Knitting Fate (Canon Patchworking with Uchiha Ren Part II)

Forty-Eighth Thread

Hey, hi, hello, a double update because my muse is a fickle bitch and I better catch her when she's here because god knows when she'll come by next time.

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"Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans."
― Allen Saunders

0

It's still overwhelming sometimes, over two years in, the feeling of waking up in an apartment that she works hard to upkeep, and to not be alone, and not in just any way. Not with some random family member who visits only to sneer at her and criticize her everything, nor someone in her life as a brief love interest. Renee always had the worst of luck with those, especially when she got older – many younger people eyed her, a woman with a stable income and a nice living space, to possibly leech off of for the rest of their lives. Because women like pathetic strays, right? To take them home, care for them.

Other women, maybe. But Renee – Renee believed in hard work, and loafers had no place in her life. Nor did her old-fashioned family that she moved across half a country to get away from and constantly weaseled out of family meetings with work.

But to wake up in the morning, and to know that there are other people in her house, her people, who care for her, who love her – that, she still isn't used to. Most days it still overwhelms her, and it isn't rare for Ren to burst into silent tears every time she wakes in her bed, in her home, with her kids still sleeping soundly in another room in the wee hours of the morning.

She still can't believe just how lucky she is nowadays, with actual friends and people who genuinely care for her, who love her for who she is despite all her many, many downfalls. So far away from her old family who, no matter what she did, was always disappointed in her. They're worlds away, now. In a whole other life, which is not hers anymore. It makes her glad, being away. The only thing she even remotely liked back then was her job, and that... that probably wasn't healthy.

Renee Archer was thirty-one when she died, murdered on a desolate street. That was three years ago; she is Uchiha Ren now, almost fifteen but also almost thirty-four, living in a world that is now her own, that before she knew only as a drawn story, and she's so much better for it. Is it odd, that she not only doesn't mind having been killed, but is also actually glad for it? Because look where it brought her – into another, much more dangerous but also much better life, where she has people she cares for and who care for her back, where she can go out and kill people and it's a perfectly acceptable source of income, where nobody judges her for it or her scarred, muscled, masculine appearance that would send her mother and grandmother into a fit should they see her now.

She's fifteen, she's strong, she has friends and acquaintances in all the right places. When she's not on missions, she manages all the Uchiha businesses that haven't fallen with the clan's demise, and teaches Sasuke how to do so, keeping their income stable.

Maybe, soon, she'll be able to repurpose the compound into something, maybe another merchant district, or a luxury district with imported goods found rarely and in small quantities if ever-

Almost three years have passed since the massacre. It's perhaps high time to dig into the ghost town and turn it from an uninhibited wasteland to an income-generating business.

But that can wait a few more weeks. For now, Ren has to get up, go to the library, and find the brats books with detailed information about the Hokage that she'd promised them. And probably some of the Fourth's pictures and decorate the whole apartment with copies.

Lady Sparkle meows from the pile of cat on the in-built bed of the cat tower, and Awai chooses that moment to drop from the ceiling right onto Ren's face.