A little girl sat before a mirror; posture proper, back straight, and a brush held in one limp hand. She stared at her reflection, her expression distant and dull, and was utterly, unnaturally still.
Her face was wrong, she thought. Her eyes are green, not yellow. Her pupils should be round. Her skin should not be this pale, her hair should not be this dark.
Her grip on the brush tightened until her knuckles were white. She screamed, loud and anguished and angry. The mirror shattered when the brush crashed against it, and her fingers bleed from the broken glass.
She was only three.
(She should have been twenty-four.)
...
The first time Orochimaru ran away, she was three years old. It was August and the air was chilled with incoming winter, and the people were tense and silent on the streets. Her uncle Eizo had been dead for two weeks, and his funeral had not yet been held. It would be three months before she would sit with her father and discuss her entrance into the Academy, and Orochimaru-Amelia-was tired.
She did not want this, does not want any of this. Did not want the power she had been given, the body that she wore, or the face of a villain that stared back at her in the mirror. Did not want the expectations placed upon her as daughter of the clan head, did not want the knowledge of where she was and what, exactly, was to come.
Konohagakure was at war, and it would only be the first of many.
On wednesday night, after the sun had set and the clan had gone to sleep, Orochimaru got out of bed, pulled on clothing she had set out for this very purpose, and left. It was a simple thing to avoid her family when their chakra, when all chakra, was so very loud in her ears.
This, too, was something she did not want.
She wandered the village, away from the tiny compound which housed her tiny clan. They were only five now that Eizo was dead. Only five, when once they were so much larger.
She wandered into and through alleyways, walking without any real aim. Her only goal was to go away, away from her family, away from her responsibilities, away from the future that loomed ever present before her.
Eventually, she came to a tree.
The buildings of the Konoha were built into and around the trees that grew here. The forest was as much a part of the village as the village was a part of the forest, and the village sang with the soft chakra of the wood, omnipresent everywhere she went. This tree, however, was separate from any buildings around it and towered above all the others.
She walked up to it, placed her foot upon the trunk, and began to climb. The bark was rough beneath her fingertips, the wood grown in such a way that it seemed less like it was a single tree grown and more like a great number of trees that had fused together through time. She climbed her way higher and higher and higher in this tree, until she found herself a spot to settle among its highest branches.
It was here Senju Tobirama found her, hours later in the early morning.
"What are you doing up here, child?" the Nidaime Hokage asked, his face stoic and calm and strangely out of place in this tall, tall tree. He did not look tired, did not look like he was grieving, but his chakra was heavy with the feeling of it. Senju Hashirama had been dead for less than four months, a casualty of war the entire village raged about. His death was a banner for them to rally behind, and it only made the war bloodier.
Orochimaru-who-was-Amelia-but-cannot-be-her-any-longer looked up at this man, weighed by grief and strife and the wellbeing of an entire village. She looked at him, this tragic man she knew would die soon and, for reasons she does not entirely understand, told the truth.
"I've run away, Hokage-sama." She pulled her knees tighter against her chest and leaned against the trunk of the tree. "And now I'm hiding."
Tobirama looked at her, something tugging his lips down, and sat on the branch before her. "Why?"
"Because I'm scared." She said. "We are at war. I have been born in a shinobi clan. One day my parents will send me to the academy and I will learn to kill and then I will be sent out to do just that."
She paused for a moment and Tobirama said nothing as she gathered her thoughts. "My uncle is dead," and she said this with a lightness that betrayed the gravity of such a statement. "I do not want to die like he did."
Tobirama seemed to mull over his thought, turning them over in his head and dissecting their every avenue, before he spoke again. "My brother," he said, and there was grief laced in his voice, "grew this tree with mokuton."
She looked at him for she did not understand.
"That was… about a week after the Uchiha signed the peace treaty with the Senju. I remember him standing there, on that day, grinning. He said that he wanted to grow something to celebrate the village's founding. A monument, he called it. Something to celebrate the fact his dream came true.
"My brother, for as long as I can remember, has always dreamed of peace. Dreamed of a world where clans do not have to send their children out to die. It was why he fought so hard for this place, when everyone told him he was a fool for dreaming of it. Child, the reason this village exists, and the reason this tree stands, is so that you do not have to fight and die."
Hours later, when the sun shone high in the sky, Orochimaru stood on the steps of her clan's compound and watched as her mother sprinted from the front door to take her in her arms.
She said nothing as Airi clung to her and cried.