Prologue: Ascendence

There was once an old saying, "Misery loves company."

Naruto thought this saying was complete and utter nonsense. He couldn't imagine being miserable around company. It wasn't that the miserable loved company, but that the miserable was no longer so horribly lonely when there was someone walking by their side.

Until then, Naruto had wondered if it was truly possible to meet someone just like him. The other children had their parents, the adults had their families. Whenever he watched them, laughing and practically glowing with life as they passed him right on by, he teetered between hating them and wishing to be there, walking alongside them.

It was a fluke. He looked up at the same time as she glanced around, shaded eyes and warily hunched shoulders. He blinked and the woman was gone, but the whispers weren't. Those eyes that he saw directed at him were turned to her, and in that moment Naruto understood why misery loved company.

He had met someone just like him. You have my eyes, miss.

Other children would have watched her go without giving it a second thought, as they had no reason to follow. There was no reason to be curious when they had never experienced the bitter aftertaste of loneliness.

Without any preamble, Naruto leapt to his feet and pushed through the crowd. (Or that's what he thought of doing, but really he was just moving through because no one wanted to touch him, to look at him).

He was almost too slow to see her again, because she's apparently a trained ninja while Naruto struggled with even the simplest things in school. He had never once received grades higher than a bare passing, and never high enough to actually graduate. Eventually, he managed to catch up when she stopped at a dango shop to treat her sweet tooth.

Naruto wanted to go up and talk to her, but part of him hesitated.

Hey miss, he wanted to say, you have my eyes.

When someone shoved by him, making him tip over and hit the ground before he could catch himself, he shot a glare at the offender. The man nearly yelped and scurried away, his face white and sweat building on his forehead. Naruto once again tasted bitter loneliness, because even though it was amusing for two seconds, it doesn't change the fact that everyone hated and feared him.

The next thing he felt was panic, because he had taken his eyes off of the woman who was just like him, and she moved like the wind. Naruto wasn't particularly surprised to find she had disappeared when he looked back at the restaurant, but it wasn't overly difficult to find her again.

He wondered if the villagers knew how obvious they made their disliking of them. For once, though, he wasn't too upset by their reactions, because finding her would have been impossible without them. Naruto followed the stares and whispers, leaving a trail of suspicion and loathing behind him as he went.

The woman had a peculiar shade of hair, neither brown, or black, or entirely purple. He caught sight of the spiky ends of her ponytail as she walked up the steps of an apartment complex, still finishing off her mitarashi dango.

It was pure luck that her apartment was on the outside, with a window. Eight year old Naruto managed to pull himself all the way up three stories, staring through a window that could do with washing. He still couldn't work up the courage to introduce himself to her. Part of him was afraid that she was some kind of smoke illusion - as soon as he reached out, she would slip through his fingers and disappear into a memory.

There was the Hidden Leaf Village symbol made out of dango sticks on the wall, and several more half-formed in various spots. Written on the wooden flooring was some kind of sealing formula, of which Naruto had to squint his eyes to make out the details.

When asked later, Naruto couldn't be able to answer why he knew something was wrong. It had been the way his heart suddenly clenched, his stomach dropped - the spark of electricity and surprise on the woman's face.

She activated the seal, standing directly in the center, and everything happened at once. There was a flash of electricity and she lurched. The entire formula started glowing with pure chakra, pulsating with potential to backfire at a moment's notice.

Despite this, it was as if she was paralyzed. Naruto tore through the glass (there was a great deal of pain somewhere in behind a veil of horror) and he cleared the apartment in two leaps.

Naruto barreled into her, shoving her out of the circle just as the lightning arched upwards, collecting over his head. He looked up in confusion just in time for it explode. His entire body was wracked with chakra-infused electricity, his eyes seared white-hot in agony. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. It was as if his vocal cords were frozen.

For a second his world had folded in on itself, retracting and condensing into nothing but pure, undulated pain. Then there was nothing.

Naruto didn't even remember falling unconscious. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again, the world didn't greet him. There was no ceiling. No blaring lights. He wasn't even looking up into the face of a detached doctor, or the concerned eyes of the Third Hokage.

Simply put, he wasn't looking at anything at all, because there wasn't anything to look at. Briefly, Naruto pondered the idea that he had died and he was nothing but a floating consciousness. As soon as he thought of it, he scrapped the theory.

The fabric under his fingertips, rough and unevenly woven (there were a couple lines out of place, he noticed) scratched his skin. Something like the heat of the mid-summer sun, despite being the dead of winter, was punching against the parts of his skin that wasn't covered in clothing or blankets.

Antiseptic invaded his nostrils, burning enough to make his eyes water under the bandages. Sweat clung to the air, soap bonding in an interesting conglomeration of cleanliness and overworking nurses. The metallic smell of blood was almost as strong as its taste, lingering on his taste buds.

Rhythmic thumping echoed around him. He could hear (and feel - thump, thump) it in his chest, right next to his bed - there were several more outside his room,(how did he know it was a room?), wandering down what seemed like straight hallways.

They were floating, suspending in mid-air - until they weren't, because there was more rushing and flowing, up and down and winding. Several were moving faster in one area, rushing along, the thumps heavier and faster. The vague sound of life, the pulse of a human being.

Naruto took in a breath, opening his mouth. He could taste water, the foulness of perfume and sweet teriyaki sauce. The world was nothing, but everything.

It was no longer nothing, though. Because he could feel the drugs leaving his body and the numbness fled him (but he wasn't numb before) and everything was suddenly growing sharper again.

The blankets were sandpaper against raw and sunburned skin. The sounds were blaring and throbbing and yet his ears weren't deafening like they should have. His world was drowning in a flavor of ugliness and pain, the groaning and sobbing of the critical, the whimpers of children parted from their parents, the shrieks of fearful.

Naruto gritted his teeth as tears leaked through his bandages, staining his cheeks and soaking pillow (the hard, rough, scratchy scrap of cloth that scalded his bare neck). He clamped his hands around his ears, but all that did was send painful jolts down his fingers and across his scalp.

"Oh, you're up?"

Naruto couldn't tell if she was yelling or not. The voice howled, bursting through his ear drums and made him wish he had woken to a silent world rather than a dark one. Thump-thump, THUMP-THUMP - everything was loud and hurt and -

"Kid, did you hear me?"

Too well.

He couldn't see past the bandages wrapped around his eyes, but he couldn't help but feel relieved for it. If he had to suffer headache-inducing sharpness from his eyes, he might just snap and start screaming.

"You feeling okay?"

Naruto recognized her voice (too loud, it hurt), her overwhelming scent. The woman he had followed, the one whose eyes he shared - she was here.

"Hey . . . It's probably not the best time to tell you this, but . . . Well, I'm not really good with kids," the woman babbled on. Naruto could hear (sense, feel, smell) her guilt as her heart rate went up.

"What happened is - well, you kind of stepped on a highly experimental seal I was working on," she explained in rush. "If you hadn't been there…. I would have died."

There was a beat of silence (if only). Naruto found he could just barely reach through the overwhelming world that had exploded into life to hear and actually comprehend her. Because he had wanted to speak to her but this wasn't what he imagined.

"I don't really know what happened -"

A skip in the beat of her heart- Thump thump - she lied.

"- but it backfired and you took the brunt of it," she continued, unaware he already knew. "It did something to your eyes."

My eyes? Naruto didn't want to speak. He knew it would hurt.

"You're...your eyes, I mean," she was struggling with her words (an odd mix of determination and conflict). "You're blind."

Naruto didn't cry. He didn't even frown. He just lay there, utterly still and confused - because there was no way this world was blind. He wasn't blind. Between the sounds and the smells, the iron from blood and the sickly sweet taste of children's medicine. There was a line of musty dust on the shelves and a pair of footsteps reverberating off of the walls into his ears.

There was no way a world so painfully bright and alive was blind to him. He still didn't want to talk. The sun was being allowed in through an open window and it seared his skin like a clothes iron. He inhaled and three more people had walked by - one of them sweating out of stress and there was blood on his (it was a male, he was sure of it) sleeve.

"Can you hear me?" she asked again.

Naruto inclined his head in the smallest nod - and instantly regretted it. He could feel his own muscle and sinew shifting and creaking. He was inflexible and stiff. Never in his life had he felt so uncomfortable in his own body.

"Oh," she said, disgruntled. "Then why aren't you answering?"

Because it hurts too much, he thought. It was agonizing. And yet he was so happy, because he was finally talking to someone who was just like him. So he didn't tell her how much it hurt. He didn't cry, he didn't frown. His lips turned up in a smile, despite all the pain.

"Hey miss," he whispered out, "you have my eyes."