Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
Prologue
"The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls."
-Edgar Allen Poe
She didn't know what was wrong with her until she had turned four years old.
That morning, when the sky was still dark and streets were empty, the dam riddled with fissures and fractures, leaking tiny pieces of other lifetimes finally crumbled and flooded her mind with lives she shouldn't remember and things she shouldn't know, leaving her mouth with the taste of copper as she bit her tongue and choked on a silent scream.
Stumbling out of her futon, she made her way to the bathroom, stomach churning and body burning despite the cold sweat running down her back. It was when she finally saw herself in the mirror, in all of her bleary eyed glory that all at once, everything seemed to break apart and suddenly, it wasn't her looking out of night black eyes but someone else who tore at her skin trying to find themselves.
It goes without saying that when her mother found her crouched over the overflowing sink with blood under her fingernails, she wasn't very happy.
She had been taken to a Yamanaka the week after. He had said she was disassociating, that her brain was making up the Others inside of her as a 'coping mechanism', and had coaxed and cajoled and interrogated her on her relationship with the men in her family, on how everyone treated her at home. She never saw him again, but she supposed it didn't really matter because he was wrong.
Because this was not in her head.
The whispers that had sometimes dribbled past her lips became an undulation of shouts and cries. People who had died too young, or left something undone, all screaming as one. All desperate to be heard now that she could listen, to be seen now that she could see.
All people, she came to realize, that she once was.
The first few days were the worst.
An endless stream of half-formed thoughts and out-of-context scenery bombarded her senses, and the only way she could deal with it was by hiding away inside of her room and trying to simply breathe.
There was one that burned itself into her mind, vivid and sharp against the plain white walls and dim lighting of the early morning. Haggard arms that embraced the corpse of her dead child, and the disgusting stench of burning flesh as those same arms killed a man to sacrifice his. The grief and rage and utter betrayal in a purple gaze, identical to her own, searing her skin to damn her for eternity...
She remembered how her world turned crimson as the blood pounded in the back of her eyes, and how much it hurt to even think. Because she was cruel once and knew deep inside of her that she would be again.
Onii-chan had stroked her hair and shushed her to sleep when she had finally stopped crying and vomiting.
He said nothing of the manifestation of her bloodline.
And she said nothing as she finally felt the chains that bound her soul before she was even born. The chains she had wrought with her own blood and sins, long before her name was Uchiha Azuna.
So... My first attempt at a long-term story. As it says in the summary, this story is a semi-SI, and I hope you get why after reading the prologue. "Sakura" (which is me, my real name) will be a really tiny, tiny influence on this character. She is basically a straight up OC.
I don't know how I feel about this chapter, honestly, but it was necessary to let readers know what was up. It's super short, with zero dialogue, but know it won't stay that way! If anyone bothered to read this, thank you so much! I would be very happy and grateful if any of you would be willing to leave a review!
Edit: 7/5/2017 Sorry! I just had to add the disclaimer.
