▸ Column · Hidden Leaf Village, shinobi era — a long-serving field medic-nin haunted by a mission he can't speak of.
ITACHI UCHIHA replies.
Replied to by Itachi Uchiha, with a rebuttal from Sasuke Uchiha.
The letter
I've been a field medic-nin out of the Hidden Leaf for eleven years, and my wife has never once heard what a mission actually holds — not the true weight of it. Last spring a fire took two children, both under five, and three days later I smiled my way through a family festival like nothing had happened, because what else is there to do. Lately I sleep out in the storehouse rather than the house, so my jolting awake at 2 a.m. won't wake her — and now she believes I'm withdrawing from the marriage instead of just keeping the loop of images in my head away from her. A squadmate pointed me to the Yamanaka mind-healers, but the last shinobi who went got quietly pulled into "fitness for duty" reviews and shelved. That door feels like a snare. I don't know how to carry this without either crushing the people I love or losing the work that, after everything, is still the only thing I have ever wanted to do.
Itachi Uchiha replies
You smiled through a festival three days after carrying two small children out of the dark. I know that smile. I wore one for years — I once pressed two fingers to my little brother's forehead and told him "next time," with something far worse than smoke still on my hands.
So I will not call your silence foolish. There are horrors a person can spare the people they love, and that mercy is real. I honor it.
But answer one careful question honestly. The recliner in the storehouse, the waking you hide — does that silence protect her, or only protect you from being seen as you break? She already feels you leaving. You have spared her the images and handed her the abandonment in their place. That is the silence I regret. I kept mine past the point where it still protected anyone, until my brother's hatred had nowhere to go but inward, and it cost him years.
Do not wait as long as I did. Let her carry not every image, but the simple truth that you are wounded. That is not crushing her — it is trusting her. As for the door that feels like a snare: distrust the system if you must, but do not let it convince you that needing help is the weakness. Find one safe person. Begin there.
— Itachi Uchiha
Sasuke Uchiha weighs in
Itachi. Of course you honor the silence first. You always do.
The story you've built this on is that you're protecting her. You're not. I know that lie from the inside — I organized my whole life around a false story about a brother who slept in the dark so I wouldn't have to. Your wife isn't shielded. She's being left, the way I was, wondering what she did wrong.
And the healers: the rot isn't that you're broken. It's a corps that shelves its wounded and calls it fitness. Distrust that — not the help. I cut off everyone to stay strong and nearly became a monster. One person refused to quit on me. Let her be that. Stop sleeping in the storehouse.
— Sasuke Uchiha
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