Veni Vidi Vici
LilyGardenia
Category – Anime and Manga: Naruto
Rated M for Mature
Genre – Drama / Romance
General Disclaimer: Naruto / ナルト belongs to Kishimoto Masashi-sensei (岸本斉史).
This is an Alternate Universe / AU fanfic.
**In order to clear up any misunderstandings, italics represents the character's thoughts and inner character dialogue is italicized with the extra [ ]. Lines in bold are for emphasis or marks a sectional change.**
Potential triggers warning (incomplete):
· Forced abortion, mentioned (chapter 1)
· Gore (chapter 4, 5,
· Minor character death (chapter 1, 5,
· Miscarriage, mentioned (chapter 2)
· Misogyny, themes (chapters 1, 2, 5,
· Suicide, mentioned (chapter 2, 3, 4,
[ updated: 2021.01.22 ]
Courtesy consumer warning: The author does not condone any of the forms of violence contained in this work, nor does the author intend to influence any consumers of this work to emulate any of the actions done by the characters in this work. This work is fictional and should be regarded as such in the events of the plot. Any allusions or references to real people, places, or properties are accidental and unintentional by the author.
Chapter 1: Part One, NIGHTFALL
Pre-Chapter Notes:
An umebaka, also known as a sutebaka, is a burying (or dumping) grave in Japan. Unlike a mairibaka, or visiting grave, bodies buried in an umebaka is abandoned by their family members. (Source: p. 168, "Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan" by Nam-lin Hur, pub. 2007)
Haruno Sakura wasn't a fool.
By all accounts (provided through the private tutors and family members), she was quite smart and had always been an avid reader of the clan's ancestral records and the clan's budget logs. Those two sources of reading material were the only two requirements for members of the Haruno clan's main branch.
And Sakura wasn't even that.
The Haruno Clan was a civilian clan, but to the world at large, zoomed out of the lens worn by generations of the warring shinobi population, civilians were the wrist. They were the wrist to the hand that was the Uchiha, the Senju, and the rest. And any civilian worth his salt knew of the Haruno.
A millennia before the first shinobi, before the descent of the Rabbit Goddess Kaguya to the mortal realm, it was actually the civilians who were doing the warring, and the Haruno clan, said to be the first worshippers of the now-ancient Gods and Goddesses, had far-reaching members spread across the continent to maintain its position of power.
Bearing the emblem of both Life and Death, the Haruno saw the world for what it was: a carefully balanced thread of fate that weaves and breaks in cycles. Those who were once the oppressed will eventually rise to become the oppressor but not before enduring trials of fire and water. Once mankind has reached its pinnacle, like the careful stretch of wool fibers to spin thread and then into cloth, the Gods and Goddesses—or to the unbelievers who call Them, Nature—would strike down to begin the cycle anew. The answer to all questions, the first Haruno realized, was in the Circle.
That was why the Haruno have always elected to stay in the shadow of those once-great civilian clans.
Once the Tailed Beasts arrived, all civilian life had slowly begun to die out, but it was only through this Great Plague that the earth could then heal and begin anew.
The Haruno never concentrated its members in one general area and even if they did, elected to do so in temples that were hidden deep within the mountains or dotted precariously in shoreline cave systems that bordered trading outposts. The power of the clan always remained consistently in first, the pursuit of knowledge and then, manipulation upon gaining it.
Power before the shinobi race was carefully crafted through espionage, through the trade of secrets between clan heirs, the training of samurai for a life of servitude, and feeding half-truths to the shoguns and absolute lies to the serfs.
Power now—after that first gesture of friendship between Senju Hashirama and Uchiha Madara spurring the Shinobi Villages into existence—lies in the daimyōs.
Civilians lack chakra.
Everyone knows that.
What the Haruno have instead of chakra, however, is the knowledge of it.
On paper, the Haruno Clan is a clan of merchants.
Is it any wonder, then, that Haruno Sakura was a paper ninja?
When Haruno Sakura was born, Haruno Mebuki died.
Mebuki was a kunoichi. She married into the family. She was from Kirigakure, former last name unknown. Somehow, her clan members are all dead. There was an older sibling, missing or killed.
And that was all Sakura knew of her mother at the age of four.
When Sakura turned five, she found out why no one ever speaks about Mebuki.
Her mother was a kunoichi from Kirigakure. She survived a clan massacre, along with an older sibling who went rogue. She was supposed to kill Haruno Kizashi for a client but fell in love with him instead. Mebuki traveled the world with Haruno Kizashi and after she gave birth to a child, died from blood loss underneath a sakura tree twenty paces outside of the Hidden Village of the Leaves.
Sakura had a foot outside of the rice paper door leading to the terrace when she overheard her nursemaid tell the new gardener that her hair was dyed pink from her mother's blood.
If Mebuki had made that final twenty paces, Sakura would have been ceremoniously killed and buried in an umebaka as a child born out of wedlock.
Instead, Haruno Sakura only had her name withdrawn from the family register and her allotted dowry reabsorbed into the Clan.
When Sakura turned five, she realized that no one ever speaks about Mebuki because no one ever needs to speak to her.
On paper, Sakura from the civilian clan of the Haruno does not exist.
There was one last trick, of course, that helped to preserve the Haruno Clan until today.
They were worshippers of the cycle of Life and Death. Legend has it that in the very beginning, when humanity reached its very first pinnacle, a Higher Being took the physical form of a white dragon and washed the world clean. The Haruno is the only clan now that remembers the First Great Plague, and it was through that piece of knowledge that the Clan weathered through the numerous Great Plagues and remains standing today.
More accurately, the Haruno worshipped a practice that both kept alive the necessary traditions and that keeps the Clan flourishing through adaption to the changing times. After all, the world, itself, ebbs and flows in the Circle.
It was an honor for the main members to wear the Haruno circle—dragon white—on their back as practitioners of honoring the past and heralding in the future.
Wearing the Haruno circle on their back, but then one on each shoulder, only served as a reminder for the branch members that they were originally outsiders. They had once been the ones who forgot the White Dragon, who had been the swindled shoguns and the lowly peasants. There were even branch members who had been like Mebuki, completely ignorant of the errors of their ways and felt content in staying ignorant—ultimately, the greatest sin of mankind, the Haruno believed, was to become a shinobi.
Even the greatest of shinobi clans, it seems, deluded themselves into thinking that they were human.
Shinobi were merely tools.
The Haruno knew this because they, like all civilians, had once utilized them as means of protection, for an assassination, or any other whims of man.
Haruno Sakura, then, by all accounts, seemed very much like a fool in choosing the path of a paper ninja.
But was she really?
2020.07.03 Author's Notes:
Hi.
This was my first work.
It was originally a oneshot, a sixty-page oneshot, but still.
A oneshot.
Long story short, I took four years and a mandated quarantine to put it on the backburner and forget it ever existed because that oneshot had been sixty pages of pure trash on fire reorganize my thought process about the plot. I actually pulled a Kakashi and got lost on the road of life but that's a longer story so nevermind.
Anyways.
I know the title page up there looks all formal and scary, but I also know how twisted my mind gets. A few scenes might trigger a few people. Read at your own risk. And of course, because I'm not a completely shitty human being, I will give reminders at the beginning of the chapters if a scene will pop up that is trigger-worthy.
(Also, heads-up: I have no long-term game plan but I'm also not a quitter, so expect varied waiting times in between chapter updates.)