Chapter 1: IN WHICH there are Three
EIGHT YEARS AFTER Kyuubi's attack on Konoha, its people bustled in their village. The sun was newly awake, there were fruits to sell, meat to cook, stoops to sweep. There were hawkers hawking and bakers firing their stoves. A woman on the main street of Konoha sang as a small child accompanied her on a string instrument. The air was still cool; a slight breeze rushed through the throng of early risers.
Quick! There, a tiny blur of brown and yellow! It darted among the people of Konoha, dodging left and right, sometimes jumping onto the rare civilians' shoulder with all the delicacy of a passing feather. It zoomed and flickered into thin air for a single moment and delving back into the fray below. And no one noticed, what with the hustle and bustle of hustling and bustling hidden villages, and the slight disturbance that was Uzumaki Naruto could be mistaken for a bird, or a peculiar piece of shadow.
Were the boy heavier, perhaps he would garner more attention—lepers have a way of demanding a certain consideration
The boy ducked into an alleyway. He stopped for a moment then quickly clambering up the layout of pipes on the side of a building before coming to a rest on the roof. Uzumaki Naruto was tiny, with thin wrists and bony , and his bright gold hair was shot through with greenish slime, similar to that found on the ceiling of the sewers of Konoha, and the grime on his face obscured the faint whisker marks on his cheeks. The only things about him that really stood out were the twin nuggets of sapphire in the place of his eyes. They seemed to hoard the light of the sun, framed by a set of generous, unkempt brows. He plopped himself down on the roof of the building. It was one of the less frequented (what a euphemism!) buildings of Konoha; it happened to be the roof of his apartment.
The boy clutched in his hand the largest wad of money he had, ano, acquired from the marketplace he'd just visited.
"Mou!" the boy exclaimed softly. "Gama-chan will eat well tonight, ne?" Naruto had a small habit of talking to himself; no one else, it seemed, took enough notice of him to even try to befriend him.
In another world, Uzumaki Naruto was always loud, always obnoxious, and always noticeable. In this world, Uzumaki Naruto was a phantom Jinchuuriki. No villager ever saw him, no wandering ninja ever sensed him, no one ever noticed him until he did something drastic. Naruto did not do anything, he figured, drastic. Ever. He was content with this. He had Gama-chan, he had the wind to speak to, and he had devised numerous amounts of games to keep himself occupied.
Sighing when the wind only ruffled his hair affectionately, Naruto stood up and moved to the side before kneeling once more. He moved his fingers around the tile on the roof blindly, stopping once he felt a loose corner tug at his finger. With a swift movement, he pried the tile off the roof, revealing the top level of his apartment.
"Headfirst is the fun way down," he murmured. Yes, this was one of the games Naruto liked to play with himself. Fall into the apartment, not knowing what was in it. Down he fell, headfirst into his empty living space.
Again he was a brown and yellow blur, hurtling down to meet the dark unknown.
Hyuuga Hinata wanted to move. She sat in a black loose robe and black training pants, calves tucked firmly under her bottom, her untouched cup of tea cold while the two men before her had some kind of silent conversation that only grown-ups could understand. Hinata, however, knew better than to fidget (her father would frown at this), or whimper (her father would 'hn' at this), or, dare she think it, whine her concern that her legs would lose their mobility if she sat for much longer. Her father absolutely, positively hated whining. It was not of them.
Her father and the other man withdrew from the room. Hinata breathed a barely audible sigh, taking it upon herself to wriggle subtly around. She had never wriggled before in front of her father. He had never expressed his displeasure at wriggling.
She heard a crash that nearly sent her jumping out her skin. Her head whipped around as if someone was in the room with her, but she was alone.
In the next room, Hyuuga Hiashi had just broken a vase. The head of the clan looked composed; his white robes and pants clean and spotless. He smoothed a hand over the sleeves of his garment and exhaled through his nose. Hiashi turned to face the speech therapist in front of him. The other man, he had forgotten his name, looked at him in bespectacled bewilderment, his salt and pepper eyebrows lifting in polite curiosity.
"…something wrong, Hyuuga-sama?"
"Yes," Hiashi said somewhat stiffly. "I believe you just told me my daughter, the heiress of the Hyuuga clan, has a speech impediment."
The speech therapist blinked, eyes flicking to white shards of broken clay strewn over the floor. "That appears to be the case."
"I see."
The speech therapist blinked again.
"Well," he said, looking around as if he'd brought something with him and misplaced it. "I should be on my way now."
Silence answered him. His right big toe was well on its way to snoozing before his patron acknowledged him.
"Yes, I suppose you should…" Hiashi allowed. "Someone will show you to the door."
Like magic, a faceless Hyuuga grew from the shadows to approach a door opposite the one the pair had entered. The nameless Hyuuga did not seem to acknowledge his existence in any way, assuming that the man he was asked to escort would just follow him. There was a flurry of gestures and flailing hands before the doctor caught on and left.
"Speech impediment," muttered Hiashi. His voice gave away nothing as he looked up toward the ceiling. "A speech impediment, Kanako"
In the other room, Hinata stared at the cold cup of tea, watching miniscule ripples run along the surface.
Two pink-haired children played in the large space behind their house. Their mother had insisted on purchasing the plot and paying a landscape artist to outfit it with sakura trees, for she had produced children with the brightest pink hair, and she had a husband with a muted shade, and she had wished for their yard to complement her life's loves. The men she hired were experts—but the grounds of their home were unforgiving, especially on the outskirts, where the rains and snows of Konoha had not yet weathered its sharp rocks. And so the sakura trees grew crooked there, with roots that twisted and protruded. Even with their ugliness, the blooms thrived under the tender care of the Haruno family. When the trees blossomed, the children would frolic among the orchard, exploring the large world of their backyard.
"Mou, Ichirou, wait up!" a little girl's voice rang out, clear and true as a bell. The boy ahead of her only laughed in reply.
"Maybe if you ran faster, you could get your ribbon back!" Ichirou replied.
"If you don't stop, I'll tell Hinata-san you're a meanie!" Haruno Sakura told her male counterpart. Even if he was seconds older than she was, it didn't mean he could push her around! The boy blushed, a light innocent pink dusting his face.
"You wouldn't," he stage whispered, shocked at the audacity of his shy twin. Sakura just stared back at Ichirou.
"Ichi-nii, give it back!" With a cry, she tackled her brother.
Sakura, despite her sweet countenance, was a rough tomboy around her twin. She was impulsive, impatient, and sometimes annoying. She hit hard, she bit hard, and she played hard. And she tackled harder. So when she tackled her brother, Ichirou, there was no way she could have known, caught up in the moment, that her brothers pink head would hit a sharp rock. She was giggling and smiling and her laughter erased the pained groan of her brother. Sakura nudged him once or twice before she nestled beside the boy, assuming he was spent. They had spent the whole day running around, after all.
Hours passed, and after a short nap, the young Haruno stirred, blinking her eyes before looking at her brother. She poked his cheek, once twice three times before she understood.
"No." she breathed. "No no no no no. NO!"
The no's turned to yells, which turned to high pitched screams, which sent her parents running to see what the problem was, which turned to panic at the state their children were in, which turned to desperation when Sakura refused to let her brother's broken form go.
"No, please." Sakura whispered.
After that were a series of strange dreams and strange sounds: the sound of her own senseless babbling, the sound of wind whooshing through her ears, the sound of rapid footsteps and heavy breath, of a door being pushed open and her parents' cries of "help our son!" echoing in her ears.
And the sound, the hated sound of a blunt overworked medic-nin, "Gomen, Haruno-san, he is gone. You came too late."
You came too late.
Sakura started to keen. She screamed to the heavens. She gnashed her teeth, bit her tongue and broke down in tears. She was a wildcat, clawing at anything. Her face. Her arms. The ground. Her parents. In her mind there was a throbbing, as if her heart pounded in series of threes, for the syllables of her lost twin's name, and all around it seemed forever that the world was laughing, that the sakura trees especially howled at her foolishness. And so she screamed to drown out the perpetual noise, uncaring of neighbors and parents, uncaring of much at all.
