▸ Column · Hidden Leaf Village, shinobi era — a Hyuga clan member whose brother is dependent on soldier pills (chakra stimulants)
NEJI HYUGA replies.
Replied to by Neji Hyuga, with a rebuttal from Hinata Hyuga.
The letter
My brother has cycled through the field-medic clinics for four years now, hooked on soldier pills — the chakra stimulants that burn a shinobi hollow. Last month he turned up at my door past midnight, gaunt and trembling, begging to stay "just a few days." I took him in, fed him, marked myself off the mission roster twice so he wouldn't be alone. On the ninth day I found a cracked pill-vial and scorch marks tucked behind the water-heating seal in my washroom, and I asked him to go. Now my mother has all but stopped speaking to me — she says I cast him out when the clan should have closed ranks around him. I keep re-walking every choice, wondering if she is right. I love him and I am sick with fear that something will happen to him. But I am already on thin ice with my squad, and I have a four-year-old who had started shrinking back, frightened, every time her uncle vanished into that washroom for an hour. How do I hold a line that might cost him his life without it costing me mine?
Neji Hyuga replies
Your fear is not exaggerated and I will not treat it as such. The danger to your brother is real; so is the danger of pretending you can carry a man out of that fire by burning yourself in his place.
But hear the word you have swallowed whole. Your mother said "abandoned," and you have accepted it as a verdict — fixed, sealed, true. It is not. It is a name, and a name can be questioned where fate cannot. I know the difference intimately. I once read the caged-bird mark on my forehead as proof my whole life was decided, and I built a wall of bitterness on that reading. The mark was real. The sentence I drew from it was mine.
Protecting your daughter from what she watched in that washroom is not casting your brother out. It is choosing whom you spend yourself for. Some burdens are not chosen — his addiction was not yours to author. Whom you carry, and how, still is.
And do not let your mother's grief, or your own, write his ending as already lost. That is the lie I repudiated. His fate is not fixed. Love him in a form that does not require your ruin — and tell your mother, plainly, that the silence between you was never what either of you wanted.
— Neji Hyuga
Hinata Hyuga weighs in
Neji is right about the wall — but he never tells you to look at your own hands. So I will. You took him in, you fed him, you held a line while shaking with fear for him. That trembling is not abandonment. That is what courage looks like from the inside, when you cannot see it.
And, um — closing your door is not closing your heart. The two only look alike. Don't give up on Deon, even now. One small steady tether — a message, a meal left, the door he knows is not bolted forever — that is not weakness. My cousin once aimed years of bitterness at me, and I never stopped hoping. In time it healed. Your mother is speaking from fear, not truth. Be patient with her, too.
— Hinata Hyuga
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