heritage

Chapter Twenty-Five: Heritage

"In which inevitably, life goes on."

           The shinsha hasn't changed a bit. Not like Sakura has. Months have passed since she and her team had returned from Wave. Since the singing first began. And ended, she thinks with a sigh. New growths of moss and ivy can hardly compare. Or perhaps they could. At least in pace, if not in effect. Slow and steady.

Forever bearing marks of change even if parts of it are cut away.

She breathes in slowly. The cool, morning air fills her lungs. She stalls it in her ribcage for a moment, waiting until she aches to let it go. The sound of her exhale disappears into the trickling stream below her feet. A splash plips up from beneath the bamboo she is standing on, breaking the uniformity from before. She lowers herself to her knees. Peering over the edge, her gaze catching on the seastone embedded in the sides of the shallow channel. Another splash.

And then a vibrant red swims stubbornly upstream, peeking past the edge of the bamboo board. It is followed by splotches of cream, black, and orange. Sakura gasps softly when even a little yellow one fights its away against the current and into her vision. Her chin jerks up, her eyes scanning the streams leading to the honden. Even more spots of color shimmer just beneath the water's surface. More and more appear the farther away she looks, until she can't see anything more definite. She doesn't need to, anyway. She can see what is right in front of her.

Koi fish.

It has been years since she last saw one in the Shima no Mura. Over seven, if she remembers correctly. She is careful not to think of it any more deeply than that. She watches the * gasp of koi with a near single-mindedness she hasn't felt since she was a child. After a few moments, a thought crosses her mind.

"Quietly, does change still come." The thought rasps slowly, its words echoed by voices faded yet familiar to Sakura. "But come it must... and so it should." She takes the gentle reminder for what it is, and pulls herself onto her feet. She looks up and over at the main house. The shoji door is tucked beneath the porch roof, untouched by time. Only a speckling of sunlight that shakes as the branches of the surrounding trees do. The ambience of the stream quiets in her ears. Her breath catches in her chest again. An unexpected breeze brushes against her neck, and the air startles out of her lungs in a puff. She closes her eyes, an airy chuckle falling from her lips. The tension between her shoulders slackens.

The soft thumps of her footsteps are swallowed by the trickling stream.

           Her team is waiting at the gate when she turns the corner. Her father's merchant kit is secured to her back. A mountain country style scabbard weighs heavily on her hip. The tip of it avoids scraping against the ground by the barest inch. She keeps her right hand on the hilt, balancing the oblong weapon. Her other hand lifts in a wave.

She walks along the side of the building at an easy pace, the little sections of stairs forcing her no faster. The sounds of Naruto and Sasuke bickering grow louder as she gets closer. A laugh escapes her when Kakashi raps each of them on the back of the head to get them to stop. She skips the last few steps. Her sensei graces her with a gentle pat on the head for her efforts.

They accompany her home. The journey is quiet, unlike most of the times they spend together. None of the ambient noise from the heart of the village makes it this far out, either. Which is odd. But that doesn't mean she can't appreciate it. Her teammates are calm, too. Instead of throwing hands with each other, each of them hold on to one of hers. Her thumbs rubbed gentle circles into the tops of their hands. A slow sigh disappears into the wind.

Sakura knows that she looks tired. It has been a week since her return. A week filled with reunions and many orders to rest. Which she has done for the most part. And yet despite the long hours of sleep from the night before, she feels as if any energy she may have gained stayed twisted in the duvet when she got up earlier this morning. Or fell away from her with every jostling step she took to begin her morning.