"To me! To me!" He called, high on the mast head. A hundred crushing bodies began their work, another tedious day, another sleepless night. The girl was so confused, so lost among the sea of dirty, swearing men. She was alone. Where was her father? Up on that masthead, forever looking out at the endless horizon and not into her eyes, her own endless eyes. Where was her mother? Dreamily floating among the life down there, beneath that coffin they called a ship. She spat at the word – ship. She was not bitter about her life, though. How could she be? She was living. That was all she could hope for.
They had been sailing for so long – years, she thought. But as that small child she was, time was a distorted mass to her, and the journey could have been just a week in her now mature eyes. Nonetheless, that time on the ship hurt her, her body, her mind, her soul. Each incessant pounding of the waves against the ship's hull has like a thrashing to her own side. She couldn't bear the lifeless hours spent just staring out at the deep, blue, tauntingly tempestuous expanse. Those days, weeks, years were her longest, and she never did forget them.
The girl was strong, though, stronger than many would think from her frail body and liquid eyes. Her heart was full of that dangerous thing we call "ambition". She set her eyes on the horizon, the same and yet different one her father also had his eyes one. She nailed her soul against the wall, disregarding her body. She didn't need any of that anymore if she could just leave that wooden cage.
She found her escape after some time of searching. It happened so suddenly, like an alighting butterfly off a flower, her discovery. She took that white blankness and made it into something, something wonderful. Her heart swelled with the all the happiness she had never felt. A butterfly, a bird, a flower – they were all hers. She only had to take it into her hands, and it would become. Her deft fingers built herself an army of those beautiful creatures of white. They fluttered and buzzed and created a wonderland in her dank cabin, her cage. But now, she could fly! She could sing and dance and love! She could be alive!
Then, he found them. The thousands of beautiful white creations – and he destroyed them. In a rage that belittled even the great seas, he ripped and burned and spat all her work, her tentative happiness. She stared with eyes no longer on the horizon, but instead at the fire, burning with the passion she had suppressed all that time. No longer soft amber, her eyes became red with the same fire that burned in the hated ship's hull. When he turned to look at the girl he had just destroyed, he saw. In that moment, he knew - his fate and all the rest of those men on that ship – doomed. And so did she, gleefully. That night, the sky burned red with the fire of the girl's hatred.
No one else ever knew what caused the sky to burn that night. No one ever knew who was on the charred ship, or what horrible men it had once carried. No one ever knew that little girl who was so lonely was the only survivor. People often remarked that the long rains began after that night, and they might have been right. Maybe that one girl's endless sadness had compelled even God to shed tears as well. She never told anyone about what had happened that fiery night; instead, she created her own sad yet mundane past. It took her so long to find someone who also understood – that sadness, of losing the once buoyant butterfly, herself, her mind, her soul, and so Konan forever loved the man who embodied Pain.
A/N: Haha, maybe I should just write a compilation of the sad pasts of all the ninja in the Naruto world. I seem to have a talent with depressing shorts. xD But uh, yeah, I just wanted to take a unique twist on Konan's past, seeing as no one would expect her to be a… pirate? o_o'