Age Ten
The letters continued.
We wrote about everything and nothing. She told me about her first successful surgery—she had reattached a chunin's severed fingers, and the chunin had cried with gratitude. I told her about my first solo sealing mission—I had repaired the barrier around the northern island, and the elders had nodded with something like approval.
She told me about her nightmares. She dreamed of her grandfather's death, of the battlefield, of blood that wouldn't wash off her hands. She said she woke up screaming sometimes, and Nawaki would run into her room and hold her hand until she fell back asleep.
I told her about my own nightmares. My mother's face. The blood on the futon. The silence after the screaming stopped. I said I didn't wake up screaming because I didn't sleep deeply enough to dream. That was a lie. I woke up screaming plenty. I just didn't tell her that.
"You're hiding something," she wrote.
"I'm hiding lots of things."
"Tell me one."
"I'm scared of the ocean."
"You live on an island."
"Exactly."
She sent back a drawing. It was crude—she was a medic, not an artist—but I could tell it was supposed to be a person standing on a cliff, facing the sea. Underneath, she had written: "The ocean is scared of you too."
I kept that drawing folded in my pocket for a year.
Sometimes I wondered what we were doing. We were ten years old. We had spent three weeks together and a year writing letters. We had never held hands or kissed or even stood in the same room for more than a few hours. But I thought about her constantly. When I trained, I imagined her watching. When I ate, I wondered what she was eating. When I lay awake at night, I replayed our conversations in my head.
Was this love? I didn't know. I had never been in love before. I had never seen my parents be in love—not really, not after my mother died. I had no map for this.
But I knew I didn't want it to stop.
"Big brother?" Kushina said one evening, catching me reading a letter by lantern light. She was five now, her red hair a wild mess, her blue eyes sharp and knowing. "Why are you smiling?"
"I'm not smiling."
"You are. Your whole face is doing the smile thing."
"I'm reading."
"It's from that girl, isn't it? The one in Konoha."
"Her name is Tsunade. She's my cousin. Distantly."
"Cousins don't smile like that."
"Go to bed, Kushina."
"You're blushing!"
"I am not blushing. I am flushed from training."
"You're a bad liar, big brother."
She danced out of the room before I could respond. I sat in the silence, staring at the folded paper in my hands, and wondered if she was right.
I wrote to Tsunade that night.
"Tsunade,
My sister thinks I'm in love with you.
She's five, so she doesn't know what she's talking about.
But I thought you should know.
—Ren"
Her reply came the next morning.
"Ren,
Your sister is five, but she's probably right.
Don't let it go to your head.
—Tsunade"
I read the letter seven times. Then I folded it carefully and placed it in a box under my futon, where no one would find it.