When Sasuke was young, he decided that he wanted to be exactly like his mom. She was so awesome!
(She was also the only one around who ever really paid attention to him. His father was always busy with the clan, and his older brother, while the epitome of cool, just wasn't around enough.)
His mom had laughed when he had declared his goal at the breakfast table, and offered to teach him some things. He'd paused for a moment, because this was something his brother had promised to do before, and had always let him down on, before he shook his head. This was Mom! She was awesome! More awesome than Itachi. She'd go through with her promise. He nodded enthusiastically.
Sure enough, his mother had followed her promise and taken him to a training ground after lunch that day. She showed him how to throw dulled kunai and shuriken. She mentioned someone named Kushia occasionally as they kept going out, her eyes sad whenever she did so. Sasuke didn't want to upset his mother anymore, so he snuck out of the compound one day to figure out who this Kushina was.
Uzumaki Kushina was a jonin during the Third Shinobi World War. Being an Uzumaki, she came from Uzushiho, Land of the Whirlpools. According to he history books she was in, she was famous for her seals.
His research on Kushona had led him to find numerous other Kunoichi, and he had decided then and there, among the dust history scrolls that he would try to become a great medic ninja, just like Tsunade-sama. Kushina-san died durring the Kyuubi attack, along with a great number of people. If there were more medics, perhaps more people could have survived. Perhaps Kushina-san would have survived, and his mother wouldn't be so sad.
Haruno Sakura, daughter of Mebuki and Kizashi, decided to become a ninja like her parents when she was very young. Her mother and father weren't always around, being busy with their job as ninja, but they alway made sure that one of them was there for her. She'd set herself that goal one day after asking her father why he was a ninja.
"Ah, Sakura-chan!" he'd laughed. "You always ask the hard questions. Now let me see. I want to be a ninja because it means I can look after you and Mebuki. It means I can stand strong and tell enemies no. Tell then that they cannot touch you, cannot hurt you, cannot kill you. It means I can move alongside someone and know every thought in their head because all we are thinking of is protecting those we love. That's why I'm a ninja."
"Alright," Sakura replied. That was all, and the very next day she took a pair of scissors to her long hair and chopped it off. Movies were always showing people grabbing a woman's hair to stop them from fighting, and she didn't want to be rendered useless for something that stupid.
He parents were surprised at the sudden change - before she had wanted to grow out her hair like her friends - but they both smiled when she explained her reasoning, and her father ruffled her hair. "That's my girl!"
As soon as her parents let her run free, she wen to the library at every opportunity, soaking up the knowledge in the history book, and it wasn't long before she decided on a role model.
Namikaze Minato - the Fourth Hokage - who was renowned for his speed, seals, and control sounded like someone Sakura could aim to be.
As a much hated orphan, there was one thing Naruto did know: ninja were safety, and in more than one occasion, ninja were life.
That fact left choosing his career path simple: become a ninja. So he followed all of the ninja he could, trying to figure out what they had in common, and one of the major things he noticed was that all of them knew how to read. So he tried to attend the orphanage's lessons. It's didn't work at first, the teachers recognizing him and kicking him out, but he managed to disguise himself well enough eventually, using make up and temporary hair dye he pulled out of trash cans.
He picked a name to use for himself, learning after the first time to have his life story plotted out, and soon enough he go good enough at scavenging that he never went anywhere without his disguise on. The orphanage workers forgot that he had ever lived there.
He was only one more face out of the hundreds of children with sob stories, and the demon child appeared from memory without the constant reminder. Tachibana Arata was a quiet, boring child after all. His life story was common - dead shinobi parents - and his brown hair even more so.
And so Arata - as Naruto now thought of himself - gained access to reading. And through reading he discovered a whole new world filled with shinobi. His personal favorite was the many stories of the Uchiha and Senju - the two main founders of the village. He loved reading about the illusions - the sheer variety of them was astounding, and loved them. He wasn't exactly sure what the books meant when they said control was needed for genjutsu, but he was determined to learn control anyways.
He slid a history book back onto the shelf, and grabbed one of the books on meditation before running back to his spot and sitting down. After a careful glance at the pink and black haired kids with their own history books, he sat down and slowly opened the book on meditation.
Sarutobi's first indication that something was wrong was when the ANBU he sent to check up on Naruto returned empty handed and confused.
"Hokage-sama, Naruto wasn't there. And from what the caretakers told me, he hasn't been there for a month at least."
He cursed in his head. He knew he should have set a guard on Naruto. At least then, he would have known that Naruto was missing when it happened, despite the possibility of alerting someone that something valuable was in the orphanage.