A/N: I GIVE UP. I give up, do you hear me?! I cannot write short stories! I have no capacity within me to be concise! From here on out, I will never say anything will be just a cute little 500 word fic, cause it NEVER HAPPENS! ...Sory. But this was supposed to be just some short random thing to distract me from my Sakura fic (which will be up as soon as I finish changing all the tenses). But then it...mutated, and acquired details, and elaboration, and...--panttwitchspaz-- and now it is this. Spawned by something I was reading about how no child grows up in a ninja clan without getting seriously screwed up in the head. And then I wanted to do something about why Itachi and Orochimaru are the two most dangerous kind of ninja, and the ideas sort of merged, and I got this. Seriously, hard core ninja angst. Cause the village could only screw these kids up more if honest-to-god rape was a part of the chuunin exams. And for once, no yaoi, except for a teeny tiny barely there allusion.
Disclaimer: Yeah...if I owned Naruto, you'd know. I mean, it'd be non-stop gay porn, pretty much, and they would have to stop pretending being a shinobi is all fun and games.
The Duty of Konoha
It is the duty of Konoha, like all ninja villages, to take the children it is given and break them.
It breaks their hearts, it breaks their souls, it breaks their bodies – and when they have been shattered it takes what is left and rebuilds them into tools that the village can use.
The families warp them first. They dream of their unborn children and the glorious feats they will perform, dream of having the next Hatake Kakashi, the next Yondaime. They tell their toddlers bedtime stories about famous shinobi heroes and scare them into submission with stories about rogue nins from the Bingo Book. They buy their children toy kunai and shuriken and send them out to play, tell them if they practice hard and get really good, they'll get real ones someday. They tell them they expect them to follow in the family business and become decent ninja, like their mothers and fathers.
The families teach their children that killing is respectable; they let them think it will lead to glory.
The clans damage them best. They do it with their obsession over bloodlines and blood traits and secret skills that must be passed on to the next generation. They do it with their expectations of perfection and their cold dismissal of anyone who cannot make their way as a ninja. The heads of the clans do it by domination, by laying down orders and laws for anyone who wants to be recognized as family; the lesser clan members do it as manipulation, as a way of getting their sons and daughters that much closer to the power they seek. And most of all, they do it by not tolerating weakness, by cutting out and driving off and even exterminating any child who threatens the strength of the clan, because the clans know where the strength of Konoha really lies.
Children of the clans know that their only value is in the talents they can use to uphold the honor of their family and their village.
The Academy destroys them most thoroughly. The families and even the clans do it without thinking, because it was done to them and because it seems like the right thing to do; the Academy, though, has a system, a system that has been tested again and again to ensure it is the most efficient and effective way to destroy its students.
The Academy hands students knives and teaches them how to throw them so they will go through a man's hand, or neck, or heart; gives them needles and teaches them where the nerves are that will keep an opponent from fighting, or moving, or breathing; shows them their bodies and teaches them how to fight so they can knock an enemy out, or break their bones, or snap their neck.
In lectures at the Academy, students learn the many rules that are part of the code of the shinobi. They learn that they must be able to kill without shedding a tear or feeling regret. They learn that morality is measured by the weight of a client's purse and whether or not the blood on the ground is their own. They learn how to sneak and lie, steal and spy, how to use every advantage given to them, how to seek out every weakness and manipulate it. They learn that they are tools of the village, good only to be used and discarded, existing only to serve. They learn that there is nothing in life more important than completing the mission.
Children who graduate from the Academy know everything about killing, and nothing about death.
It is the duty of Konoha, like all ninja villages, to take the children it is given and break them. Children become shinobi of the Leaf Village after they have lost all traces of innocence, after they have had their morals and ambitions warped into a code of strength, sacrifice and murder, after they have given up the chance at ever being anything else.
If asked, the Hokages of Konoha would say that what the village did to its children was cruel, barbaric, merciless, and even inhuman.
If asked, the Hokages of Konoha would say that what the village did to its children was necessary.
It is necessary because Konoha is in the business of death. Not the abstract and honorable death the samurai deal, but real death – dirty and angry, violent and cruel. In order to survive as a ninja village, Konoha needs children who can watch their teammates die at age twelve. Who can assassinate a target at thirteen. Who will take a suicide mission without a second thought before their fifteenth birthday.
Whole people, sane people, do not become ninja. The ones who try don't stay whole and sane for very long – if they survive at all. It is the duty of Konoha to break its children, before the world of the shinobi breaks them first.
Ninja are raised and trained to remove all the normal, fragile, human bits that would tear them to shreds on a mission, on a battlefield, all the parts that would get them and everyone with them killed some dark night in the forest, all the parts that would drive them to madness when they come back and have to live with what they've seen, what they've done. The village gets rid of all those easily broken pieces, and replaces them with something it can use.
The village of Konoha knows that it sends its children into situations where there is a possibility they will die and a certainty they will kill, and so it does its best to make sure they survive. And to do that, it has to eliminate everything in them that will hesitate in attacking and flinch in striking the killing blow, everything that will tremble in fear before a powerful enemy, everything that will be swayed by pleas of mercy from a weak one, everything that will obsess over grief and guilt and sin when the mission is over.
It's not the fault of the village that what's left at the end of twelve years of being raised and trained as a shinobi is barely even human. And the ninja of the Leaf accept what has been done to them, because the alternative is so much worse.
Everyone in Konoha knows all the stories about ninja who somehow escaped being broken by the village, or who weren't broken far enough, or who were just too weak. If they are very, very lucky, they just wash out; they come back from their first mission, hand in their hitai-ate and become bakers or lawyers or shopkeepers, never touch a weapon again.
Most aren't that lucky. They are determined enough, or stupid enough, to try to keep fighting even when it becomes obvious they don't know how to be a ninja. Sometimes they come back on stretchers, or in body bags. Sometimes they don't come back at all; their teammates hand battered dogtags to the chuunin on desk duty, or their names show up in mission reports with the postscript MIA. Sometimes they come back whole, only to be found in their apartments days later, with a bottle of pills, or a rope, or just a well-sharpened kunai. Most don't last out ten missions.
As for the rest…well, all Leaf shinobi know that what's left are two of the most dangerous kind of ninjas, the kind to be avoided or killed at any cost.
The first kind are those, like Orochimaru, who have never been broken, because they wasn't enough human in them to begin with for anything to break. They are the children who throw their knives at the teacher when he tells them to without asking what will happen if they don't miss. They are the students who lean forward with eyes gleaming a little too eagerly to hear all the ways a person can be taken apart. They are the rookies who stand over their first kill and don't shake and don't scream and don't sob but just smile and smirk until their team-leader leads them away.
They have no souls to begin with; shinobi training just gives them better tools to get what they want.
The second kind, and to all shinobi the worse of the two, are those, like Itachi, who have been broken, completely and utterly, and think they have made whole by it. They are the shinobi who are calm and efficient and flawless, until they crack down the center like a badly made vase exposed to heat. They are the ninja who are admired – until they make that first slip past the line between professionally aggressive and cruelly sadistic in an interrogation. Respected – until they make that first leap over the line between killing to wrap up loose ends and killing just to watch their enemies die. Loved – until they finally and irrevocably splinter and snap, and then everyone around them dies, and they bathe in the blood.
They had souls, once, but they let the village burn them away; because they thought it made them weak, because they thought being able to kill without remorse would make them better, or because it just hurt too much.
No child chooses to be broken. But if the only choice that exists is between what the village does to them, and what will happen if it fails, that is the choice they would make. Being broken by the world, after the village has failed, is a terrible thing; it is being smashed into slivers, being ground into dust, until there's just nothing left.
The shinobi who are broken by the village are hollow and sick and barely alive any more, but at least there's something there. At least the village gives them a chance to find the little bits inside them that are still human, to protect them, to try to piece them together in a way that will make them people again.
Children of Konoha learn quickly the many ways shinobi have of reminding themselves – or at least pretending – they are human, and the importance of finding a way that works for them.
Some find it in the quiet familiarity of rituals and habits, the soft blanket of normal they can retreat to and pretend they don't earn their living in cold-blooded murder. They find it in nervous tics and borderline obsessions and habits so well known they form the butt of countless jokes. They find it in the acrid glow of cigarettes, the steam curling off a bowl of ramen, the controlled flow of a calligraphy brush.
Some find it in the neon chaos of dissipation, the continual blur of sin that, if they can keep it up, will keep them from remembering anything they don't want to face. They find it in all the places that they are not banned from even as genin, even as children, because laws like that are made to defend the innocent, and they are not, even as genin, even as children. They find it in the gambling halls and card houses where they can play with fate, who shinobi already know is the master of their lives, in the bars where they can drink courage and happiness and amnesia in measured shots.
Some find it, simply, in each other, the comfort of love and sex and friendship that acts as a shield against the feelings of guilt and loss and fear that linger in the dark corners of their minds. They find it in relationships of every type and shape and composition, because there is no judgment in a village whose undeclared motto is 'whatever gets you through the night.' They find it in drunken parties, half-unspoken conversations, the slick motion of flesh against flesh.
It is the duty of Konoha, like all ninja villages, to take the children it is given and break them.
Konoha is not a village of real people, of grown-ups. Konoha is a village of broken children playing children's games whose only purpose is to keep them from falling completely apart. Konoha is a village of children who know, from long experience, that the only important thing in life is surviving, and holding onto as much of themselves as they can.
A/N: Reviews buy teddy bears for the poor fun-deprived children of Konoha