They all lost their innocence at some point. Some early on. Others quite late. But they all saw their childhood end.
Just my headcannons about my favorite characters.
...o0o...
Haruno Sakura:
Most people thought it had been Sasuke that had made her decide to turn her life around. When he left, she had been devastated. And she had decided to better herself and become stronger because of it.
But Sasuke had not been the reason why she her innocence had been ripped to shreds.
Actually, it had been a slow burn kind of thing. Sakura had not noticed the changes she was undergoing until one day she looked down at the fish she was trying to keep from frying with her chakra and realized how much she had changed.
Haruno Sakura had not noticed how much she had changed until well after the changes had taken place. And she felt mostly numb to them. She just focused her chakra and tried her best, pushing the sudden realization to the back of her mind.
Because what was childhood reminiscence good for other than getting people stuck in their long since gone past?
Inuzuka Kiba:
Sakon and Ukon had rattled him. They had almost done the job of making Kiba lose his childish wonder. But the Inuzuka were a stubborn bunch. And he hadn't allowed that to get to him so quickly.
He was pretty sure that the moment that had made him finally burn the wool that had covered his eyes was the same moment in which his own teammates lost their own innocence.
Botched mission.
They didn't talk about it at all. And Kurenai Sensei didn't try to get any of the details out of them after the initial report to the Hokage.
Team 8 never spoke about that mission. But sometimes Kiba couldn't deal with what had happened and tried to run away. Shino and Hinata always caught up to him, though. But instead of stopping him, they just followed. And once he'd collapse with tears streaming down his cheeks, screaming and yelling at the sky, they would cry along with him. Then they would return to Konoha and act as if nothing had ever happened.
Hatake Kakashi:
It had been his father.
Kakashi never spoke of Hatake Sakumo. And that was enough to let anyone know how much it truly had scarred him.
He was never the same after that. Even though he tried and succeeded in acting as if he were fine, he never really was.
Sometimes he even woke up screaming, the image of one of his students in the same state as his father burned into his very soul. The student changed depending on the person that currently worried him. But the fact that it was either Sakura, Sasuke, or Naruto changed nothing. If anything, it just deepened his terror of losing any of them to the same sickness that had consumed his father.
Yamanaka Ino:
She had lost all sense of childish wonder when Asume Sensei had died. That had been the moment when her whole life had gone from being an easy vacation to the arduous journey all shinobi traveled. It had opened her eyes to the harsh reality that was her own and forced her to see that no matter what she did, there were some things she just couldn't control.
Wouldn't stop her from trying, though.
Shiranui Genma:
His father had been killed before his eyes. His mother had killed his murderer seconds later. And then she had taken her own life, too stricken by grief to remember she had three children that were still breathing to take care of.
He had not been the eldest sibling. But his older sister had retracted into herself after the murder/suicide and barely managed to take care of herself. So Genma had done his best as a six year old to go to classes and keep his family life from collapsing into complete shambles.
All of his efforts had been useless, though. His older sister killed herself when he graduated the Academy. And when he was promoted to chunin, his younger sister left the village to elope with some foreign salesman.
Aburame Shino:
They never spoke about it.
Kiba was horrible at keeping it a secret. He broke down quite a bit because of it. But the Inuzuka was easily comforted, unlike his teammates.
Hinata was better. But that was because, even with how emotionally open she may seem, the girl was one of the toughest people Shino had ever come to meet. He could see the haunting in her eyes whenever they hunted Kiba down. But he could also see the grim frown set with unshakeable determination. She was stronger than he would ever be, for she admitted to what had happened.
And he just forced himself to think of other things. He refused to even admit that the unfortunate series of events had taken place.
Even though they all had scars on their wrists and ankles that spoke of imprisonment. Even though his blood ran cold whenever Iwa was mentioned. Even though there was a gnarly, still rather hurtful scar on the right side of his back that ran all the way from his shoulder to his hip.
Morino Ibiki:
During the war, Ibiki had been part of a rather tight night squad. They did just about everything together. They were all chunin that just wanted to make a name for themselves as jounin and wanted to prove their worth on the battlefield.
Then had come the ambush.
Every single person Ibiki had ever grown close to died that day.
Sure, at that point, Idate had still been around. But that day marked the day without a single doubt in the man's mind. Because after that day, nothing in his life was ever the same. He was captured, tortured, and forced to live through a hell no human should ever even think about.
Idate began to drift away from him after that day. And Ibiki had always believed that it was better for his brother to be dead or far away than to be forced to live with a monster like him.
Tatami Iwashi:
He had been six when he'd graduated the academy. Ten when he was promoted to chunin. Eleven when he was placed on the Hokage Protection Squad. Twelve when he'd devolved into a barely functional alcoholic that had almost gotten himself killed on four different occasions before the older shinobi took note of his self-destructive ways and forced him to take better care of himself.
Genma, Raidou, and Hayate all worked extremely hard to get him to get better. But there were times when Iwashi just couldn't forget all those he had failed and allowed himself to succumb once more.
They never seemed to blame him, though. Just the shinobi way of life.
He'd once heard Raidou murmuring to Genma about it.
'There's no such thing as a functional childhood when you're learning to slit people's throats and the most effective ways to poison a drink. We lost whatever semblance of innocence we may have had as soon as we joined the Academy.'
Iwashi couldn't find an argument against the harsh and cynical words.
Hidan:
Kakuzu had once insulted him by calling him a priest that enjoyed the company of little children. Hidan had promptly sliced his arm off without a single thought of hesitation, eyes blazing with fury rolling off of him in violent waves.
If there was one thing Hidan would never tolerate, it was children being touched in any way that wasn't religious.
He had been prey to one such priest from his parents own religion when he was but eight years old. 'Young', had said the priest. 'Young and strong and developed enough to not be mistaken for a girl'.
That had been the first infidel Hidan had ever killed once he'd turned to Lord Jashin. But it had taken years for him to do it. Twelve, to be exact. It was only when he had turned twenty that he had been able to gather enough strength to go after the bastard and kill him.
His last words still chilled him to his very core.
'You've grown into quite the young man. Would you like a small game to remember the good old days?'
Hyuga Hinata:
It had been an ambush.
Their mission had been a simple one to protect a caravan of merchants on their way back to their home village. They had still been genin, although well on their way to becoming chunin. And Kurenai Sensei had not been with them because the Hokage had deemed them capable enough of completing it on their own.
Ninja from Iwa had come from what seemed to have been nowhere. Attacked them in a flash of lightning. Terrorized the merchants. Tied Team 8 up. Knocked Akamaru unconscious.
They had been forced to watch the savages from Iwa tear each and every single merchant apart before any salvation came. There had been women and children there. Older men and women that could barely even see. Defenseless civilians that had never raised a single weapon in their lives.
Salvation had come in the form of a group of ANBU that had torn the Iwa nin apart.
Hinata wasn't sure which had been worse to see. The senseless slaughter of the civilians. Or the death of those that had killed them... For they had been monsters and demons up to that point. They had only become human when their crimson blood mixed with that of the butchered civilians.
Neither of her teammates ever spoke about what had happened. And Hinata could not blame them. They had all been forced to become witnesses to something horrible. But she had just been forced to watch. Shino and Kiba... They had been forced to become part of the horror.
Kiba couldn't look at a child without running away.
Shino couldn't force himself to look at the elders of his clan.
The only reason she had been spared from those horrors was because she had been saved for another set. The Iwa nin had been curious to see just how strong her Hyuga blood was. Wanted to see if they could make offspring with her clan's kekkai genkkai.
The reason why she never asked her teammates to tell the truth of that experience was because she knew she had managed to get away relatively unscathed. There were scars; physical and emotional. There was trauma. But she had not been forced to submit to those men before ANBU had arrived. She had survived simply because she was capable of reproducing.
She had never been so proud of being a woman before. And she had never been so terrified of it either.
...o0o...
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