The twelfth entry of The Language of Flowers series features Chiyo. I hope you guys like it; this isn't going to be a "light" entry.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

Rue means regret.

The small lavender flowers called rue are a main ingredient in many of Chiyo's poisons. As she pores over her work table at night, forsaking food and rest, the flowers become the faces of those she once loved, of all those whose lives have been touched by her hands, for the worse instead of the better.

When I look back on those distant days, I believe I first began to go wrong when I lied to Sasori, and told him that his parents' mission had been extended, and not that they had been killed.

Of course, there were other mistakes before that. Not making her poisons quite complex enough, so Konoha's Slug Queen could decipher them, was one. Allowing her parents to marry her off to her second cousin, a man she utterly detested, was another (The only good thing that ever came out of Chiyo's marriage was her son Kazuo; Chiyo was decidedly relieved when she received the message that her "husband" had been killed in the First Great War).

But the first real major mistake was lying to Sasori and not acquainting him with the truth from the start.

The second was the mistake of inaction. Chiyo hadn't been blind to Sasori's descent into darkness. It had been happening before her very eyes. Sasori became quiet and withdrawn (he had always been shy, but this was taking it to the extremes), interested only in his puppets; the only person who seemed capable of distracting him from them was his friend and teammate Karura. He had come back from his first battle completely untouched and unaffected psychologically. That was when Chiyo should have guessed that something was wrong.

It had all been in front of her. She was just blind to the truth.

The third was a pivotal one. Chiyo's third mistake was to obey the word of the Nidaime Kazekage and take a team of shinobi out into the wastes to recapture the Shukaku, and then re-seal it inside of its second host, a baby girl who was never named and died thirteen years later.

The fourth was not suspecting Sasori when the Sandaime Kazekage disappeared. Chiyo's suspicions against her grandson began to grow only when Sasori himself disappeared two years after war broke out. By then, of course, it was too late to raise an inquiry, and Chiyo never said anything about a possible connection between her grandson's odd behavior and the Sandaime's disappearance.

The fifth came seven years later. The Yondaime Kazekage asked Chiyo to seal the Shukaku in what would be his third host. It was a request, not an order; she could have refused. But she didn't.

Chiyo sealed the Shukaku in his third host, an unborn fetus some five months away from being born. The child was the Kazekage's third and final child, and the boy's mother was the sacrifice.

Karura's final words to Chiyo were simple and vitriolic. "Damn you." Chiyo, being possessed of a less than even temper herself, can not blame her for wanting to get the final word in.

In the end, Karura got the last laugh. But Chiyo knows that in the end, that last mistake may have corrupted her beyond all hope of redemption.

So she isolated herself from the village, claimed to hate it. But Chiyo has come to realize that there are some problems, some consequences of bad choices, that she simply can not run away from.

Sitting at her worktable at night, her joints so cold and stiff that she can't even move her fingers to work on poisons or puppets, the old puppet mistress gnaws bitterly on the stem of the rue plant (even if it is poisonous, a poisoner's habit of dosing themselves makes Chiyo immune to any toxins found in the rue plant), Chiyo bitterly wonders what might have been if she had made different decisions in the past.

And many years later, standing in a field thick with lavender rue and staring down at the fifteen-year-old boy who has grown to painfully resemble her grandson, clearly dead because of a choice she made, Chiyo's regret is alleviated. Because there is finally something she can do.

I told you it would be heavy.