Author's Note.
So this is the first fanfic I've actually bothered to post. You can comment or whatever if you want to, I'm not one of those people that is going to post "REVIEWS PLEASE" after every chapter. I probably won't even follow this up with another chapter.
Character Background: Sekka Yanaihara is an OC that was a student of Kushina Uzumaki. Minato and Kushina asked her to look after Naruto and help make sure that the villagers treated him right, but she could not because she was inducted into ANBU after the Nine Tailed Fox attack. She was also good friends with Kakashi because they were both the only students that Kushina and Minato had left after the Third Shinobi War.
Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto. (Who is currently torturing us all by not revealing who Tobi is)
It was an average day. The sun beat down, housewives haggled with the street vendors about the price of imported fish, academy students ran their laps for taijutsu class, and young children were scolded for jumping up onto the red and green roofs of the wooden buildings. Old women weeded their gardens, workers slurped to their heart's content at ramen bars, and the village gates were flung wide open to the flow of coming and going diplomats, tourists, merchants, and, of course, ninja.
Visitors from smaller towns gazed in interest at the many people in green flak jackets that were going about their business, (delivering papers and throwing knives and complaining about their missions), because of course to them, it seemed as though everyone in Konohagakure was a shinobi. To the tourists, it seemed as though the village that was hidden amongst acres and acres of forest could make even the oldest of peasants into a shining, proud ninja that had inherited the Will of Fire.
But to Sekka Yanaihara, this all seemed surreal and odd. Stranding on top of the Hokage heads, over looking the entire spread of her home, she realized that she hadn't actually looked at Konoha in over thirteen years. She had been fighting, sacrificing blood and team mates and honor and personal secrets and her emotion and her god danged arm for it at a moments notice, but she had never actually looked at it from behind her mask. She had ignored her fears, disregarded anything that she believed, and forgotten anything else but her orders for a village she hadn't seen in over a decade.
She had sought solace in her ANBU missions because she had nothing else, and they allowed her to hide, hide from her memories and thoughts and the taunts of the other villagers that screamed Foreigner, foreigner. And she had grown addicted to them, completing one after one with deadly accuracy and skill. But now they were taken away from her because of a stupid traitor and Sekka was forced to feel the memories and the thoughts and the taunts and the pain wash over her like withdrawal.
But, she realized, she wasn't actually feeling anything. The Sekka Yanaihara that stood over the stone carving of her former sensei's head was simply a shell. A shell of someone who had once been. Who had cried and raged and loved and rejoiced and agonized and had felt. That Sekka Yanaihara was only a memory. A thirteen year old memory that almost everyone had dropped somewhere along the path of hard training and their own missions.
"This should hurt..." she thought. "I should be feeling emotional pain... shouldn't I?" Sekka didn't know. Sekka didn't know anything anymore, just how to sew up her own wounds temporarily and which points of the human body were most susceptible to attack and which ANBU members were best at assassinations and which were best at torture and interrogation. She just... stood there.
Then her brilliant mind managed to pin one of the flying thoughts down. She was lost. That's what was going on. Sekka Yanaihara, with her good sense of direction and twenty seven years of living in Konoha was lost. Not literally, figuratively, she specified to herself.
"Is that an emotion?" she wondered. "If it is, is it a good thing that I'm feeling emotion? Do I know anyone that could clarify that? Do I even know if anyone outside of ANBU is still alive?" Sekka blinked and realized that she didn't really know the status of any person that wasn't one of her soldiers, a person in her bingo book or the Godaime Hokage. She didn't know if that hyperactive idiot, Guy, was still yelling about youth, she didn't know if Kurenai and Asuma had ever officially announced that they were together, she didn't know if Shukaku Nara had ever agreed with his wife on a name for his child, she didn't know if any of these people were actually still alive. She didn't even know if Kakashi was still alive... and Sekka knew, as a fact, that she should know that. But she didn't. The only person she did know about was... Naruto.
Naruto. Directly after her ANBU induction, Sekka had tracked Naruto, listened intensely for rumors of him, checked his stats again and again, making sure that he was being given the orphan allowance and feeling guilty because she should be raising him and protecting him, not some hateful nurses and indifferent Academy teachers. But eventually she had reduced her efforts to checking once a month to see if his file was still in the system, settling for the few references she heard to "the fox kid". Sekka knew something else then. That she should never be able to face her sensei's graves again because their one and only child, the child they had given their lives to, hadn't been looked after. He had been bullied and looked down on and hated by almost the entire population of the village. Their last wish was not fulfilled. It was floating forgotten in the wind. Sekka also knew that she should be over ridden with guilt, but nothing in her felt it. No inch of her body felt regret.
ANBU had stolen her emotion. ANBU had stolen her soul.