▸ Column · The shinobi world (Hidden Leaf Village) — a younger brother dependent on pain-suppressing medicine after a mission injury, and a mother consumed by caregiving
ITACHI UCHIHA replies.
Replied to by Itachi Uchiha, with a rebuttal from Sasuke Uchiha.
The letter
My younger brother fell on a mission years ago — his back was crushed, and the medic-ninja put him on pain-suppressing medicine he has never fully come off of. Three times now he has slipped back into needing too much of it, and after the last time he returned to our mother's house to heal. The trouble is not him. It is our mother. She hides his medicine, reads his messages, sits outside his door counting whether he has eaten. To the neighbors she says only, "I am managing." I came home for two days and watched her turn away a healer she had waited half a year to see, because my brother seemed "off" that morning. I cannot tell anymore whether she is a devoted mother or whether her own fear has become something that is making his recovery worse. Twice I raised it gently; twice she wept and said I do not know what it is to watch your child suffer — and she is right, I live a village away. But I believe she is vanishing into his illness in a way that will break her, and perhaps break his sobriety with it. How do you make someone see they need help too, when they have decided that needing help is something only the sick are allowed?
Itachi Uchiha replies
Your mother has confused two things that look identical from the outside and are nothing alike on the inside: a burden that protects, and a burden that only wounds the one carrying it. I know the difference better than most. I gave up my name and my brother's love, and every piece of that cost actually shielded him. There was a reason heavy enough. Ask of your mother's vigil the question I ask of every sacrifice: who is genuinely protected by it? If she collapses — and she will, a body cannot stand sentry forever — does your brother heal faster, or does he wake one morning to find the person guarding him has guarded herself into ruin? Her watching does not keep him sober. It tells him, in a hundred quiet ways, that he cannot be trusted to keep himself alive. That is not love arriving. That is fear wearing love's robes. You cannot argue her out of it; grief does not yield to reason. But do not raise it gently from a village away and then leave. I held my silence too long once, and it cost years. Come closer. Let her see you carry a piece of it, so she learns she was never meant to carry it alone.
— Itachi Uchiha
Sasuke Uchiha weighs in
My brother always did love a clean speech about love. Here is what he stepped around: your mother isn't only afraid of losing your brother. She's afraid of sitting still long enough to feel what she's already lost. The counting, the hidden pills — that's not vigilance, it's a cage, and she built it because a cage is easier than grief. I know the shape of that lie. I organized my whole life around one. And you — you raise it "gently," then fly home. Stop. Gentleness is what lets her keep pretending. Go and ask her the ugly thing out loud: who is she really guarding. Then don't leave until she answers. Hn.
— Sasuke Uchiha
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