Prologue

The black bird landed on the tree and ruffled it's feathers, picking at the little red berries, unaware.

The young ninja crouched in the bushes. Deep breaths. Racing heart. He narrowed his eyes as he raised the kunai. Nearly, he mouthed. Just a little closer.

A crunch of a leaf. The bird raised it's little head. The boy's fingers shook. Another deep breath.

Now!

The kunai whizzed through the air, cutting right through a leaf in it's path and – it missed! In a flash the bird was gone, and the boy was racing through the bush, scaling fallen logs with a hunter's precision.

And then suddenly great light pierced through the trees, and he was tumbling out of the forest. He stumbled, gasping as he pulled himself to a halt just inches form the edge of the cliff. The great village of Konoha receded out beneath him, and unlike the bird, he wouldn't survive the leap.

He placed a hand over his heart and laughed, falling to his bottom on the dirt and looking out at the great expanse of the sky. I don't want to be a ninja, he thought. Why do I have to be a ninja and risk my life all the time? I want to work in mother's flowershop and eat her pastries. But he was seven now, and if he didn't start training soon he wouldn't get into Nara, and if he didn't get into the Nara Ninja Academy his father would be sad. And if his father was sad, well, that just wouldn't be very good at all.
So he had to train every day.

But at least no one had seen him nearly fall. That would have been embarrassing. He quickly glanced around – not that anyone would be so far out of the village, but just in case.

He gasped.

A tall figure stood cloaked in the shadow of the forest, looking down the road that led to Konoha Gates. He was dressed completely in black, the hooded cloak covering everything from his toes to his eyes. He didn't appear to have noticed the little boy. In fact, he barely appeared to notice anything; birds sat on the branches around him unconcerned as though he hadn't moved and disturbed them for hours.

The boy swallowed. There was something eerily suspicious about this man. The boy crouched back into the bushes as slowly and carefully as he could. But surely, even though he hadn't shown it, the man was aware that he was there? He had made an awful lot of noise earlier.

Suddenly, the man turned around, and the startled birds scattered. A dozen ravens, squawking, flattered around him and up into the sky.

But the boy didn't chase the birds with his kunai like he normally would have done; he couldn't move. He knew this face, these dark and piercing eyes that looked at him now. There was a picture of this man in his mother's photo album.

But she had told him Sasuke Uchiha was dead.

In a flash, before the young boy could even blink, Sasuke vanished, and then something hard collided with the back of the child's head and then there was nothing.

Sasuke watched the child crumple to the ground, before pulling the boy's city pass from his pocket. He read it through quickly. Just for today, he would be Soichimaru Akimichi, a resident of Konoha, son of Ino and Chouji Akimichi.

He smiled, as though at some personal joke, before slipping it into his robes and making his slow descent to Konoha gates.