lunatic moon
I'm going to dance now, I'm afraid.
It is not a shinobi's business to make empty promises. To the shinobi, a promise is everything that keeps him alive, his reason to fight and survive and go on until there are no more promises left to be kept.
Too many don't understand this, the true wonder of a shinobi battle. It has little to do with jutsu, still less to do with employers and their money, and everything to do with a shinobi and his promise -- be it to his love, his family, his master, or his village.
It is for this reason that Hayate does not run. He remembers a time of autumn chill that makes fine hair stand on end and a heart-faced boy six years his elder, alone in the dark and a brief touch of lips to his promise of 'I'll protect you'.
No one ever had to tell Hayate what it meant to make a promise.
No one ever tried to stop him when he picked up a sword and swore his life to the Crescent Moon Dance, either, though they had said that it would hurt like hell.
A shinobi's will is iron, though, and Gemma had always seemed to be near him when it had really started to hurt, his smile more potent than anything a medical nin could offer. As the years had slipped by them, the questions had turned from what to why, but Hayate had never really needed to answer, and Gemma had never really needed to know. He'd promised, and that was enough.
His art had almost destroyed him, but he had no regrets -- the trembling wasn't really so bad. The coughing stopped, sometimes, if he concentrated really hard. He was a Konoha shinobi. He was a protector.
He was cherished.
Hayate holds the image of that blinding smile in his heart as he straightens before the Sand shinobi, the chakra slipping in and around and through him like ghostly wings, everything but memory and unwavering resolution falling from him as he draws his sword.
There is someone that he loves here. Where his body falters, his spirit does not.
And he flies, giving himself to the dance he paid so much for.
Strangely enough, he still has no regrets as the first blade of wind touches him.
He's wondering what promises this man has made.
-fin
25December 2003