Note: (An old one. Written '09)
Memory:
1. Ultimately meaning "to remember," which is also the ancestor of English remember and mourn.
2. The ability to return to an original shape.
The Sandaime's Law wasn't implemented until Naruto was five months old.
Ino's mother was out shopping in the open air market with her tiny daughter (barely a few months herself) lightly dozing in a stroller.
When Ino was kidnapped.
It hadn't been the first time danger had befallen a blonde-haired, blue-eyed babe merely because of their looks.
–-
Their eyes slide off of him as if he is made of something oily and unpleasant, slimy like the coils of an octopus.
He is swinging, but his legs are too short to reach the ground and he can't get down.
He is too young not to cry, and Naruto wails until he begins to choke on his tears.
–-
Naruto finds himself sleeping longer and longer.
The dreams are strange, extraordinary and epic like some grand fable written down on tattered cloth in a time before words were words.
He is someone he is not inside his mind, and upon waking has trouble finding the lines separating him from these images.
–-
One day he wakes up and the Third is beside him.
He doesn't know what to say, and he doesn't know what to feel, so in the end he just cries. It is a testament to Sandaime that he lets Naruto weep.
Naruto would have only cried the harder if comforted.
–-
He starts school the next day.
His feet are so used to running barefoot through the village that it isn't until halfway through the school year that one of the teachers notices Naruto has no shoes.
At the beginning of the next school year, Naruto still is barefoot.
–-
It's only in the night that Naruto truly feels alive, where he finds himself kneeling beneath the large ancient relics of trees that have surrounded for longer than anyone can say they remember.
The moon is out and his tongue is dry. He is calling out, a keening wail that echoes like a paintbrush across canvas.
This is where he first meets ANBU.
Like ghosts with painted faces they fade from the shadows into being, and Naruto is too scared to move.
For the first time, he is too scared to cry either.
–-
He wasn't crying, but his knees hurt and there was blood.
Naruto curled up under the stack of boards where no one would look. He didn't know where he was, but all around him everything was broken.
"They will bleed. Like you."
He could hear it echoing from inside somewhere deep. Why couldn't he breathe? The faster he gasped for air, the harder it was to drawn in the next breath. His eyes wild, he grasped at his chest so tightly that his shirt was ripped from the nails.
It hurt.
The sound of voices distantly approaching lit his ears on fire.
He grabbed the sides of his head so hard and curled up tightly inside.
–-
A dirty smell penetrates the air. It is not pollution .. it goes much deeper.
Naruto can taste their hate.
He wonders if he misses the Sandaime enough will he come back?
–-
Kakashi has left him and Inari alone.
He can still hear his team eating through the mortared walls of a house made of mud. Naruto turns to the boy beside him and Kakashi listens.
Inari is too shocked to cry, and his tears begin to dry into a sticky kind of residue across his young face.
Naruto is watching the water come and go, come and go, and he does not move away. Eventually Kakashi gets bored of watching and goes back inside too.
The night starts to rise, and Naruto turns again to Inari.
"You.."
Inari snaps to attention, wiping only now at what wetness is left to his face. He wasn't crying..
Naruto's eyes are dark.
"You should taste blood."
–-
Inari does not cry.
The tears have dried on his cheeks long ago. He will not cry again.
Instead, he waves goodbye to Naruto, smiling at the leaving group in a way that only Naruto himself can.
All teeth and no eyes.
–-
Tsunami doesn't know what to say.
Her little boy is sitting at the dinner table, as usual, eating in a ferocious kind of way.