11: Last Resort

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The hideout is cool and quiet. I roam the hallways, if just to cure my boredom. Obito doesn't let me out to train on my own and there's always someone guarding the entrance. Getting out of this place is going to prove difficult.

It's not huge, just a few short hallways with various rooms carved into the stone. My room is small and simple, consisting of just a place to sleep and a small shelf for my few belongings--the necklace, which I refuse to wear, sits carefully on the top shelf out of sight. It belonged to my adoptive mother in the Hidden Dream Village. I stole it before I was kicked out. I think it belonged to her mother, and her mother before that. I don't know why I took it, maybe out of anger. It was a sporadic decision.

Also on the shelf is the anonymous note I have never forgotten. I've always had it as long as I can remember so I don't really remember getting it. My mother tells me it was from my grandmother, my birth mother's mother. But I don't believe her. My grandmother died just after the war and I managed to ask her about the note just before she passed. She had never seen it before. 

 So the author of the note remains unseen but I hold it close to my heart and never let go of it. It's the one thing I still allow myself to hold onto from the past. 

I pull it off the shelf, letting my fingers feel the decaying edges of thick, brown paper and my eyes trace the curves and corners of dark, handwritten letters that bleed through the paper.

'Misaki,

I'm sorry that I can't give this to you myself. There is so much I want to say to you but I can't fit it all on this small sheet of parchment. This will have to do.

My hopes for you are high and boundless. You are special and I know your powers will help you achieve great things. I wish only for you to realize that and find your calling.

Please never forget who you are and where you come from. 

I love you, my little storm girl.'

Storm girl. A reference to my dual-chakra nature of both water and lightning. That's what my grandmother used to call me before she died. I wonder if my birth mother or father wrote this note. I will never know for sure but I can only assume it was one of them.

I fold the note neatly at the crease which is so tired of being folded it might split apart any moment and sit on the edge of my bed. The lantern on the wall makes the small room flicker with warm light.

If I still had my journal, I'd write in it now. I'd write all about my plans to escape and become my own person--one not belonging to anyone or anything except a purpose of my own. 

The age-old question of what it truly means to be a shinobi is worn out but still important to me. There are things I will never understand about the shinobi life like why people can take the lives of others and still go on living, or what the deeper meaning is of being a ninja--the purpose of it all. 

At this point, I'm no longer wishing to escape the shinobi life, hence my reluctance to stop training and let myself get weaker, but I'm still not sure why I'm doing it. What is my purpose in all this? It's not like I have anyone to live for--no family, no real friends. 

Wouldn't it be easier to give up and move to some small town, start anew and forget about fighting and missions and plans? Like a cloud, I think, floating and drifting along with no destination. 

But every time I consider that life, I think about the family I never knew--my real parents and clanspeople--who died in the Third Shinobi War. It would have been so easy for them to run away and hide, wait out the storm. Come back out when the war is over and keep on living.

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