This one's about Kurotsuchi. Second person, present tense this time. Runs with the assumption that she and Deidara are siblings. Shows a much colder, rougher side to the Third Tsuchikage's granddaughter.

Disclaimer: If I owoned it, we'd have a definitive answer on whether these two were siblings or not.

You are born into a family of men; it shapes you.

You are born one year after the boy you will grow to love and hate with equal intensities, but that is not yet part of your story. For the moment, you are simply a baby. A baby girl, to be specific, but this will never matter to you beyond your physical characteristics, even if most outside your family think it should. You are a baby in a house full of men – brother, father, cousin, grandfather – that know very little of raising children. Of raising a girl. You are a baby with no mother, if for the simple fact that she refused to stay and is now dead. You are not as different as your brother, who looks like your mother with fine bones and blonde hair, but you still currently have baby-blue eyes, so you are different enough. Looks will never matter to you, though, never as much as pragmatism and the immovable will of Iwagakure shinobi. You will grow up learning that this was something your mother never possessed, despite being the great-granddaughter of the First Tsuchikage, and the daughter of the Third.

You resolve from a young age to be nothing like your mother. You will be as strong and immovable as the earth, as potent and decimating as magma. Though your brother looks like the woman you have come to term Kimagure Tori, the Capricious Bird, you refuse to hate him because of this. He is still your best friend, the one who still plays with you despite his lessons with Grandfather, the one who still defends you when the other children tease and mock you because of your tomboyish nature. He still trains with you, still teaches you things you would only have otherwise learned when you entered the academy, still helps you hone your skills despite the fact that he is the prodigy of your tiny family. He still makes time for you even as you both grow up, still makes time to spend with you even as you enter the academy and his prodigious skill takes him to the Explosion Corps. No matter how much he apparently is like your mother, you could never hate him. Or, so you grow up believing.

You are little more than thirteen, when you witness your brother defect from your home Village. Though no-one knew you were there, you watched him steal a kinjutsu to further enhance his explosive clay – his "art" – and then flee. Trying to stop him would have been laughable, if not straight forward suicide. You had grown up thinking that your brother was not like your mother, despite being her mirror image in looks and explosive power. You had believed that he was not like the Kimagure Tori, that he had more of your grandfather's blood in him than hers, but seeing him leave proves your beliefs wrong. Your foundation isn't just shaken that night; it is completely destroyed. Your best friend is gone, your older brother is gone, the one person that refused to believe not defending you would toughen your skin against the harsh world of being a shinobi. It is as if the earth – just moments ago so strong and sure – crumbles way from beneath your feet. Watching him leave feels like you are falling into a never-ending, yawning abyss of nothingness.

Your world changes that night, and it never quite rights itself the same way ever again. You never tell anyone this, of course because now your defender and ally is gone. There is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, explosion-shaped hole in your life, and it never fills. You internalize this, and you focus on the one thing that you truly have left. You focus on your indomitable, unshakable will and power. The scent of ash and burning clings to you after that night like it never has before. You do not have friends, you spend time with your cousin because he lives with you and can teach you things about Doton that your brother never took the time to learn. You learn Katon from your grandfather, using fire to enhance the dust and ash that is in your blood. You train until you collapse, and then wake on the ground and get back up. You make your heart stone, so that you will never love and lose ever again. Shinobi do not have feelings, Iwagakure shinobi even less so.

Your brother left behind a legacy, and then returned to tarnish what was left of his reputation further. If you didn't believe that you still cared before, you now were completely disabused of that notion. Even after two years, your heart is still weak, still not nearly as hard and cold as you would like to believe. You are still bloody with betrayal, still raw with rage. But even after two years, you still don't try to interfere. Let him break the place he felt was stifling him, and call it poetic justice. Let him break you, even without knowing it. Let him come and go, blazing a trail of fire and pain. Let him do as he pleases, let him break you down until there is nothing left. Let him reduce you to nothing but ash. That ash will make you stronger. That dust will fill your veins, and you will finally be far enough away from the fact that you once loved and still love him. You will be able to move on without needing to acknowledge that hole in your life and in your heart in painful detail every single moment.

Let him do what he will do; let him reduce you to cinders. Though if he doesn't know what he does to you, even being gone, it doesn't matter anymore. You will build walls of stone around your bleeding heart, and you will move on. You will not let him continue to hurt you. You will not. You will be strong like the earth, unrelenting like fire, preternatural like lava. He will mean nothing to you any longer. He will not be your best friend. He will not be your brother. He will mean less than nothing to you – you will make it so. Even if that means you must remove your heart from your body physically to accomplish it. You teach yourself Suiton to enhance another aspect of your bloodline, your quicklime, and you use it to devastating effect. You teach yourself the art of laying traps, of skillfully navigating an opponent into them. You teach yourself to use a sword, should any of your abilities ever be compromised. You teach yourself genjutsu to ensnare those that would dare oppose your Village.

You teach yourself to be strong both mentally as physically. You train with every fiber of your being, during every spare waking moment you have. There is ash in your veins, your bones are made of rock, your heart beats quicklime. You train your speed and your stamina, until you rival the Ice Woman of Kiri. You refuse to ever be weak again. But despite everything you do, that blonde-haired and blue-eyed hole still bleeds inside your heart. You come to hate the Explosion Corps because they remind you of that hole. You come to hate men and women alike because there will always be traits in either gender that remind you of the one who broke you. And yet, you still love your home with everything you have, even your hate born of betrayal and desperation unable to rival the sheer loyalty that you have to Iwa and the people in it. Despite being a woman, you are one of the most powerful shinobi in your rank, in your Village. The men hate you, and the women think you are unnatural. None of this means anything to you.

You are of the blood of the Tsuchikage, and you will follow your grandfather and great-great-grandfather, no matter what it takes. You will be the first female Kage of Iawgakure. You will be the most powerful, you will surpass even the person you once loved. No-one will hold you back, no-one will hurt you. You are rock and stone, you are ash and quicklime. You will never be anything like your brother, you will never be anything like your mother. You will be what he was supposed to be – you will be what he never wanted to be. You will wear those robes with pride, seeing honor and power, where he saw only chains and suffocation. You will be more than he ever dreamed of being, more than he ever thought you were capable of. You are a chuunin by the time you are sixteen, and a jounin by the time you are seventeen. You have never had a team, promoted by your own merits alone, and you often refuse to work with anyone, including your own family. You refuse to ever love anyone again, to let anyone close. You will never be that weak ever again.

You wont let anyone else rip out your heart like Deidara did – never again.