AN: I have no right to start another fic, but yeah well. Too bad. I've lost my inspiration for that right now.

Disclaimer: Don't own anything here.

No Place Like Home

(prologue: if i fall)

There is no world without history, it has been said. It bleeds into the earth; what happened yesterday, what happened five minutes ago and what happened several thousand years ago. To the Kyuubi, it is all the same. The demon lost all sense of time long ago. A house remembers. A people reflect on what has happened and learn from it. The Kyuubi does not. The fox is all instinct—tooth and claw.

There's no place like home, they say. There is no home for Naruto. They hate him; fear him, despise the demon sealed inside of him. The Yondaime Hokage saw him a hero, they saw him a demon, not realising the line between the two different beings. They only ever saw the Kyuubi in him. There's no hero in him, at least, not to them.

----(//)----

It was on the day of the fox-child's twelfth birthday that our story began. A terrible day; a thunderstorm raged on over the peaceful village hidden in the leaf, and the child was left alone to wander the fields on the outskirts. The wet grass smelt good to him after three days cooped up inside of his little apartment, the feeling of the rain was cool against his face, and if he had held any less dignity, he may have found himself rolling in the sweet sticky dirt that he had trampled underfoot.

Three days ago, he received a letter from the academy. That letter, the letter that shot down his dreams like a hunter would its prey.

'We regret to inform you…' to hell they did. They were just like everybody else.

'…Unable to accept you into the academy…' like every year. It was always the same story; each year he was sent the same letter. They disguised it, hid it in fancy wording and posh terms, but it was always the same underneath it all. It was an indirect 'no', of sorts, and receiving the same thing over and over made him wonder what exactly he had done wrong in the first place. The villagers seemed to hate him for merely existing, and if the denial wasn't nearly enough, there were the stares and whispers that followed him wherever he went.

However, Naruto wasn't one to be beaten down so easily. It had happened when he was younger, too, and so he had developed a kind of thick emotional barrier between himself and others. Some of the time, he even found it easier to be by himself.

But now, he decided, was not the time for wallowing in his thoughts. And so, mud spattered, soaking wet and shivering from immense cold, the demon-child made his way back to his small apartment in Konoha, not realising exactly how much his excursion to those muck-covered fields would change the course of his life, and so many others.

AN: And that's it. (Short, I know. But it's late, and I need my sleep.) Feel free to point out typos that I've missed, and sentences that just generally don't make sense.

Pairings are undecided, though it may end up not having a main pairing at all. I'm open to suggestions.