Rob
Pew Pew Pew
My Demons
1005 Words
1005 Words
With the words of Yuu still fresh in her mind, Nana had gone to bed the moment she’d made it back to the Amaterasu estate. Although doubt was never an emotion to creep into the back of her mind like this, there were points made during their conversation that made her hesitate and ponder upon her thoughts for a bit longer than she would’ve liked to admit to others.
It wasn’t like she’d had some great revelation or anything either, though. Just some food for thought, if anything. How was she any different from Yuu? Sure enough, she’d given up on her murdering ways long before she’d made any kind of name for herself, but the fact of the matter still remained that she was, in fact, at one point, a member of the Twelfth Division. And, unlike many of her predecessors - and successors - she was not a member of the tracking club.
She was a bonafide assassin.
With an emphasis on ‘was’, of course. She hadn’t so much as killed a single humanoid in over a couple of hundred of hours. Sure, she’d killed her fair share of less than savory characters, but none of them were in any state where she would still call them ‘human’. Either they’d gone so far down the rabbit hole, or had twisted their being so far down the abyss that they might as well have been husks.
Still, what happened before that was definitely something that kept her awake even to this day. It wasn’t enough to let her wallow in self-loathing or anything, but, like with most decisions, she didn’t quit being an assassin for just any reason. It had happened just about after she’d had her falling out with House Yoshishige. In hindsight, that was probably also the reason why she had messed up her mission like she had.
She just wasn’t in a right mindset at the time, which was quite unlike her really. Not a single time had she gone into an assassination not knowing everything there was to know about the mission, its target and its objectives. She was always over prepared beyond being over prepared. Yet, that day she wasn’t, and the death that followed still haunted her to this day.
Quite literally, actually.
Perhaps it had something to do with how old she was, or maybe it was because of her ancestry - the one where she was born from her father’s eye - but for some reason some of the persons that she had some kind of connection with decided it was a nice idea to haunt her for reasons sometimes unbeknownst to even Nana.
Of course, such was not the case with this particular person. It wasn’t like he was still here or anything, haunting her in some incorporeal form. No, he’d cursed her when he died. Cursed her for her ignorance, and downright arrogance in killing him. He’d cursed so that she could never again find true love, and that those who would try and become close to her would die in any way, shape or form.
Apparently, there was a way to lift the curse, but she hadn’t found it yet. She wasn’t really actively seeking anymore either, though. She’d given up on those feelings a long time ago and, though she still felt them, she knew better than to act on them. Love was not an emotion for her, not anymore. She wasn’t always like she was now, of course. To some, that was probably surprising.
However, to the people who had known her for longer than the last couple of decades, this was all but a given. She’d became more distant and, to a lot of her family members - her Amaterasu family - this was a hard pill to swallow at first. At one point she’d even stepped down as matriarch and had part of her memories repressed.
She liked to think that her family flourished under that particular person. The person who had taken on the name of ‘Nana’. No longer was she Yoshishige Amaterasu, but Amaterasu Nana, just another member of the Amaterasu family. Born to a loving father and mother, with an older brother and sister who both had their own ways of loving her.
Because of this personality change - it was quite a big one, apparently - she’d also somehow gotten out of the Gotei Juusantai without arousing suspicion. She was an assassin back then, it probably wasn’t too weird to think that she could somehow make it seem like she’d never been a part of their group to begin with. Being able to let people disappear permanently had its perks after all.
Life was decent that way, good even. She’d thrown herself into becoming a full fledged blacksmith at that time, and had all but given up on her swordsmanship. She’d become more of a... fencer, rather than really turning her skills into a personal art, and she was just fine with that. Things only started to pick up again, both in her spiritual pressure, and her memories returning, when she was invited back into the Shinōreijutsuin.
Slowly, the locks on some of her memories were breaking and it wasn’t before long until she found herself in a complete, mental mess. She didn’t know who or what she was, and a lot of decisions back then were... less than stellar. Even now, when she finally thought she was getting everything back on track, she wasn’t completely sure she was back to her ‘old self’.
Still, it was after things like these, conversations like the one she’d had with Yuu, that she began to wonder once more if maybe, someday, there was a cure to the madness still raging on in her mind. Otherwise, she feared, I might just end up taking him up on his offer. And she knew that, if it would come to that, it wouldn’t be a pretty sight.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure if she had much of any kind of choice anymore.