Hello and welcome to my first fic based around the idea of a Communist revolution! I expect that's not a phrase you normally hear, but this was an idea that wouldn't stop nibbling at my ear. In some ways, the style of writing is based very much on Markus Zusak's The BookThief and some inspiration was also drawn from Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale, to give credit where credit is due.
Also, if anyone has ever read the fanfic Red by Sherbet Mayhem, based loosely on The Book Thief, I would like to say that it also gave me some idea to put this into words. Read it, it's really all that and a bag of chips.
So, enough of my yammering...if you stuck through that, let's carry on with the show!
This is the story you've been waiting to hear since you arrived on my doorstep covered in blankets and coats, shivering from an inner chill that would not leave your tiny hearts. Ever since I saw the both of you, I decided to shield you from tragedy, and that includes this. I wanted to save you despite myself, and it hasn't been easy. Those sets of clear blue eyes pleaded with me all this time to speak, to reveal, though neither of you ever truly knew there was a hidden tale that I had taken, a tale that had played parts in your lives. Selfish of me, but I thought to extend your innocence for a while longer. I played a thief with truth and this is my comeuppance.
You are going to know. Consider this my gift.
By the way, this is my story too, in some way. But I am only a subplot, a shadow snaking through the undertones of this tale. You will only know me once the story has reached its end. Keep that in mind.
The first character we meet is a young man by name of Hatake Kakashi. He is rich, young and foolish, thriving in the borderlands between youth and adulthood. But his life is changing, shifting and rotating the opposite way as a young girl with glowing, ember-like eyes walks down an aisle in white to meet him.
I like her. She, like me, is a subplot. But then again, we stood at different ends of time. She died before I took my first steps.
Hatake Kakashi had married Haruno Ayame young, when both had still been rich and foolish. He remembered her from the day she'd appeared in Konoha with her prodigious parents, her mother a stiff, authoritative mannequin, her father completely in thrall to the matriarch. In that sort of family, there were always squabbles that grew and morphed into feuds, with her parents having been ousted from the clan for some unknown reason.
Perhaps that was why she'd sought comfort in the first boy she'd seen. A quick escape must have been the safest plan.
It did seem a little rehearsed, her openly flirtatious gestures at him, stealing his Icha Icha to dangle it in his face, the lip-licking over any variety of food offered to her. But what had perhaps been the most genuine were the questions she asked him after they made love, two sixteen year olds in rumpled garments, lying in the summer sun.
"What do you think about the future?" Her long pink hair, tangled in grass and fallen leaves. Her features delicate and, for once, innocent, not a pretense of seduction in those large doe-like eyes, which were staring up at him like flickering amber flames.
He was speechless, suddenly feeling as though he was several decades older, staring at Ayame, bewitching, one-time Ayame, her guard down for him, only to find a child. A girl. He hadn't expected protectiveness to wash over him at the sight of her vulnerability, but then, he didn't know what he'd expected. Without makeup she had always seemed just a little softer…
"I think….I want to spend it with people I like."
Of course, he remembered the diagnosis. Her father, normally placid and jolly, shaking Kakashi's shoulders together furiously, as the matriarch of the Haruno family watched, her features arranged in a sort of contempt satisfaction. He tasted the bitterness in their voices as they surrounded him, an army of two.
He agreed to their ultimatum: Marry Ayame, or else. He didn't pretend to have any naïve thoughts about the Harunos not being powerful enough to perform "or else" satisfactorily. Of course, he was glad they hadn't said anything about giving up Icha Icha. That went without saying.
She had been about six months along the day he was drafted. The war with Kirikagure, after all, was a war that could not be ignored.
He left watching her smile and wave, and never saw the tears that came once he was gone. After all, one can either be a soldier or a husband. He couldn't do both at once, and, had he seen her cry, he might decide to stay. That wouldn't do. The army needed every last man it could get.
Years. It had been five years since he'd left.
Yes, I know I'm jumping around in time. I will commit this crime much more drastically in the rest of this story, not to miss out on details, but simply because it makes it easier for me. My knowledge is filled with gaps and potholes. Why should I be well-informed? I was not there when the Mist soldier fired a bullet that carved through Kakashi's left forearm, drawing strands of blood. I wasn't there when the bombs fell, and I especially wasn't there when Kakashi's daughter (who, by the by, becomes very important in this whole deal) opened her eyes for the first time. But I know what I know.
Blood in his mouth, Kakashi sucked at the gaping hole in his arm, waiting for the medics to get around to him. The tangy taste of so much at once made him gag, and the droplets of red flew down his mouth, mixing with the dirt.
He was trained, of course, much better trained than so many others. How else had he survived? He refused to believe luck had something to do with it. Luck was faltering and failing, uncertain. That wouldn't get him back.
Somehow, he had gotten into a competition to kill, kill as many of the enemy each day contest with another soldier. He hadn't taken it seriously, so it was a bit of a shock to see Marshal Gai out and charging, uniform stained with fresh blood every day as he shouted out death tolls at night.
"Perhaps it's the only thing that keeps him sane, turning all this into a contest. " A new voice, strangely cheerful, sounds from behind. Kakashi turns steadily, subconsciously preparing for an enemy, only to find a dark-haired Konoha Captain behind him, smiling as he stretches out a hand.
"Uchiha Obito." The smile seems to be genuine and warm, despite where and when they are. Perhaps that's what makes him take the stranger's hand and shake it, a similar smile playing along his features.
"Hatake Kakashi."
Of course Obito dies. I should've told you this wasn't a happy story. Oh well, I never knew too much of him anyway, but I can tell you he was lucky to die at that precise moment when the Mist soldiers created an avalanche of stone to break his regiment.
For if he had waited a few months to go on leave back to Konoha, his throat would have been slit so fast he would never have felt a thing coming. He would only have been aware of icy hands reaching for his neck, barely having any time to turn around.
This was the fate of that illustrious Uchiha family.
Well, most of them. Two brothers survived. One had stood over the bodies with the knife in his hand, silver and crimson glinting under a blood moon.
Obito gave Kakashi an eye as he lay, broken and bleeding, his bones crushing themselves to sawdust.
I thought that it was very nice of him, personally.
Kakashi found the boy during a rainstorm.
"Carry on! Carry on! Faster!"
What for? He thought, unsurprisingly.
What for?
We're all dying, and Kiri's too strong at the moment to be defeated.
They do something with those soldiers, train them to inhumanity… The Bloody Mist has a reputation well carved into time.
Maybe if you'd done that with us, we'd be better fighters…
They marched, no, drudged, past a tall steel gate covered in damp moss and ivy that twined in on itself. The gate was poorly made yet still standing, spikes devilishly protruding from its rusting, orange metal, a demonic barrier. Behind, flickering movements caught the corner of the eye that he had been given, an eye from Obito…...
His fault. His fault that Obito was gone. Shaking his head, he forced his shame out of thought. Survival was necessary, he needed to have the rest of his life to live with that guilt.
They were children. Both the soldiers fighting alongside him and the creatures that moved behind the gate.
Perhaps because of his own loss of one eye, that the bodily feature he obsessed over as he walked past them. Haunted, dull, glassy eyes, each one another color, another story, and yet all the same in the nothingness so apparent in those orbs, unifying them all. They were nothing, a ragged, starving majority.
"Penal colony." Marshal Gai whispered to him. "Shameless, but they take the youth who come from horrible families…place them here behind bars for their parents' mistakes."
As his borrowed eye washed over the children, he saw one boy off at the far right.
The boy has a name that will prove to you Fate does make plans, and surprising ones at that.
His name is Uchiha Sasuke, and he is one of two brothers and two survivors.
He was not the one who slit the throats, and yet the blood from that night still lingers.
It will taint him, but then, who could watch the deaths of parents, of cousins, and not wish for vengeance?
I sure couldn't.
Kakashi somehow, in some way, is able to break him out. I'll never know how, perhaps it was a silent entrance through the crumbling gate, an outstretched hand and a moment's pause before the boy shuffled off behind him. Or maybe it was some other way.
What I do know is that Kakashi saved the Uchiha boy for three reasons.
One, he remembers his own wife, heavily pregnant and waving from the doorstep. Their child would be the same age this year as the boy, and maybe he is growing soft, but he cannot help wondering if the boy needs someone as well. If he cannot ever go home to the child he has never met, he will help this one, the one that, age-wise, could just as well be his.
Of course he's not. Uchiha Sasuke's parents are Uchiha Fugaku and Uchiha Mikoto. Both are dead.
Two, he is lonely. Gai seems to have gone almost mad, shrieking and screaming in the night as he fends off imaginary enemies. Some men are shell-shocked, delusional, rocking helmets like squealing infants back and forth in the night. There's no good company to be found now that Obito is dead.
Three, he saw hopelessness in the eyes of the other children as he passed. Sasuke merely showed ambivalence as he glanced away from the soldiers, not paying them attention as they drudged past. He simply kicked a stray rock.
Perhaps the lack of hopelessness in those wine-colored eyes made Kakashi think there was still some will to live left in the boy. And Kakashi has never been a wasteful man.
He does have a will to live.
And it is to see his parents' murderer dead.
It's a bit of a complication that the murderer is his own brother, but he's been in a penal colony for the past few months after watching the blood drain from his mother and father, corpses lying in the snow.
He probably has enough rage and revenge in him for one man.
Kakashi teaches the boy to fire guns and write over the next two years out on the battlefield. He saves the boy's life three times, twice from Mist soldiers, and once from another Konoha soldier who screams something about his father.
The boy is most grateful for the gun-shooting lessons. His fingers meld to the trigger naturally, almost as if the sleek metal is the missing piece of his arm. This will be useful for him in more ways than one. Writing, not so much.
Kakashi becomes attached to the boy and eventually, with some coaxing and waiting (after coaxing entirely failed) learns his name.
He never really hears the boy's full story, but he doesn't need to know.
He returns with the boy to Konoha, back to the house where he last saw his child-bride with her protruding stomach waving goodbye to him. Hopes are dashed when he hears Ayame died in childbirth five years before, hemorrhaging gallons of life-blood on a doctor's table, screaming and praying for death rather than life in her last moments.
"My wife died and no one thought to inform me!" The anger in his tone, cutting as the bayonet slung around his shoulders seems not to impact the figures of his former in-laws. They do not even flinch.
"You were at war." Sarcastic, biting. Now that he's not their son-in-law, they can treat him as what he is to them. Their daughter's murderer.
They inform him that his money was used to pay off his debts. He is penniless and therefore, they continue, he cannot be trusted with his daughter.
As soon as he knows she exists, he wants to see her, badly. Does she resemble him? An innate parental curiosity to discover yourself or your loved ones in another skin, a skin formed in part by yourself. What have they named her? Will she want to see the man who is her father? Will she look away?
But he never gets to know, and only has a glimpse in the doorway of a pink-haired girl with inquisitive jade eyes staring at him with a mixture of awe and horror. Immediately after, the door is shut and their connection of seconds is severed.
And Hatake Sakura becomes Haruno Sakura legally, once Kakashi is forced to scrawl a signature declaring his parental ineptitude. She becomes under the care of the mannequin and the chubby dwarf once more.
Perhaps, to rub salt in the wound, they invite him coldly to attend each of her birthdays, if he arrives promptly and leaves before it is over.
What a sucker, he thinks, even as he accepts and walks out of that gilded mansion.
He raises the boy in her place, but he still does attempt to look in crowds, eyes darting back and forth, as he attempts to find the girl he fathered amongst other strangers.
Meanwhile, a man known as Nagato publishes a document that will play an direct role later on in this as it circulates amongst the Konoha lower classes, disgruntled and dirty, almost animalistic.
It is called "A Future Built on the Principles of Communism."
Around the same time, out of fear of the new doctrine, Marshal Gai and his six-year old daughter leave Konoha. Kakashi never hears from them again.
It's late. I can no longer speak tonight, you have already begun to whine and whinge, yawning at me out of sleepiness rather than boredom. You both need your rest. Off to bed and wake up bright and bushy-tailed. Yes, that is an expression, no need to roll your eyes.
Don't worry. I will carry this tale onwards, for both your sakes.
In the end, it may be the story you must carry on your entire lives.
So...how'd you like it? This is a prologue, and I would really appreciate any and all feedback so I can make this story more enjoyable in later chapters. Please review and rate!
And, by the way, while this is somewhat Sakura-centric in later chapters, Naruto, Hinata, Lee, Neji, Shikamaru and Ino will all be making significant appearances, just in case you wondered.