous. Now he stood before her, blocking her escape. However, he seemed calm enough for the moment, and Shinako decided that being direct about the situation would work best to her benefit.

"Please, Tenzo. We've only just met. Do not ask my forgiveness, because of course you already have it. If you need time to clear your head, I will gladly excuse you."

Listening to herself as she spoke, she thought that her introduction was good, and that her voice was soothing enough.

"I have not acquainted you well with myself...you see, despite my earlier outburst, I am generally a quiet girl, and you can surely see how a man as imposing as yourself might frighten someone with my...delicate constitution."

She cocked her head to the side with her last words, putting on her sweetest smile as she entreated him to remain calm. Perhaps a little bit of feminine guile would convince the raging beast within him to see it her way.

With her left hand Shinako gently patted the seat beside her once more, hoping that Tenzo would resume his former positon, so as to no longer be looming over her, his hair an almost impossibly dark halo against the background of the sky. For a moment she had even glimpsed the world-famous sharingan.

As this occured, Shinako's heart threatened to leap out of her chest. Her pulse must have been well over its normal resting rate to make the throbbing beneath her breast and behind her eyes so intense. This was how she felt sometimes when she sparred with a particularly dangerous opponent, though it was completely foreign territory for her within the normally docile confines of conversation. If someone were to ask her to be truthful about the ordeal later, she would have admitted somewhat shamefully that she had been scared.

The young woman continued to flash her most winning smile, the squinting at the corner of her eyes doubling as protection from the sun in case she had to react quickly, though she doubted that if Tenzo truly wanted to hurt her there was anything she could do but cry out for help. And so, Shinako waited patiently for a few moments before outstretching her left hand to take Tenzo's right hand, slipping it gracefully from the hem of her long sleeve in an attempt to guide him kindly back to his seat.

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As Tenzo grasped her wrist, Shinako's first instinct was to panic. Luckily, however, she was able to overcome that instinct and wait for the moment to play out. It dawned on her after a few moments that Tenzo was attempting to compliment her. She simply continued to smile and nodded her graceful acceptance of the remark about her skin. It was a matter of fact that she had taken great pains throughout her life in the pursuit of beauty, and proper skin-care had always been one of them. Though, looking down at her own hand as Tenzo did, Shinako noticed a few calluses beginning to form from her practice in Shinobi arts.

She also could not help but take acute notice of how close Tenzo had chosen to sit to her now. She was unsure, but part of her believed that in all of this--approaching her, mocking her tears, growing angry--there was some game afoot, designed to keep her off of her balance; some trick of smoke and mirrors to conceal the truth of what her new companion felt and thought. Tenzo certainly was not as polite, or as refined as the company that Shinako was accustomed to having. Thinking back, the young woman had been uncomfortable from their first moments of meeting. This was partially why Tenzo's question threw her for a loop.

"I? I mean to say..."

For the second time in the same day, Shinako was struck speechless. She was unsure what was meant by the question. What could she possibly want from this stranger? Was this another trick, or some form of paranoia expressing itself? She decided to half answer the question, and to be as honest with that answer as she could.

"You are, of course, free to leave. I do not mean to detain you here. I was simply entreating you to calm yourself. A girl with sensibilities such as mine can get nervous with a powerful man such as yourself standing in front of her."

Perhaps in Tenzo's time he had been tricked by a woman. Perhaps, in his experience, all women ever did was take and exploit for their own gains. Shinako's imagination flew to some far-off village, and to a beautiful brown-haired girl, gently caressing Tenzo's sharp, handsome features with one hand, and holding a knife behind her back with the other. It was another instance, of which she found many, in which she found herself failing to understand the man seated so close beside her.

It was more than just the suddenly intense sun that caused her face to flush with heat. In all of this, Shinako realized that her left leg had gone tense with the apprehension of brushing against Tenzo's right leg. With some amount of conscious effort, she managed to relax, though her eyes darted for just a moment to narrow space between the two of them on the bench, as though searching for an assurance that it was still there.

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It seemed that, for the first time, Tenzo was allowing some of his hardened façade to crumble. There were cracks in the exterior, but Shinako could still just barely see through them. The conversation now had a confessional tone about it. She had unveiled the problems of her day early on, and it appeared as though Tenzo now wanted to do the same. Shinako knew, from the textbooks, about the history of the famed Uchiha clan; about their struggle with the Senju, uneasy peace treaty, and ultimately their destruction at the hands of one of their own. Many lectures were given on the legendary shinobi Itachi Uchiha. He was a hero, but something of a cautionary tale; a man who stood too close to the fire for comfort at times. Perhaps Tenzo too could feel himself approaching the flames, and beginning to doubt his place in the world, as so many of his family had before him.

"Your usefulness is in more than your bloodline, and your worth as a person cannot be measured in your utility to others. Sometimes you just have to take a moment and enjoy life."

Shinako knew this simple truth from experience. It was difficult enough for her to find time to be alone, or to do the things that she wanted to do. Over-analyzing everything was her forté. People in Konohagakure's meritocracy could often forget that the Leaf's military superiority was not for its own sake, but for the sake of living fruitful and fulfilling lives. Shinako thought about Itachi Uchiha, and how easy it would be to get lost in the bowels of it all--the darkness that lay in the foundations beneath her feet.

The shinobi that she was could not be described as a great one. She had not even mastered her own clan's jutsu, let alone an element or the village's signature styles. Yet often she found herself, even as a genin, getting a glimpse into the absurd politics of it all. Just a few months ago a man had been jailed for attempting to infiltrate and learn the secrets of the Akimichi clan. The Yamanaka had been used to scrub his mind of any knowledge that he may have acquired.

Shinako began to frown as she also looked upward toward the gathering clouds. The life of the Shinobi was so often one of secrecy that deception permeated every aspect of it. She thought about her own secret techniques, and the clan guidelines for utilizing them; all of the precautions to keep them hidden away from the eyes of the world. Moreover, she thought about how such efforts extended even to her own identity. The Shinako that could be found around the dinner table, or at social events, or at academy training...each one was different from the next. In fact, these days, the only time she felt like herself was when she was alone, in her room, or out in the South Forest. The rest of the time she was an imposter. That thought was what made one of Tenzo's comments stick in her chest like a kunai knife.

"Tenzo-sama," she used the formal honorific so as to avoid offending again. Her voice was steady and rich, as though the natural flow of the conversation had been leading up to this question the entire time, "when you say that you haven't met a person like me before...what do you mean?"

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It was becoming increasingly clear to Shinako that Tenzo experienced the world mostly through tactile cues. As he poked her she leaned away, almost falling off of the bench, which distracted her from the next two pokes which landed cleanly on her lower ribs on her left-hand side. The young woman had to raise her arms to her sides like an acrobat to maintain her balance on her already narrow perch and avoid an unceremonious fall to the concrete. Once she regained her composure, she continued the slight frown that had come with her question, using both hands to reposition her hair behind her ears, as it had fallen across her face. However, seeing that Tenzo was laughing, she too forced a laugh, though there was little true mirth in it.

Tenzo had a point, though Shinako hated to admit it. She was stiff. Sometimes she felt like a zombie, just shuffling through the motions of her day, cursed to knowing that what the people around her saw was not truly her. Like Tenzo and his perception of her beauty, they all saw a cheap facsimile; something designedly thrown into the world, dropped to cover the trail of the girl who had often retreated so far inward that nobody could follow. So often, what they saw was her rejection of their looks.

One thing that she did not doubt was that Tenzo had been prized and valued for most of his life as what essentially amounted to a weapon. The Sharingan was one of the deadliest and least understood bloodline limits of the Hidden Leaf Village. Its name alone inspired fear in most enemies. Shinako imagined Tenzo as a shuriken in the hands of the village leadership, thrown with reckless abandon to strike out at an enemy, but always with a wire wire attached, so that it could be pulled back quickly to the hand. Her father had sometimes spoken about what essentially amounted to suicide missions in which shinobi were treated exactly that way. She wondered if that was the type of life that she was getting into.

"What courses and runs, leaping into the bright sky, is not the river..."

Shinako remembered the haiku that she had penned in one of her literature classes as an exercise. It revealed, without saying much, exactly how Shinako felt about herself and others in the town sometimes.

"It is true that kindness does not come as a difficult thing to me, but sometimes I am kind for all the wrong reasons, or when I do not wish to be. Kindness is best when it is given genuinely, not as a tax for remaining in someone's good graces."

She thought about how the other Nara women would have reacted to such antics such as Tenzo's horseplay and temper. Any one of them would have confronted him or stormed off by now. Her step-mother was the one exception, though there was nothing truly Nara in that woman. She was a distant cousin by marriage, and though the clan claimed her, she had not had doctors or shinobi in her family for generations before her. The woman was not even possessed of the most basic Inton skills, preferring bukijutsu and taijutsu to get accomplish her ends.

Yet, here Shinako sat, paralyzed with something that was not exactly fear, and not exactly desire to stay. It was loneliness that kept her, and her continued presence was her tax. Something melancholy had settled over her. Looking around her she saw a puppet town. In every building, of every compound, of every neighborhood in the entire village were wax or wooden figurines. It all felt like a museum with a pulse.

Suddenly, inexplicably, but undoubtedly, Shinako felt the need to escape.

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Shinako, too, looked at the ground in front of her for a long while, eyes going out of focus as they often do before drifting off to sleep. The entire conversation had a surreal and dream-like quality to it, the way it transitioned from mood to mood, distracting from any sort of deeper meaning it might have had. At any rate, they had circled around to Tenzo ferretting out her lie. She was not nearly so delicate as she often led people to believe, but people had seen her in that way for her entire life. For several long moments she let Tenzo's question hang in the air, unsure about how she wanted to answer it.

"I'm afraid of what it might do to other people..."

The answer that she finally settled on was as close to the truth as she could come without making herself out to be the weasel that she sometimes saw herself as. In an odd way, she was continuing to shield herself, even when presented with an opportunity to come clean.

"My father, my brothers, my clan; they all expect to see me a certain way whenever they look, and I couldn't bear to disappoint them. I always show them exactly what it is that they want to see. Without a tight leash on myself, what would I become? Would it frighten them?"

She thought about how, underneath everything else, there may have been a monster in her waiting to pounce, just as was the case with her step-mother. An alarm went of somewhere in the depths of the nearby hospital, drawing Shinako's attention to the closest door, through which she saw a gaggle of nurses rushing up a flight of stairs. She didn't lose her frown, but gestured with her head toward the women.

"It's so easy to forget, sometimes, how full the world is of people that are constantly misunderstood; misimagined. It's sometimes hard to understand others the way we understand ourselves. We imagine them as either gods or monsters, sometimes seldom more than animals. But that's not exactly the truth of it, is it?"

She looked for signs of recognition in Tenzo's expression, her eyes almost desperately asking him to understand. She thought about what he had said about her beauty, and it was almost enough to make her angry. Sometimes she fantasized about chopping off all of her hair, and the tip of her nose, disfiguring herself to become hideous so that when people saw her they would wonder about her story, and not about her availability.

"To want to be around someone because of their beauty...I've always found it so odd; almost like choosing which foods to eat by their color instead of their taste."

She reached down to the hem of her dress and removed the Senbon needle that was hidden there, holding it in the light so that Tenzo could clearly see it between her manicured and polished fingers. She thought in that moment that the red of her fingernails could have been mistaken for blood on such a weapon.

"When you first saw me, did you ever imagine that I would sew shinobi tools into my clothing?"

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Shinako tucked the senbon needle into the lining of her long sleeve. Tenzo almost seemed to peer through her kimono as he stared at her in such a cavalier way. She thought back on the first man who had ever shown her such attention. She had been barely fifteen years old, and had taken on a womanly shape. The man had invited her to have sake and sweets with him one night. Before she knew it, he had wrapped an arm around her and begun to walk off. She had never been more terrified in her life before that moment, and wasn't sure that she had been since. Her father had rebuked the stranger and ushered her away, but Shinako never forgot the look that the man had had in his eye; as though he was hungry for something more than mortal food.

She was unclear if Tenzo was actually propositioning her, or if he was speaking in the hypothetical. It was also a mystery to her at the time which one was worse. Either way, she was slightly disappointed. She was far more than a body to be used for pleasure. Her etiquette teachers, and later her match-maker, before she became a shinobi had all believed and instilled in Shinako that for every conversation there was a perfect question. That question would set aside the need for further discussion, while two kindred spirits were content, for a time, to simply ponder the answer. Shinako was not yet sure if this conversation's question would reveal itself to either her or Tenzo. With a flat tone, so as not to betray her indignation, she asked:

"What would you like to do with my body, Tenzo-san?"

If he was brazen enough to make his prior statements about her body, then she would dare him to at least be thorough in his shamelessness enough to spell it all out. She had often seen this tactic used when her father disagreed with something that he had overheard one of her brothers say. It mostly embarrassed them so much that they either fell silent or recanted immediately. The man would never get to see it, it seemed, but Shinako became more and more like him every day, a thought that would have comforted her had she not been seated so close to the adventurous eyes of Tenzo Uchiha.

She looked down at his hand as it moved closer to her. In that moment she was sure that it was a hand that had killed. Someone's son, or daughter, or husband, or wife, or sister, or brother would not return home; there were arms that would never hold again, and lips that would never kiss. Their voices, if they ever spoke, dripped like so much blood into the ground. They returned in the sight of that hand, not as quiet whispers, or long-forgotten necessities, but as restless and unfulfilled years that burned, and burned.

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As Tenzo's hand moved toward her thigh Shinako stood immediately from the bench, slipping off of the side of it and onto her feet. She gave a hard stare at the man. Deep inside, she curse herself for not simply cutting off his advances at the start of it all. Some crippled, broken thing inside of her was incapable of being rude to anyone, even the most reprehensible men in the world. Gathering her hair into a pony-tail, Shinako quickly looked around the area to make sure that she had not left anything on the ground in her haste to separate herself from the groping hand.

The kunoichi's cheeks were clearly flushing red, both in anger and embarrassment. To say that the situation had not gone as she had expected was an understatement. Her Kimono fell to well below her knee, but she almost reflexively stooped slightly and gave it a slight tug, making sure that it covered all of her. As she did so, a single silver tear escaped her eye and cascaded to the side-walk, barely touching her face as it departed.

Shinako cleared her throat as though she was about to speak, refusing to look back up at Tenzo; in fact, she was willing to look anywhere else. Feeling a lump rising in her throat, she pulled her collar higher as though she were cold, even though it was a very warm day. It seemed as though the clouds that had threatened earlier were there to stay, giving Shinako a proper excuse.

"If you will excuse me, Tenzo-san, I must be off in search of an umbrella. Thank you for our conversation. It has been...enlightening..."

With that, Shinako turned and began to walk away from Tenzo as quickly as she could without appearing undignified, or as though she were fleeing. She felt like she had swallowed a burning coal. How was it possible that she had read all of the signs so wrong? She had let her guard down for a moment and tried to show someone who she was outside of the context of her everyday struggle to be seen, screaming on the inside for release. She felt like she had crawled from the surf, only to be found drowning on dry land. She felt betrayed, not only by the wandering hands that she left behind on the bench, but by her innermost self for not forcing her to be more cautious.

As if a heavenly gift from the sky, a few rain-drops, too thin to even be seen cutting through the air, fell on Shinako's head and face. She hoped that with enough luck she could cry on the walk home and nobody would notice. The worst part was, even though the hand had not connected with her body, she could still feel it, as though it were crawling up inside of her, clutching with fingers that threatened to choke something precious, wringing the life out of it until it had nothing more to give.

As she rushed away, she tried to tell herself that life's silly drama did not limit her; that people on a path of purpose do not have time for drama, or tears. She was not sure that she would believe herself today.

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Exit Thread

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