Death has a strange sense of humor. I had failed in protecting my teammates, and as punishment, I am thrown back in time and into the body of my killer no less. Growing up in a family of assassins who cared more about money than kin wasn't easy, but...
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THE DAYS APPROACHED TOO QUICKLY, as if Tsukasa were now just going through the motions and not truly living them. She tried to act normal, but the funny thing about normal was that the more you tried to be it, the harder it became to mold yourself.
"What is wrong with me?" It wasn't the first time she had asked that of herself, but just like every other time, she didn't have an answer. She wasn't normal. Still, it was frustrating to see that she couldn't even pretend.
"You seem stressed," Itachi mentioned, which was different since he usually minded his own business. It was honestly the only thing she could stand about anyone, and why she didn't cancel their shogi games. She should have known it wouldn't last forever. People eventually get too comfortable, that was what they did and it didn't matter if she didn't like it. "You don't have to talk about it."
Tsukasa moved along another piece, not really thinking about what strategy he was playing since she had never been able to predict them before. She managed to beat him a grand total of six times in the last six months, but he adapted too quickly. His weaknesses, his mistakes, he truly learned from them and made them disappear. He adjusted too quickly and she couldn't keep up.
"Why bring it up?" Tsukasa asked, more determined to never tell him that she was actually much older than him mentally. She could never get over the shame of being bested by a child. Kill me, take my tongue, my limbs, but for the love of all the gods, I needed my dignity.
Itachi glanced up at her, his eyes tracing over her face and likely he did see the dark circle under her eye. She tried to hide them with concealer, she even bought concealer, but the shadows were too deep. She could tell he was worried, but she could only half heartedly deny it since she was worried too. Even worse than that, her lack of expressions made it more difficult to lie and she never had much love for it either. One would think being unable to form appropriate emotions on one's face would be well suited for the art of lying, but she knew that the part that convinces people is in the eyes and she had nothing in hers. Perhaps all that had been lost with her other eye.
"I just thought it might be helpful to let you know," Itachi told her, moving his fingers over the pawn on the left side of the board, before resting on a different one in the middle.
"You're strange," she said, barely noticing the slight affection in her tone. She cleared her throat in an attempt to rid herself of something so embarrassing as seeing him as friend. She still didn't understand why the two of them, Shisui included, were so quick to find ways to spend time with her. This was especially the case since she was fairly certain she didn't have much in the ways of a good personality.
This is not just as Tsukasa, since Misaki had not been much better. In fact, she may have been worse back then. Two faced and prone to backstabbing that was never quite drilled out of her in her adolescence and onto her teenager years. She had been mean, saying one thing to people's face, and another behind their back. Thinking back on it now, that might have been due to jealousy and inadequacy. By the time she really decided to change her ways, to take her relationship with Hikaru seriously, they had all died.
