Chapter Text
Hatred is a very simple word, and a very straightforward emotion.
At least, that is what I believed before I understood how heavy a simple word could become when it finally belonged to the right person.
There are words people use too carelessly because the world has made them available, because language is easier than honesty, and because the human heart is often too impatient to separate irritation from resentment, resentment from anger, and anger from the darker, colder thing waiting beneath all of them.
People say they hate rain because it inconveniences them. They say they hate a person who embarrasses them, a rule that binds them, a bad memory, a mistake that refuses to remain in the past. They say it with exhausted little sighs, with laughter, with tears, with the temporary drama of a moment that feels larger than it will seem later.
I had done that too.
I had used the word because I thought the presence of pain was enough to justify it. I had thought dislike, humiliation, fear, resentment, and wounded pride could all gather under the same name if they were strong enough to disturb me. Perhaps that is why, for so long, I mistook hatred for something I understood. I had known too much grief not to imagine myself acquainted with every ugly room inside the human soul.
That was arrogance.
It was also innocence, though I would have resented anyone who called it that at the time.
I’ve found that most of the people who say they hate someone, or something, do not hate it, they despise it, whatever it is, frustrates them to the point of insanity, or they find something off, distrustful or negligent about the person, the place or the thing they claim to hate, but that, to me, is not hatred.
Hatred is not merely irritation sharpened until it draws blood.
It is not a bad day that never resolved itself. It is not the sick, embarrassed feeling of being wrong, or the exhausting knowledge that someone has seen you too clearly in a moment when you wanted to remain hidden. It is not even the immediate fury that comes from betrayal, although betrayal often walks close enough beside hatred that, from a distance, they can be mistaken for the same figure wearing different clothing.
Hatred is not always loud.
That was one of the first things I learned too late.
Hatred does not always scream. Sometimes it does not break things. Sometimes it has already settled so deeply inside the body that every breath passes through it, silently.
Real hatred can be quiet. It can move through a life without theatrical display, making every ordinary object feel contaminated when it reminds you of the person who caused it to exist in that form.
Annoyances or your own failures can not be classified as hatred. I thought I knew what it was to hate something, but I was wrong. I hated the cage the Uchiha had built around me, but now, I understand it was their way of loving me, and protecting me.
That understanding did not come gently.
Nothing important ever seemed to come gently in my life. The Uchiha cage had been real. I will never insult the girl I was by pretending otherwise. Love does not become harmless because it is sincere, and protection does not become righteous simply because danger exists outside the walls. The compound, their money, their guards, their silence, the decisions made around me before I understood enough to refuse them properly, all of that had been a cage.
Yet with time, grief, distance, and more loss than any person should have to use as education, I understood the difference between a cage built from ownership and a shelter built badly by men who had never learned how to love without guarding the door from both sides.
The difference mattered. It did not excuse everything. It only made hating them, impossible.
Madara, Obito, Itachi, Izuna, even the house itself with its watchful corridors and old violence pressed into polished wood, had become complicated in ways Ren never was.
The Uchiha frightened me because their love had weight, hunger, memory, arrogance, and devotion. It was dangerous because it was real. It could smother if left unchecked, but it could also stand between me and the world with a ferocity so complete that even resentment could not make me call it false.
Ren was different.
Ren called his cage rescue, he thought , I truly believe he thought, he was my salvation.
That was why his cruelty reached places inside me the Uchiha’s never had.
I hated how little my mother and father cared about me when I was younger, and I hated how unfair it was that both of them died, before I was able to sort out, understand and fully accept my feelings for them, but most of all, at that time, I hated that none of us were to blame for our inadequacies.
There is a particular helplessness in loving people too late.
It leaves the heart full of unfinished sentences. It makes every memory unstable because even the worst ones begin asking to be reconsidered once the person who made them can no longer answer for them. When my mother died, I was still young enough to believe grief would have a single shape if I looked at it honestly. When my father died, I was old enough to know better, yet not old enough to bear how much of him remained unresolved inside me.
Parents are cruel in the way all ordinary people can be cruel when they are too limited, too frightened, too tired, too broken by their own histories to become what their children need. That kind of failure scars differently from malice. It does not give the clean relief of blame. It only leaves a person standing amid the wreckage of what should have been, holding love in one hand and injury in the other, unable to decide which one is heavier.
I had wanted someone to be guilty enough to simplify them.
My mother would not give me that. My father would not give me that.
Their deaths did not make them innocent, but death has a way of making accusation feel indecent when the person receiving it can no longer flinch at my words.
Now, I understand that they were only human, like me, and had faults that were the result of their own youthful, environmental failures. My mother, like me, lived a life uncommon, a life most people wouldn’t understand. I no longer blame her for her short comings. I have too many of my own to point my finger at her.
It took me too long to understand that forgiveness is sometimes less generous than exhaustion.
There are emotions a person releases not because they were small, and not because the dead earned mercy by leaving, but because continuing to hold them begins to feel like carrying furniture from a burned house into every room you try to inhabit afterward. My mother was not what I needed her to be. My father was late in every way that mattered until that too became part of our love. I blamed them both when blame was the only power I had.
Then the world grew larger and infinitely crueler.
It showed me men whose failures were not human weakness, but choice sharpened into habit. It showed me the difference between a parent who did not know how to love me properly and a man who looked at my suffering and decided it was a doorway through which he had the right to enter.
Perspective is strange and ever changing. The way I see the world now is not the same way I saw the world a year ago, two years ago, or even, three months ago. I am certain, that a year from now, I will likewise, see the world differently.
That is one of the humiliations of surviving any tribulation. You are always someone who understands yesterday too late.
The girl I was would have judged the woman I became. The woman I became would have pitied that girl for thinking judgment was the same as wisdom. There were so many versions of me left behind in rooms I no longer enter, the girl who wanted ordinary love, the daughter who wanted a parental apology for being human, the student who wanted safety in an unsafe world, the woman who mistook distance for freedom, the survivor who mistook knowledge for peace.
Each version of me believed she had finally understood enough to be safe, and could protect herself.
Each version was wrong, horribly, dangerously wrong.
Love is like wise complex. For me, it is the most confusing and most difficult thing to accept, cope with or give. I want to be loved and I want to love those who make me happy, but every time I do, it seems, like someone dies. There aren’t many people whom I love, but more than half of the ones I dared to love and who I know loved me back, are gone now, because they loved me, and because I loved them.
That is the ugliest arithmetic my life ever taught me. Love became a thing I counted in graves.
It should not have been that way. Love should have been morning coffee left on a desk, laughter in a hallway, a father’s watch still warm from his wrist, a friend’s voice filling a room with more confidence than sense, a hand at my back waiting for permission before it settled there. Love should have been inconvenient, tender, difficult, irritating, and alive.
For me, love became the absence of life and all the warmth, I vainly thought I deserved.
It became something men could follow. Something the world could punish. Every attachment I tried to keep private seemed to reveal itself eventually as another vulnerability, another line leading back to my throat. The people who loved me became visible because of that love, and visibility, in the world I inhabited, often became the first step toward loss.
I know that is not fair. Grief rarely is.
Someone once told me, that you have to love something to hate it. What a ridiculously foolish, and naive thing to say. It is such an irritating sentiment. It disgusts me to the point of complete revulsion. Hatred, does not require love, it is the absence of love.
That sentence still offends me.
Perhaps because I know how fond people are of making pain sound wise once it is far enough away from them. People love softening hatred into the remains of affection because it comforts them. It lets them believe every strong emotion must have once belonged to love, as if love is the source of all deep feeling, as if the human soul is too simple to produce revulsion on its own.
That is not true.
I did not have to love Ren Kanagawa to hate him.
I did not have to cherish some buried softness, some secret grief for what he might have been, some tragic longing for the boy he had been before his life taught him cruelty was its own reward. The idea insults me. It makes a romance out of rot. It imagines a red thread of fate where there was only a stain. It asks the victim to preserve tenderness in order to make the hatred more acceptable to people who have never had to breathe beside the source of it.
There was no love in what I felt for Ren.
There had been confusion once and fear. There had been pity, and perhaps that pity was one of my most foolish mistakes, because pity can become a door if you leave it open in front of the wrong man. There had been revulsion, then anger, then recognition.
Love was never part of his, or my equation.
There is no room for love, in hate. I know, you can hate something you once loved, but that is not the same thing. The sentiment infers that you still, love the thing you claim to hate, even as you hate it, and that, to me, it weak. That is something someone tells themselves that can not accept, or doesn’t know how to overcome and deal with the situation they are in.
It tells me they have never felt hatred like I have. Real hatred does not need romance hiding inside it to justify its depth. It can stand alone.
It can look at a man who has violated, manipulated, lied, killed, threatened, stalked, arranged, and called the destruction he caused devotion, and feel nothing tender beneath the disgust. It can hear his name and feel the body recoil before the mind has time to become civilized. It can remember his voice and understand that some sounds remain indecent because they belonged to a person who should never have been allowed to speak gently after what his hands had done.
Ren had sexually assaulted me and still found ways, inside the warped cathedral of his own mind, to make himself central to the wound. He could turn violation into a story about longing. He could turn coercion into proof. He could stand inside someone else’s pain and speak as if he had discovered a holy place built for him.
That was not love. That was obscenity in a man’s form.
However, I do not blame a fool for being a fool. You can only know, what you know and humans are limited by their own lack of worldly experience, be it voluntary or forced.
Ignorance is not always innocence. That was another lesson I learned to late.
Some people do not know because they have never been forced to learn. Others do not know because knowing would require them to change, and cowardice often dresses itself as confusion when the truth becomes inconvenient. I have met both kinds. I have been both kinds, in smaller ways than I like admitting.
I cannot blame every person who failed to understand what Ren was. Some people saw only a polished young man, a wounded heir, a criminal with old grudges, a survivor of family violence, a figure moving through Tokyo’s underworld with purpose and money and enough restraint to seem strategic rather than diseased. Some saw a man with reason to hate the Uchiha and mistook reason for justification. Some saw my distance from him and believed distance was safety.
I blame myself for that too, though blame has become a dull knife after so many years of use.
I had seen him.
Not fully. Not early enough. Not with the brutal clarity I would later wish I had possessed. Yet I had seen pieces of him. I had felt unease. I had noticed the way his attention lingered too long, the way his compassion had edges, the way his grief seemed less like a wound and more like a room he wanted to lock other people inside. I had been too tired, too frightened, too entangled in other cages to understand that one of the clearest and most present dangers in my life was standing directly in front of me.
That failure belongs partly to me, but Ren’s crimes do not become smaller because of it.
A better sentiment is, you can do anything you want. I know this might sound immature, but if you stop and think about it, it isn’t. Or rather, it doesn’t have to be. As I said, the only limitations there are in life, are the ones you give yourself. I’m not saying something so juvenile as, rules are meant to be broken, though, some are, I am saying, people can really do anything they want, they can be anyone or anything they want to be.
What people are, who they become and what they do with their lives, depends solely, and wholly on them.
That is why I cannot forgive him.
Not because I do not understand suffering, or because I have no imagination for the way pain can bend a person until they hardly recognize their own shape. Nor because I believe childhood wounds vanish cleanly once a person becomes old enough to sign documents, inherit names, command men, or destroy lives. I know better than that.
I know what grief can do, what loneliness can excuse if you let it speak too long without answering back.
I know how violence can train the body, how neglect can teach a person to mistake hunger for fate, how love given too late can become almost as painful as love withheld entirely.
None of that made Ren inevitable. He chose his own path. Again and again, he chose, the wrong path.
He chose to make his pain more important than the lives around him, to turn women into experiments, tools, sexual slaves, into inhuman dolls existing only for other men’s pleasures. He chose to look at fear and see opportunity, to look at me and see not a person, not a woman, not a survivor, but an answer to questions I had never asked him to bring me. He chose to believe that if he could destroy enough of the world around me, the emptiness left behind would resemble love.
People can really do anything they want, and Ren did. That is the terror of free will.
I have my own limitations, but they are far less than they used to be. I now know a world so much larger than the one I was brought up in, and it is still growing. It will keep growing, and I will slowly, but doggedly eliminate all of the limitations set before me, because I never, never wants to go back to the person I once was.
The person I once was wanted safety to be simple.
She wanted love to have rules. She wanted family to mean something clear. I am not that girl anymore. I do not know whether to mourn her or feel relieved that she is gone.
Perhaps both.
The world became too large for the girl I was, and once it widened, it never stopped widening. Tokyo grew teeth. London grew mirrors. The Uchiha compound became both shelter and prison. Kanagawa became a name I could not hear without feeling bile rise in my throat.
Individual determination can be fierce. I have a strong heart and a stubborn will, but comfort, that thing called love, loyalty and devotion, those are all limitations, bindings that keep us grounded, for better or for worse.
Some limitations are wroth keeping, others, not so much. That is another truth Ren never understood.
He believed devotion was something to be extracted, believed loyalty could be arranged through pressure, fear, shame, dependence, and grief. He believed love was proven by endurance, as if the amount of suffering a person endured beside him could measure the strength of their bond. He believed if someone stayed, it meant they belonged, and if someone left, it meant they had been stolen.
The Uchiha, for all their faults, were not gentle men reshaped into harmlessness lumps by affection. I would never insult myself by pretending that. Madara did not stop being Madara because he loved me. Obito did not stop burning too hot, or stop being too violent. Itachi did not stop hiding knives behind restraint, his passivity a thick mask, to keep the cold hearted killer, underneath, contained, and Izuna did not stop cutting truth into cleaner shapes than comfort would allow.
Yet they learned that if I was to stay, the choice had to be mine.
Ren could not comprehend that distinction.
Perhaps, I am still naive, or ignorant, but I can not let go of my hatred. It is also, a limitation I have set for myself, a reminder, a fire that still burns deep within my soul.
That hatred kept me awake.
It did not always make me strong. There were days when it weakened me, when it sat inside my stomach like sickness, when it made food taste useless and sleep feel untrustworthy. There were moments when I hated Ren so completely that the feeling frightened me, not because I thought he deserved less, but because I did not know how to live with something so vast inside a body that still had to dress, study, work, speak politely, answer questions, and accept the comfort of hands that were not his.
Hatred can become a country if you are not careful. It can give you borders. It can tell you where not to step because you think every step may be your last. Fear, that is what Ren gave me. There was a time I feared him, more than I hated him because he was unlike any person I ever knew, heard of, read about or could conjure in the depths of even my sometimes distorted, fragmented mind.
At times, when I thought of Ren, I thought I was going insane. Maybe I was. I am not ashamed to admit it, because even though I was weak then, I am strong now. Even if you are strong, it does not mean you can not be weak and vice versa, if you are weak, it does not mean you will always be weak.
Fear can keep the dead beside you in a terrible way, as if releasing even a little of the fire means abandoning them to silence. I knew that danger. I know it still. My dead, walk beside me everyday. I hear their voices sometimes, when I least expect it. Ren used that against me, tormented me with it in a drugged state, making a prison of my own mind for his sick pleasure.
There were people who loved me enough to worry that hatred would become another cage, and perhaps they were not wrong. Rem was evidence of that, even though, I never told them what he did to me, Itachi I think, knew.
Some cages are worth breaking. Some fires are worth keeping, so long as you remember they are not the same thing as light.
Kanagawa Ren. I hate everything he is and everything he could become if left unchecked. He is evil, he is despair. No one has caused me more grief than that man. My cousin.
His name became a sickness in me. His name carried too much with it, rooms I did not want to remember, hands I would have cut from memory if memory had flesh, old griefs he wore as if they belonged to him, and every dead or wounded part of my life he tried to arrange into proof that he and I were alike.
We were never alike.
That was one of his great delusions. He thought, fate had brought us together, some form of kami divination, destined lovers or some other bullshit.
Ren believed loss made him special. He believed grief purified his cruelty, that his own suffering entitled him to take, to punish, to keep, to ruin me in the name of what he called love. He believed that because something had been stolen from him, the world owed him compensation in the shape of power, fear, revenge, and me.
My suffering did not make me his reflection. It made me recognize him, as the person I could have become.
I hated him for killing Yami, for every lie he told himself about saving me. I hated him for every person he used because they stood near the outline of my life. I hated him for my father’s last unfinished chances, for the friends whose warmth should never have become targets, for the way his violence made love feel like an accusation against the people foolish or brave enough to give it to me.
His life was not worth half of one life he damaged. Not half of one laugh. Not half of one ordinary morning.
That is the kind of thought a decent person might be ashamed of. I am tired of pretending decency requires dishonesty. If one can love honestly, brutally and without remorse, why can I not do the same with my hatred?
…and yet, even after everything he has done to me, I can not hate him, only his actions, his obsessions and his delusion.
I pity him.
It is not forgiveness hiding beneath a prettier name. It is not the childish pity I once might have offered because I wanted the world to make sense and thought understanding a wound meant lowering the knife held by the person who carried it. That kind of pity is dangerous.
My pity is colder.
I pity him the way one might pity something ruined by its own design, the smallness beneath the violence, the emptiness beneath the myth, the boy who may once have stood somewhere inside him before the man buried him under grievance, entitlement, and hunger. I pity the waste of a human life that could have become something other than a plague.
That pity does not lessen the disgust. It sharpens it, because he was not born to be evil. He became what he was by choosing one cruelty, then another, then another, until choice became habit and habit became nature. He was not the necessary outcome of suffering. He was a man, and because he was a man, every monstrous thing he did belonged to him.
However, my pity, does not extend to forgiveness.
It never will.
I know that now with a certainty I did not have when I was younger. There are people who will tell you forgiveness is for the wounded, not the guilty, that releasing hatred is how a person becomes free. Perhaps that is true for some people. Perhaps there are wounds that close only when the injured hand lets go.
Mine did not work that way.
My hatred did not become freedom, but neither did surrendering it. My hatred became witness. It stood beside the dead when the world wanted to move on. It remembered what had been done when official stories tried to act cleaner than truth. It kept Ren from becoming tragic in my mind simply because he had once suffered. It reminded me, every time pity threatened to become weakness, that pain explains nothing unless a person chooses what to do with it.
Ren chose wrong.
I blame him for almost everything that went wrong in my life, even knowing that sentence is not wholly fair. He did not create every cage. He did not write every lie. My world was already damaged when Ren entered it.
Yet he used every damaged part of it to manipulate, and control me.
That was his genius, if such an ugly word can be placed near him. He did not need to invent all the rot. He only needed to find where it already lived and feed it, nurture it and watch it grow and fester in me until I could take no more, until I broke and he was the only thing there, by his own design for me to turn to for human comfort.
Old police failures, underworld grudges, old shame. Old grief, men who thought silence was strategy, young men who thought cruelty was power. Ren made use of all of it.
Perhaps that is why my hatred feels so immense. It is not only hatred for one man. It is hatred for the fact that the world had so many places ready to praise and enforce what he became. Hatred for every locked door that opened for him. Hatred for every person who saw only fragments and decided fragments were not enough to act, for the version of myself that saw fragments too and looked away because I was exhausted, frightened, grieving, or too busy surviving the last disaster to recognize the next one heading straight for me to avoid it.
That is my blame. I carry it. I do not let it absolve him.
There is a difference between guilt and responsibility, just as there is a difference between pity and forgiveness, love and possession, safety and captivity, hatred and anger.
I spent years learning differences other people seemed to understand in childhood, and perhaps that is why each lesson cost me so much.
I will not say hatred saved me.
That would give it too holy a name.
I will say hatred clarified what love could not bear to look at directly.
When I think of Ren Kanagawa now, I do not think only of his crimes, although there are more than enough of them to fill any grave meant to hold him. I think of the obscene fact of his continued life, the insult of all the mornings he had while people better than him lost theirs. I think of the way his breath entered the world again and again while the dead remained silent. I think of how many warnings arrived too late, how many truths surfaced after they could no longer save anyone, how often I mistook survival for understanding simply because I had not died from the last lesson.
Hatred is a very simple word. That is still true.
I hate Ren Kanagawa.
I understood, eventually, that none of the truths I held in my hands cancelled the others.
That may be the worst thing perspective does. It does not give you peace. It only makes the map larger, until you can see every road that led to the ruin and still know, with perfect clarity, who chose to walk it while carrying a knife.
Ren chose to walk that path and so did I, only, it was not a path we walked together as he thought, but in opposite, and drastically opposing directions.