First attempt at a story. I've been wanting to upload one for a while now. I've got a couple of ideas ratling around, but this was just something I thought of after the latest chapters of the manga (is anyone else getting irritated by those?)

As with any of us, I do not own Naruto, Kishimoto does.

Okay, lets give this a try

October tenth... six years. The thought consumed his focus as he sat there, the lack of any furniture having forced him to the floor, a questionably stable wall at his back. Currently in Kiba no Kuni (Land of Fangs) this dilapidated, one roomed hunting shack had been a gift from Kami after being caught by one of the unseasonably heavy storms that had been pounding the region. Mercifully, this shed was raised on stilts, lifting it out of the standing water that had slowly corrupted the pristine woodland into a vile bog of shoe grabbing muck. Despite being draughty, rotten and having a roof that looked like a colander, it was a damn site better than being outside right now.

The lashing rain was coming down in sheets, so heavy that it obscured all vision just a few feet ahead, almost giving the appearance of a thick fog. It had felt more like a hail of broken glass than shower of water as he had made his way through it, and had long since worked its way in through the roof, soaking not only every visible surface, but right through the thin wooden beams that made up the structure. All that water had started to drip down from everything in the ceiling, adding to a horrible sense of damp within this meagre shelter. The wind that continued to howl through the trees, and rotted holes in the walls, had combined with this damp to leave a bitter chill in the air, that seemed to be sapping the warmth from his very soul. A small log burner in the corner held the dying embers of a fire, wood dry enough to burn having been difficult to come by in a bog. It gave off a pathetic but still much appreciated warmth tonight as he sat there, a thick cloak wrapped around his form.

Beneath, his lithe frame was covered by a black, sleeveless Gi -though the fabric seemed much heavier than what would normally be used to make such clothing- over a deep blue t-shirt, matching the belt around his waist. A pair of black, steel toed boots and leather wrist guards completed the outfit, with a small pack on the back of his waist, and a leather shuriken holder strapped to his left shoulder. Slowly dragging a hand through his blonde hair –spiky and wild, even when matted by the rain- he shifted it over the tan skin of his forehead and out of the piercing, sky blue eyes that beheld his surroundings.

The sixteen year old's face remained perpetually stoic as he waited out the storm. For some reason there had been a significant shift in the weather patterns of the area, with the heavy thunderstorms that usually broke over the mountains of Kumo waiting until they were over Kiba and Tsume no Kuni (Land of Claws) to finally condense and return their water to the earth. The thick storm clouds completely shielded the top of the many peaks that gave this country its name from view, creating a dreary and generally oppressive atmosphere. The sudden rainfall had wreaked havoc on an area that simply wasn't ready for it, causing landslides that washed away roads and bridges and, combined with having reduced the ground to a thick putrid marsh, had rendered the majority of Kiba no Kuni impassable. But no matter how difficult traversing the forest outside had become, he wouldn't risk being snuck up on. Even now, even here in what was, for the moment, probably one of the most isolated and difficult to reach areas in the entirety of the Elemental Nations, he remained as alert of his surroundings as he could through the storm. Listening out for any trace of an approach that made it through the thundering of water against itself was the only safety he could really have today, the usual comfort of being able to feel the footfalls nearby through the ground having been robbed from him by his surroundings. But having been on the run for so long, this was nothing new and he was thankfully able to get some much needed rest without leaving himself vulnerable.

For two years this had more or less been his life, moving, running, never stopping, never safe. It had been like this for so long now that he couldn't even remember the last time he'd called somewhere a home. Years ago, when he'd only recently run away from the place he was born, his life hadn't been so difficult. Originally, he'd found a small house in southern Umi no Kuni (Land of Sea), figuring it had been so far out of the way that he would be safe there, beyond their vision and so out of their reach. And for four years he had been.

Then they came. His stalkers, the faceless wraiths that had haunted his childhood and to this day, his nightmares.

Back when he was little, everyone he knew had been afraid of the spirits that seemed to haunt the shadows around Konoha. They would be there, shifting from vantage to vantage around the academy, watching and judging absolutely everything you did. They would be following you through the streets as you made your way home, or whenever you were out with friends. Once, when he'd been pretending to be sleeping, he had caught the reflection of one in a mirror opposite his bed. The wraith, as he had come to call them, was wearing a grey flak vest over a black uniform, both cut off at the shoulder to reveal odd tattoos, an odd spiral design on the left and the Kanji "ne" on the right. Matching grey guards went up the forearms that gripped his window, but what really drew his attention had been the face. Instead of a pair of eyes, a nose, or a mouth, what one would expect to see below someone's hairline, there was just a white mask with two deep black recesses. Such an empty, hollow image had been terrifying to a four year old, those two black holes proving themselves more frightening than anything he'd encountered before. The wraith had just been sitting there on his windowsill, gazing at him intently, and it truly felt as if a monster had come to pluck him from the warm safety of his bed and spirit him away in the night.

He hadn't been the only one to notice these stalkers, there were others at the academy who knew of them, though not many. It seemed they had just sort of always been there as there were stories from the older kids about them, the most terrifying of which had been how sometimes the wraiths really would spirit someone away in the night. They said it had been very rare but the whole experience was so strange it almost denied belief. Once someone disappeared, no one had ever asked questions about them, teachers would simply miss their name on the roll call so for the first few days everyone thought the missing someone was just home sick. However after a few days of this, someone had gone to visit them, and found out that they weren't there. Asking parents about why their child was missing school, they had simply laughed off the query as if it were some sort of childish joke. If they had asked to see their friend, their family would say they had gone out and didn't know where or when they would return, but they were strange about it, often sounding like they were reading lines from a script and their eyes would take on a glazed, distant property that truly frightened the academy students. The situation would continue like that, sometimes for as long as a few weeks, and had served to terrify many students, that people could just disappear like that and no one notice.

Then, just as suddenly as they'd disappeared, the missing person would show up again. They would just be sitting at the front of class in the morning, having arrived before anyone else, acting as if nothing had ever happened. Once again, confronting and questioning proved itself pointless as all they ever seemed to say was that they had been away, in as much detail as that. But it was the change in them that had finally cemented the fear of the wraiths in the minds of those who'd seen them. People were never the same again once they were taken, they became distant, reserved and always so awkward that they almost seemed like a completely different person. They would always become outcasts as no one wanted to associate with "the taken" lest they become one themselves. These stories had gone on to become nightmares when some of the people in his year had disappeared, then reappeared exactly as those in the stories had.

Years later, when he was a Chunin, he had finally found out who the wraiths were. It had been several years since he'd seen or heard of them, and slowly thoughts of them had faded away to the back of his, and everyone else's minds. They become one of those little stories you talked about with your friends, about how silly and skittish you all were back in school, facts about missing people and wild changes in them upon their return written off as childish exaggerations. But when he had been visiting his father at his office, he saw something lurking in the shadows that had immediately connected to those old memories, he saw an ANBU. Like any competent shinobi he knew who the ANBU were, the elites, soldiers, the real military of their militarised village, but he had never really seen one before, just odd glimpses out of the corner of his eye, most notably on those incredibly rare occasions he was in the company of his father. The ANBU was almost identical to the wraith he remembered from his window and for a moment he had mistaken him for one, but the ANBU wasn't faceless. Wraiths had always been faceless, it was one of their most terrifying qualities, but the ANBU's mask bore resemblance to some sort of cat's face, and further inspection revealed he also lacked one of the tattoos, having only the odd spiral design on his left shoulder. After reassuring himself that his childhood's nightmare hadn't come back to finally claim him, he had resolve to actually find out who those creeps in the shadows at the academy had been, and why they had taken people.

Trying to uncover secrets in a village full of people who were quite literally trained in keeping them wasn't the easiest of tasks. It had taken months of scrounging through libraries and carefully interrogating comrades to learn anything worthwhile about the regular ANBU forces, with how secretive everything about them was. This made learning about a group who may, or may not have been ANBU but did dress like them, with only the description of a Faceless mask and Kanji tattoo on the right shoulder nigh on impossible. It was only made harder by his trying to do it without drawing attention to himself, he had never really grown out of that childhood fear that these people might come and spirit him away, though he took comfort in the fact that even the bulk of his peers that had come to dismiss the wraiths as the work of an over active imagination were still stricken by the same affliction.

Eventually, it had been in his own sensei that his efforts had borne fruit. Upon describing the tattoo the man became very serious, quickly interrogating him as to where he had seen such a thing. After dodging a battery of very awkward questions, his sensei finally revealed that the wraiths were ANBU in a way, but not as he knew them. The foundation, know to most as Root, explaining the Kanji, had been a separate division from the regular ANBU forces. Apparently, they were run completely independently from the regular service, recruiting younger, training harder and supposedly performing better than anyone else in the village. That had been the propaganda anyway. According to his sensei, they had in actuality been a rather small force, taken out of orphanages and trained both physically and mentally to become what was considered to be the epitome of a shinobi by the, as his sensei had put it, most worthless and disgraceful excuse of a Konoha shinobi and general human being to ever be born. The man was apparently a disgusting traitor who believed the epitome of a shinobi was an emotionless tool, completely stripped of their own will, and capable of functioning only as an extension of his own.

In its heyday, Root had apparently been a force roughly a fifth the size of the ANBU, but the extra training involved in their development meant that Root drew roughly three times the resources from Konoha as the ANBU did. The Sandaime had allowed the founding of the division at the end of the First great shinobi war, to "help safeguard Konoha and her interests" in an increasingly complex and dangerous world. The resources the project claimed had seemed justified due to their apparent successes, which also served to grant an enormous amount of leeway and independence to the foundation. The best training obviously cost more, and Root did seem to be the best. It wasn't until the beginning of the Third great shinobi war that the truth about the division was revealed.

When the political climate had begun to deteriorate the better part of a decade ago, Konoha's leaders began to plan for an all out war that they simply weren't ready for. The resources of the village were simply inadequate to deal with funding any large scale conflict, after being reorganised to better support economic growth and civilian prosperity in the extended period of peace that had followed the Second war, and undoing these reorganisations simply wasn't an option to the council despite knowing the difficulties and, ultimately, the fatalities such a decision would bring. To deal with this, all of Konoha's resources became much more heavily regulated, and the huge economic draw that was the foundation suddenly needed to justify itself.

This shouldn't have been a problem for such an elite division, as a war was where such highly trained forces should shine, but the Sandaime had wanted more than the standard assurances of their prowess this time. When Root supplied a manifest of their accomplishments to try and justify their resource requests, the Sandaime had noticed several mission reports amongst them that he had never seen before. Greatly troubled by this, he ordered an investigation carried out into Root's operations and mission logs, and it was discovered that this entire elite division was nothing but a sham.

The ANBU of Konoha were highly trained, well disciplined, and charged with the most important and difficult missions that the shinobi village had to offer. Yet they were able to complete these missions with a success rate of roughly 80%, putting many of their foreign comparisons to shame. On top of this, Anbu suffered some of the lowest casualty rates of the village, proving the value of squad medical training even if the council still refused to fund the addition of medics to the regular units. They proved themselves to be the best special forces of the elemental nations time and time again. Contrastingly the investigation into Root showed that, far from being the supreme force of the village, it was an absolute disgrace. The missions their leader had charged them with may have been obscene in nature and often tantamount to treason, but were no more difficult than those given to the regular forces. In fact, given the lax mission parameters they had to work with, most in fact worked out to be considerably easier. Yet Root's success rate was shown to be close to a pathetic 10%, while suffering fatalities on some 30% of their missions, with one huge hole that had been stricken from their records entirely, its only evidence being the loss over well over half the division in a single mission somewhere to the west. Given these revelations, the foundation was struck away by the Sandaime in absolute disgrace.

This single insight from his sensei had answered all of Naruto's questions about the wraiths, as well as provide a truly shocking insight to his home. Whilst he had had no illusions as to the rampant corruption throughout Konoha's leadership, the time and effort his father needed to try and stem it being one of the main reasons for his lack of presence in the boys life, and the subsequent difficulties between them, even he was surprised that their government was so worthless as to allow such a group to exist for so long. It served to strip every last thread of respect he had left for the council, as well as severely reduce his opinion of his father's predecessor. He had held a great deal of respect for Sarutobi Hiruzen, whilst he may have been completely incapable of actually leading the village council as his position required, the man had led Konoha successfully through three wars, even if their success in the Third was almost completely independent of him. Yet the fact that he could allow such a travesty of a division to be founded, go unchecked for so long, leach resources from the village, and then be so inattentive as to allow them to continue to operate after disbanding them really shook his faith in the man. Worse than any of this though, had been the answer as to why these wraiths followed and abducted academy students. With how the taken acted upon their return, he immediately likened it to the behaviour of the roots, as his sensei had called them. The foundation was far from gone, they had been recruiting!

After that Naruto had stopped all inquiries into the wraiths. Given how the division was described to operate, he didn't want to make himself a target as, Hokage's son or not, he didn't doubt for a second they would deal with him if he proved a nuisance. He'd not seen or heard of them again after that, not until six years ago today. Since then, they had been hounding him constantly. It had been they who forced him to flee the village he grew up in, the village he was born in, the village he swore to protect with his life, and the village that betrayed him and his family so badly that he could never forgive them for it. He refused to be taken; he would not let that cripple do what he wanted. He would not let him trample on his parent's memory like that, so after collecting everything his parents had left behind in their passing, he had fled Konoha, to the southern most tip of Umi no Kuni and it had been four years before he'd seen them again.

When he reached his destination, he had found himself a small, isolated house outside a little fishing village. Buying it hadn't been too much of a problem. With what his parents left behind he wasn't exactly strapped for funds and the locals really didn't care about where he came from, so he set up a life there. Knowing that, given what he'd taken, Konoha would be scouring the world looking for him, he set out to avoid people as much as possible, to make it harder to track him down. He would help out in the village every now and then, sometimes aiding the fishermen, though usually he stuck to hunting bore in the forests surrounding them, selling it to the villagers as and when he needed. They were quite far out of the way here, so the village got very little through traffic and seemed to have been completely missed by any raiding parties. It was a nice place and Naruto had come to think of it as home.

Through all of this though, he never allowed his training to become lax. Naruto had been a Chunin when he left the village, but had been training to advance for quite some time and was ready to apply for a promotion before everything went to hell. From the moment he left, he knew the people Konoha would be sending after him would be powerful, and that he needed to make himself ready for them, because as things stood he wasn't. He was highly proficient at taijutsu and genjutsu, and had a good list of ninjutsu at his disposal, however he was most proud of his work with Fuuton chakra. Training had allowed him to advance his skills to Jonin comparable in everything, with a secondary affinity in fire, but it had been wind manipulation that truly captured his interest when his mother had first introduced him to it. She had had a strong water nature, but was still knowledgeable enough to help him train with wind and had set him the challenge of cutting a leaf in half. He had taken to it like a fish to water, not only cutting a leaf in half after a few weeks of training but he had begun to cut patterns into them soon after. He had developed a love for experimenting with fuuton techniques, finding the rigid shape and directionality of Konoha's library of them horribly stifling. Manipulating both had produced incredible results, and when he demonstrated a technique that took a simple blast of wind and used it to penetrate and then completely disperse one of Mikoto-san's best Gokakyu no jutsu's, his mother had nicknamed him her little Divine wind and, despite his objections, the name had stuck. Dedicated training with his mother and his sensei had brought the rest of his skills up to proficiency as he experimented with wind manipulation, but now proficient just wasn't good enough.

He was a nukenin now, so he would be facing the masterful forces of the ANBU, against whom proficient meant worthless. Added to this, now that his parents were gone and he was out of the village, the ever present fear of the wraiths became a real danger, there was nothing to scare them off anymore, not the fear of retaliation or the risk of exposure, and the one who led them wanted nothing on this earth more than what Naruto had taken. Since arriving here, he had rededicated himself to training, spending from before dawn to well after dusk every day improving in any way he could. Running laps, training his speed -quite possibly the only thing his father had ever actually taught him how to do- practicing chakra control and elemental manipulation, reading about anatomy and genjutsu theory, he would not leave any weakness for them to exploit if they found him. When they found him he had reminded himself. They would, so he had to make sure he was always ready, to either fight them off, or flee with everything he had.

On the night that would have marked four years in this home, he had settled in as he always did. Securing all doors and windows, sealing anything important that he could into scrolls and packing them up, then making sure everything important was ready to go at a moments notice. And finally checking that the seal arrays he had long ago placed around the house and the area as an alarm system to warn of any approaching forces were ready and armed, before quietly crawling onto his futon. It had been about three in the morning when he was rudely awoken by a painful burning sensation on his right forearm. Instantly he knew what this meant, and he just as quickly knew that they were ten in number, approaching from the north. Gathering everything up in moments, he debated whether to fight them off, or simply flee. Whilst there was no doubt in his mind that he could fight them now, with how he had advanced in his training since arriving here, the problem was whether it was beneficial to do so. Such a large group wasn't sent on search and confirmation missions, it was a capture or kill squad which meant that whatever happened here tonight, someone knew he was here now. That meant that whatever happened, he couldn't stay, more would come. But more important than any of this, if he chose to fight now he would be too occupied to ensure the safety of everything he had brought with him, everything they were after and with that, his decision was made.

Quickly making his way into the dense woodland between his house and the coast, he settled in a small patch of dense foliage beyond the tree line. Making sure to suppress all traces of chakra from his position, he waited. This wasn't a simple game of cat and mouse, any number of people could be chasing him for any number of reasons and if wanted to stay ahead of these ones, to stay ahead of his hunters, he needed to be sure of just who they were and what exactly it was they wanted. Carefully watching from his cover he observed the house, taking in every detail. The house was centred in a clearing with a good hundred meters or so of open land in any given direction, it made it very hard to sneak up to the property without being seen and was one of the main reasons he settled here. From the far side of the clearing, he saw eight blurs career out of the tree line. They were on top his house in seconds, quickly working through any locks or security measures in their way before proceeding inside, and it had confirmed his worst fears. Of everyone that could be chasing him, from Konoha's compassionate shinobi who would likely want to force him home, to the bloodthirsty forces of Iwa who would enjoy nothing more than to spend a few weeks slowly mutilating him in some sick twisted idea of vengeance against his father, there was one party that had consumed more of his thoughts in the last four years than any other. And it was them, the same faceless wraiths that had been haunting him his whole life that had found him now.

Mindful of the two missing members of this team, and how they were likely circling the clearing to cover against any attempt at escape from the house, he turned around, not even sparing his home for the last four years a second glance, and set off towards the coast. Carefully he ghosted as fast as he could along a long since memorized route through the treetops, taking care to insure he made no sound and left no traces as trail for them to follow. Hitting the coast in minutes, he paused briefly to take in his surroundings. As he stood there, a sigh escape his lips, this was the second time he had lost his home in as many years, and he had a feeling the next time wouldn't be too far away. Happy that the wraiths hadn't followed him towards the coast when he couldn't detect the rustling of leaves that anyone less familiar with the area than he would make travelling through it, he suddenly broke out into a run for the cliff face, and jumped clear over the side. Being certain to ensure the safety of his load as he hit the water, he quickly made off along the coastline on the water's surface, from there on staying in the shadow of the cliffs to cover his escape.

Having successfully escaped Root's squad, he'd made his way to Nagi Island in Cha no Kuni (Land of Tea). The island was sparsely populated and the majority of it was covered by a very dense forest -so bleak it could almost put the "forest of death" to shame- which he had promptly wandered into the depths of. Here, there were no roads and even fewer passers by and that suited him perfectly. For them to have found him in Umi no Kuni, word of someone matching his description had to have travelled from the local town back to Konoha. This would almost certainly have happened through vectors in the form of merchants and travellers that had seen or herd of him in town, then spread that knowledge like a disease everywhere they went, it had been his method of keeping tabs on the rest of the world after all. Naruto was naturally a social person, having never handled a lack of enough interaction well, and the near complete isolation from society that living in this forest would bring would be incredibly hard for him to bear, but his hope was that by hiding here, where almost no one would come across him, his pursuers wouldn't be able to find him again, at least not for a while.

For four months he had lived there, in the depths of that forest, with baited breath. Upping his training, he dedicated a larger portion of his time to honing his senses. If they were coming for him now, a seal array wasn't always going to be able to save him, and needed to be able to sense approaching enemies. After four months without any new human contact Naruto's nerves were begging to fray, he simply wasn't meant to live like this and the several times he'd caught himself talking to the animals he was skinning weren't laying his fears over his mental state to rest, but it seemed to have been worth it. After four months, it seemed that he had once again found somewhere safe enough to be called a home, even if he would rather it had been anywhere other. Then, once again, he was woken early in the morning by that horrendous sting in his arm.

The seals here had been placed in a hurry, as a full security/ detection array was by no means a simple thing and, even with the skill in the art of fuinjutsu that ran in his line, was a slow and arduous process, one he was only half way through. The extra focus on his senses during training definitely proved its worth that night. He could hear them, light footfalls of hunters ghosting through the trees, vibrations running through the trees and earth to him. Seven, eight, nine... fifteen this time. Once again, the decision of fight or flight had been made for him, and he made off with everything precious to him into the dark. He had been lucky again, being alerted to their approach had allowed him to sneak away from them before a violent encounter, but he couldn't help the sinking feeling that took over his heart as the reality of the situation set in. They had his trail now. No matter where he went, no matter how far he ran, even if it was to the ends of the earth, they would always be there, just a few steps behind. It was a difficult truth to accept, all he had wanted to do was find a safe, quiet place, away from the greed and ambition of the hidden villages, where he could do right by his parent's memory, but that was little more than a pipe dream now.

That incident on Nagi Island had really been the beginning of this life. From then on he had had to keep his life moving, never spending more than a few weeks at the most in any given place because he knew that they would be there before long and every time he allowed them to catch up to him, he took the risk of not being able to get away again. Fighting his pursuers really was a last ditch option, the risks involved were simply too high, as they always had been, so with the option of hiding now stripped from him, constantly running was all he could do. He would not risk being captured, or worse. No matter what it took, what price he had to pay, he needed to protect her.

Resting by the burner, he felt the lump against the side closest to it shift. Taking the cloak that covered them in hand, he carefully pulled it back, revealing the small form of his sister in her dull burgundy clothing -a simple set of trousers with a long sleeved top, finished with a set of boots and writs guards to match his own- cradled against his side. Sleek red hair braided to her shoulder blades and tied by a thin yellow ribbon, striking violet eyes currently hidden away, perceiving only her dreams. Despite the differences in their appearance, there was a noticeable resemblance between them, especially in the identical birthmarks they shared, the three light black lines resembling whiskers that marred each cheek. With her fair complexion though, she was even now the spitting image of their mother, something he found incredibly unnerving whenever she was angry, the face she would make reminded him so much of being scolded when he was little that he almost couldn't look at it.

A ghost of a smile crossed his lips as he stroked a hand through her hair. How ironic was it that he had ended up a veritable clone of their father yet, as almost everyone who knew them back there had put it, was in every other way his mother. She had loved to tease him about how he was slowly turning into her whenever he was loud or overbearing, jovially praising him for doing something exactly as she would have. Once she had actually died his hair red to match hers as, what she considered to be, a joke. And now of course Mito-chan was growing into a miniature clone of their mother, and behaved exactly as their father had been described to behave in his youth. That wasn't to say she didn't get anything from their mother. The fact that Mito had inherited her smile was something he was eternally grateful for, he missed his mother's smile more than anything else. Her extremely violent reaction to the teasing nickname "Tomato" was another thing Mito took from her, though he was decidedly less grateful for that one.

He had been raising her alone since she was just a few hours old. What the Sandaime had done meant that there was no one there he could trust to help with her there. So many people would have taken any opening to simply murder her at the first opportunity that he couldn't bring himself to trust any of them. It wasn't quite the entire village he had to worry about doing that, there were a handful of shinobi loyal enough to the village to not disobey a directive from their Sandaime, and even fewer who actually held no enmity for her. But both of these groups held absolute loyalty to a man with an almost compulsive need to capitulate to the council's every whim, so ultimately they could not be trusted with her. Horribly, abuse and possibly death probably would have been a better future for her in Konoha, given that another was ending up in the hands of that demented, crippled monster. If Danzo ever had her, he would defile his little sister in ways far more horrifying than anything he could imagine.

When he noticed her shivering, he carefully moved her small form against his side, draping an arm over her shoulders and hugging her closer to him. Gently, he replaced the cloak that they were for now using as a blanket. Settling in as the storm started to ease.

It was her sixth birthday today. Maybe they could stop someplace nice, just for a while.

Okay. As i said, this is my first attempt at posting anything, and the first time I've written anyhting in a long time so I'd appreciate any feedback people are willing to give. I originally wrote this in a few hours on Saturday, but reading it this morning, it felt a little flat so I reworked it.