Warning: Story involves the death of a young child

Ibiki was well positioned, hiding in a shadow under the eaves of the small castle, lurking outside the window of his target's bedchamber. The fact that the room was a nursery, he told himself, and that the target was a mere toddler, was irrelevant. He waited and watched, observing the nurse who put the child to bed. Marking when the positions of the guards changed. One guard, tonight, was one of his own team. The man he was transformed into was already long dead, his body disassembled and bones crushed, fed to the flock of vultures Ibiki summoned. The birds would carry the young guard's soul to the sky, liberating this unwitting victim of the Leaf from the pain of his current lifetime.

At just before midnight, the false guard carried out the ultimate task of his aspect of this mission: he seduced the nurse away from the sleeping child. When Ibiki heard the soft laugh of the woman, the syrupy, disguised voice of his comrade sweet-talking the unsuspecting servant, he slipped silently into the room.

Standing over the child's bed, he was struck with how small and fragile the boy was. Small, delicate, with a large forehead and wispy black hair, he reminded Ibiki of his brother Idate. His brother who, just as he would willingly kill this child tonight, he would himself willingly die to protect. Idate was older than this boy, but somehow he could not banish the thought of his sibling from his mind as he slipped his large hands around the baby's neck, crushing it's larynx.

Cutting off the child's air and voice was only the preliminary step, though, to this assassination. The boy was a pawn, the heir to a noble house, his death intended to destabilize the realm in which he lived and make it ripe for control by the men and women who had plotted this event. There was no reason to make the infant suffer. Ibiki jerked his hands sharply up and to the left, snapping the tiny spine and severing the baby's brainstem.

As he felt the life leave the body he held, Ibiki thought again of a sibling, but this time it was Isao, his older brother, who came to mind. Like the baby now dead in his grasp, Isao had been deprived of his future at the hands of a ninja assassin. Would this little soul, so recently departed from its body, find new life? A better life? Be allowed, next time around, to live it longer?

Ibiki laid the boy back in his bed, carefully setting his skull atop his neck to appear unbroken. In the morning the nurse would awake from a sleep she hadn't meant to fall into, to find her erstwhile suitor disappeared without a trace, and her charge cold and stiff in his cradle. Suspicion would naturally fall upon the missing guard. Ibiki and the other Konoha ANBU would be long gone by the time the sun rose over this fractious fiefdom.

Originally written as part of an application to an RPG, Scarlet Spiral. The scenario: How does your character cope with a mission where s/he has to kill a young child?

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