The Art of Kunoichi
Summary: Falling in love with guys isn't the only thing Female!Naruto can do. She's learning the fine art of being a kunoichi.
/ Chapter One /
They were all around her, glaring. They acted like she wouldn't notice, or worse - they didn't care if she did. It was like someone watching an insect go about its business; it was a lesser being, one you could observe without people wondering why you were being nosy.
The angry looks were almost worse than everyone ignoring her. Almost. At least, with their hatred, they acknowledged her existence, acknowledged that she was alive.
Suddenly, the people glaring at her disappeared, and she was alone again, in the dark. The only light she could see was a spotlight that shone on her, but everything in all directions was darkness.
She was alone, again…
"Naruto!"
Naruto woke up, breathing heavily, heart pounding. It was just another nightmare…
Yes, a nightmare. She was back in her bedroom at the Aburame Clan compound, with the bright orange walls and matching carpet. She recognized the bright lamp she had begged her Dad for hanging from the ceiling.
The whole of her bedroom was brightly colored, in an effort to keep away the nightmares of darkness - not that it helped much at night. It was always a comforting sight in the morning, though.
And there was her brother, Shino, standing by her bedside and looking rather concerned about her. The average Konohan citizen might have trouble telling the body language of her brother - actually, all the members of her clan - but Naruto had no problem. Besides the fact that she knew him almost as well as she did herself, Shino wasn't wearing his usual coat to hide his face and body.
Members of the Aburame clan usually wore them outside the compound for the other citizens of Konoha, so they wouldn't fear the Aburame for seeing insects crawling in and out of their bodies. When they were in the comfort of their own homes, though, they universally preferred not to wear the coat covering their bodies.
The coats were uncomfortable, and that's without mentioning the feeling of being isolated from the people around you. They couldn't see you smile or frown, and it was harder to communicate with friends and comrades. Nobody would want to wear them, if wearing them wasn't a necessity, but it was.
After all, people fear what they do not understand; and what people fear, they try to eliminate. It's human nature, based on survival instinct to get rid of whatever is different from you. In this case, though, that instinct would only be harmful to the Aburame.
The Aburame held a good position in the village economically due to their production and trade of honey and silk, due to their insects, and they did not wish to jeopardize this standing because of a few narrow-minded civilians. Thus, the practice of wearing coats.
Among themselves, however - their fellow clan members, those who knew the pains they did - the Aburame were very open. It was a tight-knit clan, made all the closer for the distance from the other villagers; and Naruto was one if its members in all but the practice of hosting kikaichu.
"Shino-nii," Naruto greeted her older (only by a few months, though!) brother.
"You were having a nightmare again," Shino observed quietly.
"Ah, it's not that important," Naruto smiled, waving her hand as if clearing away the nightmare, the darkness. "Today's our first day at the Academy, right? We shouldn't be thinking about negative things!"
Shino sighed before turning around to leave the room. "We're leaving in twenty minutes," he informed her. "Mom and Dad want to talk to us before we leave."
"Okay, Shino-nii," Naruto said absentmindedly, already pulling an orange top and a matching pair of pants out of her closet. "I'll see you in the Entrance Hall, then."
Naruto went through her morning ablutions - taking a quick, five-minute shower, getting dressed, brushing her teeth, and fixing her hair. The practice was routine after years of doing the same thing again and again, leaving Naruto time to think of other things.
There were a lot of things going on in Naruto's mind. At the foremost of them, looming like a shadow over all her other thoughts (the less-important ones, like 'The toothpaste is running out, I should ask mom to pick some more up at the store later' and 'My hair is more tangled than it was yesterday; maybe I shouldn't sleep on my back before important days') was how her time at the Academy would be spent.
Naruto had wanted to become a ninja since she was old enough to realize that she wasn't going to stay a child forever and would, in fact, have to go out into the world to do something.
Maybe it was because she was raised by a clan comprised predominantly of ninja, or maybe because she lived in a ninja village. Maybe it was because she was the daughter of two powerful ninja, and they somehow passed the N-gene onto her. Maybe it was because Shino-nii wanted to become a ninja, and she wanted to stay close to him.
Anyway, Naruto wanted to become a ninja. Not just any run-of-the-mill Chunin, though; no, Naruto wanted to be the greatest ninja she knew of - the Hokage.
Her reasoning for this goal was simple. The Hokage was the most powerful ninja in the village. This fact was recognized by every person in the village, regardless of profession or standing. The Hokage was the greatest. End of story.
Naruto wanted to be great. She wanted the strength and the power that came with being the leader of a village full of people. This desire was spurred on by her less-than-friendly treatment from the villagers.
If one person was picked on and hated by those who were supposed to look out for her, then who's to say there weren't other people ostracized within Konoha? Naruto knew the feeling of pain, of being hated for something that wasn't your fault. Because of this, she could empathize with society's outcasts - the weak, the poor, those who were looked down on - and she wanted to stand up for them. She wanted to become Hokage so she could be the strongest person in Konoha and make everyone acknowledge the weakest people.
Of course, she knew becoming Hokage was a difficult goal. She wasn't even totally convinced that she'd be able to achieve it, but she knew trying would be that much better than giving up. On the way to achieving her dream, she'd meet people, and maybe be able to convince them she was right - that the weak could become strong.
The first step towards her ambition was, of course, to become a ninja of Konoha - a Genin. Before that, though, she needed to be an Academy Student. Thus, her thoughts were all but a flurry on the topic.
Would her sensei like her? Would she make friends? Would she learn a lot? Would she have a hard time with the lessons?
A lot of people in the village didn't like Naruto, for some reason. The closest she had ever come to figuring out the reason was her father telling her it was 'something related to events that happened before and during her birth', and he had been drunk at the time. What if her sensei was one of those people?
'A lot of people' also happened to include most of the children her age. A lot of the kids liked to make fun of her, not to mention keep her from playing with them. Shino-nii was always there for her, though, and told her they weren't worth playing with if they couldn't be friendly, and she was grateful that he would be with her in class. She was hoping to make some new friends, though.
She had been taught a great number of things by her parents and some of the other members of the clan, but she wanted to learn more. Specifically, she wanted to learn some cool ninjutsu! Most of the Aburame jutsu was concentrated on utilizing kikaichu, which was useless to Naruto. Thankfully, there was about a handful of other techniques in the Clan Archive.
One of these was the Fūton: Daitoppa, which was used by some Aburame shinobi in defense of most Katon jutsu. The technique was used to push the fire back towards the user, while simultaneously making the fire more powerful with the wind. Most Katon users could create big fireballs, but few could control it once it had left their chakra systems. It was important for the insect users to have something to use against its greatest weakness, fire. Aburame Shibi, Naruto's Dad, was beginning to teach her this technique.
Naruto was pretty good with learning things about chakra and jutsu. She had had a difficult time with chakra control near the beginning, but she was undergoing intensive control-training in the form of running up and down trees with leaves stuck to her forehead.
No, it was with history and lectures and maths and flower arranging that Naruto was worried about. Mom had told her all about the lessons she would be having, and they sounded really boring. When she told her mother that, her Mom had replied to treat the thing as an infiltration mission.
Naruto loved infiltration.
Well, Naruto loved pranks. Infiltration was part of pranking, though. She loved playing tricks on people who had been mean to her, like the weapons shop owner who had sold her defective kunai at a premium - she had only found out they were bad when her Dad had volunteered to help her with her throwing practice.
She had snuck into the man's store, with Shino's help, and written over his accounting book. Thanks to her, pages that had been filled with neatly-written sales and expenditures were now covered with doodles of ninja and rainbows. Then, she had paid a kid a couple of years younger than her some ryo to run into the store while she and Shino were leaving and shout, 'Ninja Attack: Rainbow Power!'.
So infiltration was pretty much natural to her. With her newly-assigned 'mission' in mind, she bought a notebook that she intended to fill up with information on her new classmates. After all, infiltration was about spying, and taking intelligence for the benefit of others. She had spoken to Hokage-jiji about it, and he had told her that he would be grateful for her information when it would be time for putting together the genin teams. He had even said she could have her brother as back-up!
Naruto tightened the elastic band around her ponytail, before nodding to her reflection in the mirror determinedly.
"Let's do this, 'ttebane!"
