A/N: Yay, I updated! Inspiration hit me. Whoohoo. Sorry it took so long! In the mad rush of exams and coursework in college I totally forgot about it.

Since some of you were wondering: RIJII IS FEMALE. I know there have only been a few hints (such as replacing the only female member from team twenty-three), I know I haven't been overly specific. I don't know about you guys, but I refer to myself as "me" and not "she" or "female". Since Rijii is only young, and far too overwhelmed with learning to surive, things such as periods and hormones haven't really come into play yet. But they will, because amongst everything else, poor Rijii will have to deal with gender prejudice, too.

And yes, I refer to her as 'Rijii" – as I said in the last chapter, I don't really think of her as me anymore. Too much as already happened to her. She's just a girl that started off as me, but has been thrust into many horrible situations that I hope I will never have to get into in the real world.

QUITE A DARK CHAPTER. Contains death, blood, and swearing. Short, but necessary to show development in situation and character. Eh, I'm on my holidays. I'll write an extra-long chapter tomorrow.

Enjoy!

Only A Moron

Chapter Four

Eyes bulged, mouth gaped, blood spilled. It spurted like a fountain – all red, red, red. The bandit was dead, dead, dead.

I stood by the caravan, still frozen. Fear gripped me, everything trembling, my hand grasping the kunai so hard that it began to cut into my skin. All the bandits - only three – had been despatched, quickly and efficiently, while I had just stood there. Doing nothing.

Useless.

Knowing I would have to kill one day, reading about it, learning how to do it – it was all so completely, utterly different to facing it in real life. I felt odd. Numb. I'd been apprehensive, of course, when our team had taken that C ranked mission. Nervous, even; but not really scared. I had training. I had teammates. I was mature and worldly experienced – more so than any other from my graduating class. I could deal with a C ranked mission. I could deal with bandits. Right?

But I had been so, so wrong. Sensei had known about them before they attacked – how could he not? He was a Jounin. They were rogue bandits, stumbling about the bushes with knives and swords. When they jumped out at us, we attacked. Well, my teammates attacked; I threw a kunai, and it attracted attention. One of the bandits noticed me – saw the too-big hitai-ate – and figured me as the weak link. He grinned and leapt (probably thinking of using me as some sort of hostage against the superior ninja) but as he leapt, he wasn't fast enough. Just as he reached me, Nakamura sensei stabbed him in the neck with his kunai.

It wasn't glorious. It wasn't epic. There was no flourish – no heroic action. There was no evil in the bandit's bulging eyes as he died in front of me. Just a man, murdered.

It wasn't a clean death – it hadn't meant to be; sensei had just reacted to an opponent aiming for his student. The first thing in his hands had been a kunai, and he had used it quickly to pierce the main artery that throbbed underneath the skin. It took a few moments for the man to die – he gurgled, blood bubbling where it escaped. It wasn't like falling asleep; his eyes seemed to scream at me, and his whole body spazmed, chest heaving as it tried to suck in air that ran away with the blood. Eventually, he stopped. Everything stopped.

The rest of the bandits died, Takeshi and Shiro killing one each. I stared at the bandit; he was just a man. What had he done? He attacked innocent people. But he was a man; someone's son. A son they'd never see again; a son they'd never bury. What if he was a father? Oh, God. Oh, shit. Shite. Shit. Dead. Dead. Dead.

I'd never before seen anyone die. It was – weird. Nothing really happened. The skies didn't darken; it didn't start to rain. No one did a sad, good-bye monologue. It was a clear day, the sky was bright. I didn't feel guilt or remorse; and, horrifyingly enough, I didn't even feel sad or scared by it. His death just seemed logical. If he was still breathing, then he was still a danger to me and to the mission. Why not kill him? It was easy enough. He wasn't my friend, I didn't know him. He didn't belong to Konoha.

I felt shocked; but as I stared at his corpse, my shaking slowed down to a stop. I stared. I'd never seen a dead man before.

Sensei Nakamura approached me, after checking on the boys. "Are you alright, Rijii?" He understood the importance of the first death.

"I – yeah," I said, unable to take my eyes off him. Every muscle had slackened in the slump he fell in. The eyes looked the same, but unfocused – no life in them. I pondered on the corpse; we were the same, weren't we? Only my chest was still moving. His wasn't. It stayed still, unlike the blood that continued to seep into the grass.

"How long will it take for him to bleed out?" I asked, startling even myself with the question, but it was all I could think to say. Only one cut, and he died. It was so horribly simple. (And yet, I couldn't stop picturing myself doing it. Instead of sensei, I was the one holding the kunai – I was the one that lunged it into his neck. And then I was the one dying, and I was standing over my own corpse, laughing. So easy, my imagination mocked. So simple. One cut, and bang. It's over. You're dead! Just like him. Just like the girl you replaced.)

My mouth went dry, and then my sensei answered, a grim turn to his lips. He and the boys took the corpses into a pile and burned them. And then – we left, continuing on our mission. The civilians were shaken up, and they stared at us children in horror. For us, it just seemed so simple.

How are you feeling? Uh. Fine.

What do you see in this picture? A… Face? Smiling. Laughing.

And what do you see in this? Oh. He's on the floor. I think he's bleeding.

And what do you see in this? A man being stabbed.

And what do you see in this? A lizard.

A lizard? Yeah. But it's ripping someone's face off.

The psychiatrist was boring. She asked me the questions nicely, but it seemed like she was bored of it. Like she'd tested loads of pre-pubescent kids to see if they'd snap. I already knew that I had a morbid imagination – how could I not, with all the conditioning that the academy and further training had done? But by my own answers, I knew they could be a lot worse. There had to be other Shinobi that saw worse pictures than mine (it scared me a bit to realize that in a few years time mine would be just as bad, too.)

Nothing happened after the evaluation; no straight jackets, no white, padded rooms. I was just given a lollipop and sent straight back on missions. None of them were ever quite as bad, though; apparently, Nara Nakamura had a daughter, so he was a bit sentimental. I never had to directly fight any of the enemies myself (of course, it could just be that since I was still so small and weak that I'd probably be more of a hindrance than anything.)

I went home, still living in the orphanage until I saved enough money to buy myself a flat (it didn't matter that I was only seven. I was a Shinobi; old enough to die. Old enough to kill). I boiled some water, made some tea and drank it with a biscuit. It was frighteningly normal, and a small part of me found it hard to believe that everything and everyone could just carry on with their daily routines when a man had just died and I'd seen it. The larger part of me – the rational part, the mature part, the shinobi-trained part – just laughed. How self-centred. How arrogant. To think I really mattered, in the large scale of things. What was I? A pawn. A weak, useless pawn. I wasn't Hatake Kakashi, a genius from a genius family. I wasn't Uzumaki Naruto, destined to great things with demons falling in my wake. I wasn't even Haruno Sakura, lucky enough to know some of the most powerful and influential people.

I was justu Rijii, a little Genin nobody. I needed to train. I needed to be prepared. I needed to be strong.

I don't want to die.

I sipped my hot tea, and marvelled at its normalcy.