Chapter ONE:
Do you know what it's like to have everything brushed away into oblivion, to have nothing but yourself aware your life is crumbling and unaware if you'll have the strength of heart to manage with it. I was in that state of mind, nothing left but the whiteness of absence of all that I loved within my life. I've been there more than once, just because of one simple decision.
I decided I wanted to be a ninja of the hidden leaf village.
Looking back on everything I have no idea how the fascination began with the ninja I saw. My father was a ninja, as was my brother, my mother was a part of the science division but also was a Chunin. I guess it was simply in my veins.
Or maybe it was the way ninja always stood; tall, backs straight, chin up, like they had seen the hells and heavens of Earth and had lived more than anyone else could live.
Either way, they grew to enchant me, made me build myself up into a successful ninja before I even stepped foot into the ninja academy. Which, lead me to come to the immediate realization that the life of a ninja was difficult and required one to be aggressively bound to the idea of becoming that ninja they dreamed of.
I was lucky, I had quite the imagination and I was quite the stubborn little girl.
The ninja Academy was one of the rougher portions of my life and my outspoken nature did not assist that endeavor. The teachers viewed me as insolent and annoying, I consistently argued with principles and got a C average even though I was clearly better than that, especially with the upper hand of living with two Jonin and a Chunin.
The kids hated my hair, they would pull on it, sometimes the girls would try to cut pieces off when I wasn't paying attention, especially one girl named Ino, she hated my hair. It was an unusual shade of dark red, very like the color of condensed blood, a dark sinister red that brought to much attention. For the first few days, like every day I kept my hair down, a curling, tangled, thick mane of blood red hair that I was intensely proud of, but as I began to be harassed I tied it up, I rolled over, as I always did when it came to anything regarding my appearance.
Yet besides the constant harassment about my hair, besides the kids forcing me to the back of the class, I always went hope happy, I had a family to return to, a father, a mother, a brother that loved me.
They didn't care that I didn't have the best grades, they encouraged hiding my ability, they encouraged a trick up my sleeve. They loved my outspoken side, they were proud I spoke my mind, I never told them about the bullying.
My father taught me when I began showing serious potential in my training with chakra control and my chakra nature how to forge a weapon, and so bloomed my love for creation. It was a perfect way to get out my anger, to hammer a blade into the perfect shape, the perfect way to think as I sharpened a blade for hours on end. It was a fantastic passion that my father soon addressed with Kenjutsu, the study of sword usage.
My mother helped me develop an incredibly sharp intellect, she taught me games that involved strategizing, she taught me phycology and how to analyze everything, and I mean everything.
My brother taught me to believe in myself, to keep moving forward to be strong in morale character and to not stand for harassment of any sort, but most of all to fight with my words before I was forced to fight with my hands.
When I finally stood up to any of them, however, it took me two years, I was seven, and when Ino Yamanaka came up behind me as she left class she grabbed a little bit of my pony tail and yanked as hard as she could. I turned around slowly at the sound of her laughing and delivered one, solid, silencing, sentence.
"Amazing how ugly your personality is."
She barked at me angry words screaming I was weird and I'd never find love, stupid things that she deemed important, insecurities she pinned on me. I nodded, and listened and when she was done, I was about to say something breathtakingly heroic along the lines of 'at least I know who I am' or 'I'm sorry but your problems will never be mine. I hope you can get over your own insecurities,' but at that very moment, a small white puppy rushed between my legs and bit Ino Yamanaka on the ankle.
Akamaru. Ino ran out of the room kicking the dog off, screaming about how it needed to be trained and stormed out of the room. That's when I met Kiba Inuzaka, my best friend.
He smelled awful about 90% of the time, but he did live with several dogs and he stood up for me when no one would so it hardly mattered to me. He was the best friend I had ever encountered, until I started to meet others, mainly Choji, a kind, great soul. He was so friendly and compassionate to any woes I might have that I found myself buying his chips one a week, every week. We were all good friends, but life changed.
At ten years of age, my brother, a negotiator within the village, a Jonin, broke of an unnamed stress and left right after I gave him the first sword my father had ever complimented. A sword fit for a knight, perfectly crafted. I gave him a lecture about keeping it in shape. I remember halfway through the conversation how he hugged me for no apparent reason, and I was left wondering what was wrong.
My family life became troubled after that as my parents started leaving frequently to meet with my aunt, uncle and cousin, a group I couldn't meet due to my ninja lifestyle. They grew more and more tense with every trip until, a week before the final exam to become a Genin, my family left me alone and said goodbyes fit for dying last words.
My father told me I would change the world, told me I would be a legend. My mother told me I would be too compassionate for my own good, and that I should never fall in love, it was too much trouble. They said it with a smile, with a joke, with a laugh, but there eyes were frowns with a depth of sadness I could not fathom, but still was so strong it created a hard rock that rested in the bottom of my stomach, worry. They left, and I was alone: scared and stressed preparing for an exam that would determine my life as a ninja.
I was so alone.