Title: Ghostly Beginnings
Rating: Mature
Pairing: Neji x Sakura
Summary: "My entire life I've devoted myself to one thing: Uchiha Sasuke. But now...I have no purpose for living. I don't have a heart. I have no sense of feeling... I'm merely a wraith."
Author Chat: Okay, so hey. Uhm, if anyone still wanders around the Neji and Sakura area from about a year ago and remembers this story, it's the same person. I just changed my pen name and I'm reposting this because I've done a lot of work on it since then. I just never got around to sitting down and posting it and also I was scared of what people would think of it. But here it is...hope I get some new readers on it.
Disclaimer: None of the characters that have been mentioned in Naruto belong to me and neither do any of the places that have been mentioned in the anime or the manga belong to me. Mitzu Raeli is the only real claim that I have.
i!i!i!i!i
Ghostly Beginnings
By x0Aishiteru
Prologue
My entire life I've devoted myself to one thing. That one thing was Uchiha Sasuke. Even now, I still devote myself solely to him except in a different sense then the love I once felt. Now I devote myself to him in hate.
When he remained near me, I had a purpose. That purpose was to be strong like him, to become like him. To become strong enough for him to recognize me and for him to see I'm his equal.
When he left to seek Orichimaru, I had a purpose. That purpose was to find him. And during that time in which he wasn't there, my purpose remained the same as before. To become strong so he would finally recognize me for who I was. That I was no longer weak and that I had become a true part of Team Seven. I devoted myself entirely to training, learning jutsus, getting Lee to help me train. My entire life focused around him.
When he found us, I had a purpose. That purpose was to hate him and destroy him. He had changed and he was no longer anything that I recognized as being Sasuke. My Sasuke-kun. The one that I was meant to marry in my teenage mind. So I continued to train, enlisting others to help me and devoting myself solely to that. I fed off the power of my hate and I became corrupt with it. Everyone noticed but no one dared to contradict me on it. As long as I continued to live, to smile, the others were all right. Maybe not happy, but they were all right.
But then something changed.
When we next found him, I had no purpose. He was dead and everything that I had once drove to live for was gone. Even though I had hated him, loved him, missed him, he had been the inspiration in everything that I did. And that inspiration was gone. With him gone, I was nothing more then a wraith, a mere ghost of what I had been.
Everyone noticed the changes. I no longer smiled and my training was forced with one goal in mind, to become strong enough to build walls around my heart and never be hurt again. No one spoke to me unless I spoke to them. And even then, they guarded their responses. I would lash out randomly, never giving them any sign that I would. In all ways, I had become what I had always wanted to be, Sasuke's equal.
But he wasn't there to see it.
My friendships slacked and I no longer associated myself with the people that I had once called friends. They became my teammates and my rivals at the exams to rise higher in the ranks. Tsunade still kept me as her apprentice but now...I think she regrets taking me as her apprentice. I had become nothing more then a killing machine that could not be saved. My entire purpose in life was to protect and save my village, to make it the most powerful of all the Hidden Villages and to show that Konoha was a proud shinobi village. That we were not to be messed with in any way or else you would face the wrath of the kuonichi and shinobi.
Within weeks after becoming a Jonin, I decided to go for ANBU. It wasn't doubted that I wouldn't succeed. It was wondered when I would succeed. Two months after becoming a Jonin, I went for the ANBU testing and flew through it easily, becoming an ANBU and shortly after that, one of the top ANBU captains that Konoha has ever seen. My squad was top notch. Consisting of Neji Hyuga, Shikamaru Nara, Ino Yamaka, Kiba Inuzuka, Rock Lee, and a transfer kuonichi from Sand known as Mitzu Raeli, we were one of the toughest squads.
Now though...
It's changed.
We're still tough. We still work together like a well oiled machine. But there's tension. There's tragedy within our group. There's a silence between us all that won't go away.
I want to blame it on the fact that one of our comrades died. I want to blame it on the fact that for a moment, we failed to work as a team. I want to blame it on the fact that our enemy was tougher and that we had not counted on the reinforcements that were sent in. I want to blame it on the war that caused the tragedy and horror that surrounds us every day of our lives. I want to blame it on anything but the truth. Because no matter what I don't want to admit...
This was all caused by the fact that I began to feel again.
i!i!i!i!i
Author's Chat: So that's the end of it. I hope you enjoyed it. I realized it's a big angsty but that's the entire purpose of it. Anyways, let me know what you think! I would definitely love to hear comments and criticism on this and I'm wondering if people will like this.
Ja ne for now!