My bloodline was a small one to begin with, but by the time I was born it had disintegrated to only one family. My mother was a sickly woman and always had been, so I was told. Most considered it a miracle that she bore a child at all, let alone managed to produce one devoid of any serious illness. However, the birth had been hard on her and left her almost bedridden for the rest of her life. Such were the ends they went to to preserve the bloodline.

Thanks in great part to my mother's condition, I was considered a weak child, though it could not have been further from the truth. Brute strength counts for nothing in this world. At the beginning, oafs like Jiraiya could best me easily when it came to physical prowess, but I don't think he was able to even lay a hand on me for quite some time because unlike Jiraiya, I was a genius. A once in a decade genius, they said, but I liked to think it was more correct to say once in a lifetime.

I spent little time at home as a boy, but what time I did spend was given over almost entirely to my mother. Father was often on missions, his own choice rather than a duty imposed on him by Nidaime-sama. Konoha was prosperous at the time with a veritable army of ninja at its disposal and did not require its jounin to spend such a great deal of their time in the field. I had come to the conclusion by the time I was four that father took on so many missions in order to escape the hassle that was caring for mother. So from the beginning my life was given to study and nursing.

On the days she felt well enough, mother would help me with my studies. I would sit perched on the foot of her bed, telling her of what we learned in the academy. She would elaborate on topics the sensei only mentioned in brief and instruct me in the special techniques unique to the family.

It was late in my sixth year when she finally took a turn for the worse. I had graduated by then and was away more often tending to the ridiculous missions that were always forced upon the brand new genin. Mother knew she was dying and it didn't matter to her so much. She said it was best to escape such a disappointing venture sooner rather than later. There was no way to make the most out of a human life, even a healthy one, she said, when the time given was so brief. So when she found herself unable to do even the most basic things, she saw no further point in it.

Before the end, she entrusted to me the most valuable strength our family possessed. I made blood pact with the snakes that day, signing my name next to hers. The first snake I ever summoned was purposefully small. A young snake with slow moving, numbing venom. I never asked if it was what she wanted. Suicide was something terribly frightening, even to a brave soul, so it was better in the end to remove the choice entirely from her hands. Perhaps at the end, when the numbness took hold, she regretted the choice, but it hardly mattered. Even had she protested, I would have done the same. I had learned everything I could from her and I no longer had any use for a dying woman.

When it was done, I released the snake, a pathetic creature I never once called for again, and retreated from the room. It wasn't until my father came home days later that the village even knew she had died. There was no point in disrupting my normal schedule to deal with a nuisance like that. It was time better spent gathering and organizing her texts and beginning my studies in earnest, learning all the secret kinjutsu she had neglected to teach me. Mourning for such a woman, who had not taught all she knew, was useless.

It wasn't even a year later when my father died. It was an unfortunate accident while on a mission, though no one had witnessed the event itself. The circumstances surrounding his death were decidedly strange, but as near as they could see, he'd been dispatched by the enemy. I allowed them to think so, as it was in my best interest.