Introduction: Homecoming
It's amazing how one place can draw you back, time after time after time. It seems in my strange life Konoha has always constantly haunted my mind and never vacated far from my memories. Home.
Konoha is an important place, no matter how people can try to trivilise it into a kind bustling town, I know better. It's lethal, precise and will never hesitate to pour cold blood. The history of Konoha is written in steel, chakra and blood, so much blood.
I suppose Konoha was the closest place to home that I ever resided - it was where I spent the better part of a playful childhood and a gruelling adolescence. I trained from Genin to Jonin without complaint in the Konoha Shinobi Academy. It's not like it was a life long dream of mine to become a ninja. (Actually, if I recall correctly, I wanted to be a fisherman till I was six).
I didn't come from a noble clan like Obito Uchiha (one of the more talented students from my class), or was I particularly gifted. But my father was keen for me become a great Shinobi so I obliged his wishes for me and enrolled. I suppose I just pushed my way as best I could through the gruelling training regimes and exams to gain a reasonable, well-known reputation of being a reliable, however average Kunoichi.
Being mediocre in the Shinobi World is still rewarding even if you don't have a ripple of terror to your name. Being reliable is better than being reputable – you leave less space to disappoint.
When I became a Jounin, I was offered after a month or two the option to become ANBU. A decision I did not let pass me by. Now I can look back and realise that I took that decision too lightly. Now I know, ANBU is not just a job, it changes you, in ways you always saw coming but refused to acknowledge.
The years have caught up with me now, and I return to Konoha, not sure to what awaits me. Hoping for the familiar. Needing the familiar.
I spent five years away from Konoha. It was a hard time for me, but I suppose I had to take the opportunity, it wasn't everyday a ninja like me was given a chance to take part in the capture of a highly wanted S-class criminal. I did what was expected of me and after a few months I had learned that not one of the other Shinobi in my sleeper cell expected me to live past the first week. So considering my reasonable state of health upon returning to Konoha after the completion of the mission. It seems I succeeded beyond everyone's expectations.
If you can't tell already I've had way (pause for any emphasise) too much time to think over my short (and rather plain) life through and through again. And after so many months of silence, I had learned to develop an internal monologue.
I stood at the top of the hill that revealed Konoha in the valley below, glittering like a long forgotten jewel. Entering Konoha again was like a punch to the gut, each knuckled finger wrapped in rings of nostalgia, familiarity, longing, anxiety and overwhelmingly crushing happiness…. I was home.