Making Trauma Worse with Words 🫶🏼

The wet hair, the dead-eyed restraint, and the absolute, grim certainty that the only thing left for him is damnation. Like, yes, king! That's another death on your shoulders! Yes, your hands are never going to be clean! (Not that it should matter—they were already stained red to begin with). Yes, you won't ever truly find peace!

Itachi is basically a beautifully engineered guilt cathedral wearing a forehead protector.

The appeal is not even “he’d kill me,” really. It is that he would do it with that horrible, tender, self-erasing conviction that he was sparing you something, then spend the rest of eternity treating it as proof that he deserves no warmth, no future, no forgiveness. The man would make one devastating choice and build an entire internal mausoleum around it.

First and foremost I apologize for my extended absence—things got a bit out of hand.

To be honest, I had no intention at all to ghost the fic—and let me be clear—I haven’t. I just haven’t posted in months. And I didn’t really mean to do that.

I’ve actually had half of Chapter 31 written out for the longest time, and I plan to finish it soon. But as we know, things don’t always go to plan.

I’ve read each and every one of your comments. I’ve sat down and looked over my storylines time and time again.

I’m just really tired.

But fret not, this fic is not abandoned. It will never be abandoned. Even if I take a long time to post, I will never abandon this fic.

I’ve been thinking about how much I love Naruto and Sasuke lately.

In one of my earlier chapter notes, I talked a bit about how my personality resembles Naruto much more than Sasuke. Now, I’m not sure. I feel much more like a mix.

When I like something, I tend to be extremely obsessive about it. Naruto and Sasuke are kind of the prime example, lmao.

This is something I’ve been thinking about lately, and I wanted to put it somewhere.

Then I remember I’m a weird little freak and have always been a weird little freak and I will continue to be a weird little freak forevermore.

My very first fixation started at the young and impressionable age of exactly 3 years old—sharks.

After a few years, a classmate eventually called me a “shark freak” and that’s kind of stuck in my head ever since—hence the username.

It’s a bit of reminder that my obsessions never really fade—they just seem to take a bit of a backseat until they randomly resurface again.

13 year old me adored Naruto. And then I didn’t think about him again properly for years until all of a sudden, last year, on a random night I woke up in cold sweat from a dream about Boruto and Shippuden’s ending.

The intense sense of injustice, revulsion, anger, and near religious fervor I felt cannot properly be conveyed in words. I wrote Chapter 1 that night in a haze—before spending the entire day somewhat revising and editing it before posting it. Pressing the post button baffled me; I’d never posted on Ao3 before despite being a lurker for the longest time.

It was strange. Naruto had been gone. I hadn’t thought about him in years. Why had he come back? As it turns out, I was the one who’d left.

I know I talk about him as though he’s a real person. But—years after I’ve watched the show, it’s like he’s come back to teach me about things I haven’t learned or have already forgotten in the brief period we spent apart. To me, the impact he’s had on my life even as a fictional character is undeniable.

I felt like it was fate. I hadn’t thought far enough about what to do with the plot, but I knew what I wanted out of this fic: to write it.

My fic is just a fic. It’s random fanfiction. However, the compulsion I have to write it out, feels like, to me, fate. I’m being weird and intense about this, of course, but dear reader, if I wasn’t as weird and intense as I am, I wouldn’t be able to write them the way that I do.

My dear Naruto and Sasuke. I adore other characters. Of course I do. My obsession with them may fade again one day—switching from the driver’s seat back to passenger’s seat. But it will never be gone.