A/N: Second chapter!
I don't own Naruto.
I have no beta.
ENJOY!
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-NEW CHAPTER IS 2,048 WORDS LONG.
-THE ORIGINAL STORY DIDN'T HAVE THIS CHAPTER.
"Every winner has scars."-Herbert N. Casson.
Naruko's first amount of training came in the form of food. As she was now wearing a mask everywhere she went, she needed to learn how to eat without people seeing her face. As she was just ashamed of the scars she bore constantly, she needed to find a way to eat quick enough so people didn't see her face. That meant that she could not go to Ichiraku Ramen until she discovered something.
This training included fast movement of chopsticks. First, her arm had to be fast enough to be able to grab the food and put it in her mouth without being seen. Second, she had to be able to lower and lift her mask at a rate that nobody would be able to follow. Third, she needed to be able to move fast enough to where the food would disappear and nobody would notice.
Every meal of instant ramen that she had for the first month after being released from the hospital, had been treated as a training expedition. She needed to improve and she needed it quickly. She was going to be entering the Academy within the next year and a half and she wasn't about to deal with the nosy children she would know doubt be sharing space with. It was vital that she learned how to eat properly.
As a particularly smart child, Naruko knew that it wasn't healthy for children her age to miss food. Even if the food she was consuming on a daily basis wasn't exactly healthy for her, she knew that she couldn't just miss meals. So it wasn't like she was going to be missing lunch at the Academy.
With these thoughts in mind, she pushed herself towards her goal, intent on finding a way to ease the eating process.
Her second form of training, came as scavenging. She had never really had to do it before, but according to Kyuubi she now had to collect things. So she was told to visit the training grounds every evening and collect all of the weapons that she could find. Ninja were incredibly wasteful and tended to forget their weapons after they were done training. Their foolishness was her reward.
Kyuubi knew how to inspect the weapons to see which ones were okay to use and which ones weren't. When she asked how Kyuubi could even know something like that, she simply got a small explanation about how she was a chakra mass created long ago and had seen things over the years that would add to her knowledge of the world. Basically, the Fox knew everything. Or at least almost everything.
And then began the lessons of how to sharpen her weapons properly.
Her third lesson started off as a hunt. The Fox was insistent that Naruko knew how to hunt for herself. Since she could not go out into the village to purchase things like other people could because she was taxed too much, she had to find her own prey.
Unfortunately, the Biju tended to consume their food raw, so she needed to learn how to cook various types of meat. This bled into her fourth lesson. She had to learn how to sneak.
Naruko was not allowed to enter the Library, meaning of she actually had to sneak inside and take the books that she needed. The first three times were a complete failure, but she finally learned that the old woman at the main desk was having vision problems and if she wanted to avoid all of those issues of getting caught, she had to do something about her hair. Naruko was the only person in the village that had bright blonde hair in that particular shade. All she had to do was dye it for the days she was going to the library. The woman would not notice her at all if she slipped in behind somebody else. Of course she also changed her hair style to just to make it more difficult for people.
After getting the books that she needed, Naruko was finally able to cook the food that she wanted. She learned how to prepare fish that she caught from the streams in the training grounds, and venison, which she also caught in the training grounds, so that she wasn't relying on fish all the time.
Once she knew how to prepare the meat properly, Kyuubi told her that she needed to plant herself a garden. Her fifth lesson had to do with thievery. She needed to learn how to steal things from people without them noticing.
So Naruko got to practice ditching her Anbu guards and then stealing things from various vendors in the village. Once she had acclimated a large assortment of the things she needed, she turned one of the various apartments in her building, into a conservatory. Basically what she did was she tore out parts of the ceiling to let the sunlight and rain come in and turned the entire room into a big garden.
The fruits of her labor began to grow not too long after and Naruko no longer had to worry about whether she was going to be eating healthy food or not.
When the Hokage found out about what she was doing, he turned a blind eye to it, pretending that he did not know that she had basically stolen a whole bunch of stuff in order to do what she wanted. But seeing as she had been put through unimaginable amounts of suffering at the hands of the villagers, he allowed it to continue because they deserved a little bit of suffering in return.
It was the year before she started the Academy that she finally started her sixth form of training. The Kyuubi wanted her to locate her chakra. Being able to pinpoint where her chakra was before entering the Academy, would give her an advantage over all the other students. Especially if any of the teachers did not like her and tried to sabotage her work.
She had already explored her mind in full. The reason that her mind look like a sewer, was because she apparently felt safer in places that other people would not dare to venture. Several times had she taken refuge in the dirty, smelly waters that resided beneath Konoha.
She wanted to make it better, but Kyuubi insisted that she needed a deeper knowledge of how to feel and see her mental palaces and understand how they worked before she could properly fix things. She was advised to not try to fix anything until she knew what she was doing.
However, she was able to find the door that pretty much let her to her chakra center. Since her chakra network was filled with at least three times the amount of chakra than a normal child would have, she had more work in learning to control it. At least it meant that she definitely had the makings to be a ninja, she just had to work hard to get there.
Her chakra was a light shade of lavender and was warm and comforting, and sometimes she liked to just enter the room and wrap herself in the warmth inside. It was basically the closest thing she was going to get to a hug. Kyuubi was much too large to be able to give her any kind of hug, so she had to make do with what she had.
After getting acquainted with her chakra network, she was able to manipulate it in little bursts from her fingertips. So long as she was able to locate it and use it, she had passed that training perfectly.
Her seventh form of training came in the form of lying.
As a ninja, she needed to be able to lie on the spot and make it believable. That meant that she had a lot of things to do. The Kyuubi had various little excuses that she can use in order to trick people into thinking that she was telling the truth. She was also taught various facial expressions in order to make her stories believable.
Of course as she was wearing a mask the only facial expressions she could really use were her eyes but eyes could go a long way. Actually, the mask did aid her. It hid most of her face so that she wouldn't have to worry about people seeing if she was grinning or not.
A few months before she began at the academy, she started her eighth lesson. Knowledge gathering. Knowing things before entering the Academy would be the best way to go.
So she began sneaking into the library in order to take books out all the time.
Reading books was boring. Naruko wanted to be able to fight and use weapons, but the Kyuubi wouldn't let her because her body was small and she needed to wait until she was a bit bigger before starting intense training. She didn't want to ruin her growth or something like that. She kind of lost interest when she learned that she wasn't going to be starting any physical training for a while.
And it wasn't like she was learning things that were fun. Who wanted to learn about the history of the village? It was boring and filled with a bunch of old guys who didn't seem to learn from their actions. She didn't care about who created the village, or how the village was created, as far as she was concerned the village was full of a bunch of assholes. That was all she needed to know and it was all she cared about.
At least reading about chakra and the various uses that it could have, was interesting. And briefly she had wondered if maybe she could be a Iryo-Nin. Kyuubi immediately shot that idea down when she informed the little blonde that her chakra was mixed with a bit of Kyuubi's chakra, making it impossible for her to heal people other than herself. Biju chakra was extremely deadly to people who weren't Jinchurikis.
A least there were other things she could possibly master in.
Kyuubi was a taskmaster, plain and simple. As she was the most powerful of the Biju, she had demands that Naruko must absolutely follow.
She refused to have a weak vessel. The Kyuubi was stuck with Naruko probably for the rest of the blonde's long life, but that did not mean that she was going to get away with being weak or being stupid. As the best of the Biju she had a reputation to uphold and if Naruko did not properly portray who she was, then she would suffer.
And not physical suffering of any kind. No, this would be mental suffering. Naruko would be forced to sit through lecture after lecture after lecture about the faults of humanity and how they could have avoided making stupid decisions had they used their brains.
Naruko had been through several of these lectures already and she really didn't want to have to deal with any more of them. Because even if she wasn't in her mindscape, Kyuubi could still talk to her no matter what she was doing and no matter where she was. So there would be a dull, ringing voice in her ear just lecturing on and on and on, and it was torture.
So no, Naruko was not about to come across as some kind of weak individual. Not when her mental sanity was on the line.
A/N: So this is the new chapter 2! It was not a part of the first version of this fic, but I felt you should all see Naruko's childhood a bit. See what Kyuubi made her go through.
How was it? Let me know.
Ja ne! :D
CHECK ME OUT ON TUMBLR. HELLY-WATERMELONSMELLINFELLON. I FOLLOW BACK.