Her eyes were blue then- blue as Konoha's summer sky the day she was born.
"Kurenai. Crimson," her father said, and blood from his well worn vest leaked onto the blanket as he held her, before the nurses shoed him away, promising not to let him back before he was clean. Her mother didn't care though, not really, she was happy enough that he had finished the mission in time to be there at all.
"Kurenai?" the nurses asked, confused by such a name for such a pretty girl. Blue eyes, dark hair, fair skin.
She didn't say it, she didn't need to, but her mother didn't like the name either. Red was the color of panic and blood. Her daughter would not be a shinobi, she would not. Her daughter would not bear the same dreams, the same wounds, the same sick hell her husband did.
Kurenai would not be a shinobi.
-------
She entered the academy through a great amount of luck.
Her father died the night before it began.
A trap, they told the quiet widow and the young girl that hid behind her mother. The grass shinobi were waiting for them. They knew everything, their locations, their numbers, their jutsus. They fought back hard, but they were outnumbered and injured, too damaged to run and too damaged to win. He put them in a genjutsu, bleeding to death upon the grass. He gave his team three hours of life, until his chakra and his life ran out.
He wrote something in those three hours. His dying regret was that he could not see his daughter graduate the Academy.
She went the next day, all of eight years old, with her blue eyes blood red from tears.
Kurenai. Crimson.
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She was scared of his eyes, she told him. She respected them, like hell she did, but she feared them too.
Kurenai wasn't much of anything without her illusions, not even moderately sane. They were her world, her own creation. There was no blood if she didn't want there to be, and there was no death until she willed it.
She feared those red, red eyes that tore her perfect world apart.
She told him that, and he kissed her in return.
A week later he was dead, and she didn't see those eyes around anymore.
Secretly, she was kind of glad the rest were gone, because then she didn't have to think of him, and she didn't have to fear.
Kurenai saw a different kind of red when she looked in the mirror.
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It's been a couple more years, and more than a couple more battles, and her eyes are always red now. Crimson, her mother said the first time she saw them, her voice quiet with guilt.
It made it easier sometimes, to keep them like this. Kurenai remembered them all in one act, and it didn't matter if she forgot a face or a name once in a while, because this was a tribute to them as a whole.
Kakashi told her that her blue eyes are prettier, to which she replied that his face was probably more handsome than his mask. Sasuke blinked at her in surprise, then shrugged in indifference.
The rest have forgotten by now that her eyes were anything but the red they are now. It fits her after all. Her father must have known something when he named her, almost thirty years ago.
He might have known that she would be a shinobi, and he would have known how often a shinobi's eyes are red.
Crimson red.