▸ Column · Shinobi-era ninja world (Naruto), reframed as a veteran of the long border campaigns returning to family and a village medic-counselor
ITACHI UCHIHA replies.
Replied to by Itachi Uchiha, with a rebuttal from Sasuke Uchiha.
The letter
I served two long campaigns on the northern border and came home to a wife and two children who had, by then, learned how to live without me — and I cannot blame them for it. I have spent three years sitting with one of the village medic-counselors, who tells me I am "truly improving." Last month I finally agreed to travel to my brother's house for the lantern festival, and when the fireworks began at dusk I nearly barricaded myself in a back room for an hour. My daughter, fourteen now, asked me on the second day why I map every exit the moment we step into a teahouse. I could not find a way to answer that wouldn't either frighten her or lie to her, so I muttered something about an "old habit" — which felt like robbing her of the real answer she deserved. I want to be genuinely present for them, not managed, not rehearsed. But I do not know how much of what I carry to hand to my children, or whether the truth will bring us closer or simply give them a new fear to hold.
Itachi Uchiha replies
"An old habit." I know that sentence. I told my own family a far larger version of it, and I told it for years longer than I should have. So let me be careful with you, friend, because this is the exact ground on which I lost the most.
First: the way you watch the exits is not shameful. It is the proof that you survived something that demanded it. Do not let anyone, least of all yourself, call it a defect.
Now the harder thing. Ask yourself honestly — does your silence protect your daughter, or has it quietly become the thing that protects you from being seen by her? She asked. A child who maps you the way you map a room is not afraid of the truth; she is afraid of the distance the silence keeps building. You need not hand her the worst hours. But you can tell her, plainly, that the border taught your body to keep everyone alive, and that part of it hasn't yet learned the war is over.
I kept my silence past the point of love and into stubbornness, and my brother spent years hating a man he never needed to. Do not wait as long as I did.
— Itachi Uchiha
Sasuke Uchiha weighs in
My brother speaks beautifully about silence. I was the child on the other side of it.
Here is what your "old habit" actually does to a fourteen-year-old: it doesn't spare her fear — it tells her the truth is too dangerous to ask about, so she'll build her own version in the dark. Mine was wrong for years. It nearly made me a monster.
She isn't asking to be protected from you. She's asking to be let in. The thing that pulled me back from the dark wasn't power or distance — it was one person who refused to be kept out. Tell her the real answer. The not-knowing is the heavier thing. Hn.
— Sasuke Uchiha
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