Tale of the Setting Sun

Chapter 16: "Glow of a Firefly"

At the ripe old age of five, Fū had quite confidently decided, in her not-so-humble opinion, that her home was the most beautiful place in the world.

She lived in the village of Takigakure, an abode which nestled at the edges of the roots of an ancient, colossal tree that guarded them from the rest of the world. It towered over a sparkling clear lake which was pure enough to drink directly from, and farther down, a thin but regal waterfall, the namesake of their village, tumbled down over the side of a cliff.

Fū and her mother lived together in a small, modestly-decorated house at the farthest edge of the village, but they were also the closest to the guardian tree, so Fū never minded. The other village children never liked her anyways; whenever she tried to join them as they played swim-tag through the underwater roots, they threw rocks at her and told her to go away.

It hurt, but Fū wasn't alone. She had her mother, a quiet older woman with long green hair and dark eyes. When her mother wasn't tired after a full day spent working in the village rice paddies, she would hold her hand and carry her up the trunk of the guardian tree to a faraway branch where they would sit and talk and laugh.

She also had her pets. For her birthday present one year, her mother gave Fū a tank with a colony of white shiroari, which were termite-like insects. A multitude of insects lived alongside the village people at the roots of the guardian tree, and it wasn't uncommon to adopt them as pets. Fū thought they were quite cute, with the way they squirmed around her fingers. At first, she'd had to take care of them outdoors – after all, if they escaped, they could very well eat through the wooden frames of their house. However, once she'd found that she could control them if she fed them her chakra, her mother had allowed her to bring them inside their home.

And finally, she had Chōmei, a blue kabutomushi (beetle) that lived inside her mind.

"I think I'll try adopting some kabutomushi too," she told him, stroking his green wings. "So you'll have more beetle friends like yourself."

"For the seventh time, I'm not a beetle," he said tiredly.

"Whatever you say," she said, giving him a thumbs-up.

If Fū had to decide what the best part of Takigakure was, it would have to be the Firefly Festival. Every summer, the Festival was the one night a year when everyone's houses were dark. All the villagers rowed out to the lake in their canoes with their lanterns; when the sun set and everything was pitch black around them, they opened them and let the fireflies fly out. The glowing fireflies and their reflections in the lake illuminated their boats, reminding them of all of their loved ones who had died in battle. Fū and her mother often prayed for her father; she'd never known him, as he'd died just before she was born, but she did know that he was a ninja who had fought in the war.

"How about I get some fireflies too?" she pondered, rubbing his shell exactly where he liked it.

Chōmei snorted. "They're fragile, and die far too quickly. Stick to the ones you've already got."

"I stuck some of my baby shiroari on Mushimi yesterday," Fū grinned. "He kept scratching, and he didn't know why. He thinks he has lice now, and his uncle's furious."

"Nice!" Chōmei wiggled his tail in his best impression of a thumbs-up.

When Fū's mother died when she was seven, her world suddenly grew ugly. Their house was too big for one girl, and as time passed by, mold and fungus crept into its cracks and it slowly fell into disrepair. It was alright in the summer, and there was always plenty of fish in the lake so she never went hungry. But as the cold breeze of winter began licking at her toes, Fū realized that she would have to do something. After being refused by every repairman in the village, she tried to clear away the weeds and board up the holes herself, but it was beyond her. Nevertheless, she kept at it every day, licking her bruises where she'd hammered her own fingers instead of the wood as Chōmei performed cheering routines in her head.

It was one such winter evening that Gobuki, the village leader, approached her. He was a stern-faced man with dark hair; Fū knew that they were distantly related through her father, but he had never come near their house before, so the only times she had seen him were during the Firefly Festival.

Unlike the rest of the village people, Gobuki wasn't cruel, but he was still a practical man who told her in matter-of-fact tones that Chōmei was actually a monster that had been sealed inside her, and that she was expected to learn ninjutsu and use his powers to kill the village's enemies.

"I don't want to kill people," said Fū, after thinking it over.

Gobuki paused and looked at her oddly as he stroked his beard. "Well that's what you were born for. A lot of good ninja sacrificed their lives capturing Chōmei so it could be sealed in you."

"Not my fault," Chōmei interjected in her head, making a rude gesture at Gobuki.

Fū cocked her head to the side. "Why me?"

"Your mother offered you," Gobuki said flatly. "Which I always found odd, considering your father was one of the ninja killed by Chōmei."

No, the world had never been as beautiful as she'd thought.

And so, over the years, Fū trained under a variety of teachers who made little effort to contain their hatred for her. Grudgingly, they acknowledged that she was clever and a quick learner, but most abandoned their post after several months, unable to stand being in such constant contact with the village monster. Nevertheless, she mastered all the basic genin-level ninjutsu by the time she was eleven. Then, working with Chōmei, she began working to gain greater control over the Seven-Tails' power until she could even begin to change form and adopt some of his capabilities.

The first time she managed to project two scaly wings like Chōmei's, heedless of the fact that it was nighttime and that she was exhausted, she flew up the guardian tree. Even with the temperature dropping rapidly, she flew higher up than she'd ever gone before, until she finally its very peak.

The view took her breath away. With wide eyes, Fū slowly took in the open canvas of the black sky, which reached endlessly out in every direction, ending only where it touched the expanse of dark forest that surrounded them. She'd never been able to see the sky properly before, because the tree tops blocked so much of it.

Raising a hand up, Fū marveled at how many of them there were. She hadn't realized that there were a million stars that hung like fireflies, lighting up a faraway world that was out of her reach.

One day, when Gobuki had gone away on a secret mission, the village deputy who'd been left in charge summoned Fū. He was a thin, dark-skinned man named Haike with narrow, guarded eyes; unlike Gobuki, he'd never hidden the fact that he despised the Taki jinchūriki. He told her there would be a Chūnin exam in Sunagakure in a week, and that she was to go there with one of the Taki team cells. Upon meeting her new teammates, Mushimi and Suzuru, Fū scowled. Mushimi, as she quickly recalled, had been one of her old tormenters. He was Haike's nephew, and he eyed her with intense loathing as soon as he'd laid eyes on her.

As soon as she'd finished carefully inserting the last of her shiroari and kabutomushi into a padded wooden tube which she then strapped to her back, Fū was whisked off to Sunagakure.

As expected, the Chūnin exams were a breeze. For the first exam, in which they had to break apart the opposing team's boulder, all she had to do was send over her cute little shiroari at the opposing team to distract them, while simultaneously crawling into any cracks in the rock. With a stern order to her shiroari to not eat the genin, their rock soon felt apart and they passed.

The next exam, Mushimi and Suzuru immediately abandoned her and ran off with their team plate, which was fine with her. The idiots of course got their team plate stolen by another team; she hunted and took back the team plate, and then with vindictive pleasure, frolicked around her tied-up 'teammates' as they glared at her sullenly. She then burrowed inside a dead-end tunnel near the surface to take a nap, but accidentally mistimed it. Nevertheless, Chōmei frantically shook her awake just in time to meet the exam's deadline.

Despite that tiny mishap, the remainder of the exam was also going swimmingly, when something went wrong.

Her preliminary went by in a flash – afterwards, she couldn't even remember the names of her opponents. The Ame genin had gone down with little effort, but the other genin from Konoha had proved a little bit more tricky. She'd used a long-range medium for her genjutsu, with irritating squawking blue birds that Fū had had to take great pains to avoid. But in the end, of course, it hadn't been a problem.

After two weeks of loitering around – while making sure her shiroari and kabutomushi were breeding properly – her following match came, and it wasn't much of a challenge for her either. Her opponent was a Suna genin who seemed to have an extraordinary amount of pride in his puppet. Her shiroari had just bred recently, and she'd been making sure to keep them extra hungry; Fū took great pleasure in seeing his horrified expression after having them eat up his puppet in a few seconds.

In the final match – as it should've been – Fū faced off against the other most powerful genin in the exam. He was a red-headed boy from Konoha, with a tantō that must have been at least half his short height strapped across his back. But despite his disarmingly young appearance, the genin, Naruto, had been making waves in the Chūnin exams as an especially dangerous opponent to watch out for.

The battle had been going more or less in the direction she expected, when the boy suddenly slammed his tantō into the ground and electrocuted all of her insects.

"No!" she screamed, her vision flashing red as she watched them blacken and shrivel up. In her mind's eye, she recalled with a flash her mother's eager face as she watched Fū unwrap her birthday present. "Chōmei!"

"You sure?" he asked uncertainly, tail whipping around fretfully. "I thought we'd agreed not to attract too much attention.

But at her insistence, he reluctantly agreed, and she transformed into her initial jinchūriki form before proceeding to pummel the brat into the ground where he belonged.

Fū probably should have ended it there then, but she'd always had a rather nasty habit of playing with her fish before skewering them.

The worn-out boy seemed to have given up all hope, and had just been lying still on the ground, his chest slowly rising up and down with every breath. To his credit, he did not seem altogether afraid.

And then –

"Naruto!" With some encouraging words from his teammate, the redhead was back on his feet with renewed strength in his eyes. Fū had been taken aback at first, watching with disbelief as it all happened, but she finally dove towards him with her hands outstretched.

With her enhanced vision, she could see the artery in his neck pulsating. Just a single slash, and he'd be dead, and she'd have avenged her poor insects.

There was something materializing in his hands; it was chakra, made so dense that it had become visible. Fū narrowed her eyes, but kept going; she was confident that there was no way it'd penetrate her hardened shell armor.

They met each other head on. Fū swiped at his neck, but he dodged; nevertheless, she reached under his arms, and lifted him off the ground. As she did so, she felt the ball of chakra he'd summoned slam into her torso. The impact was so powerful, the sand around her exploded up with a bang like massive waves, hiding them from the watching eyes of the audience.

Gritting her teeth, Fū held on to his struggling body, and streaked upwards to the sky. Letting out a hiss of pain, she felt the ball of chakra grind abrasively against her armor and begin to inch its way inwards to her flesh; with shock, she realized that her armor was cracking. Panting, Naruto determinedly continued to drive his hand against her. It was like a small contained storm that tore away at her shell as if it were made of paper.

Before Fū could pass out from the pain, she dove, and just before they reached the ground, she released the boy. With another explosive crash, a shockwave of dust and sand swept through the arena.

Gasping in agony, with blood dripping out through the gaping cracks of her armor, she soon dropped to the ground, her wings curled protectively around her. Black tendrils of unconsciousness began to creep upon her vision.

When the sand had settled down, the match was over. Holding their breaths, the watching crowd quickly identified the victor.

There was stunned silence. And then –

"The winner of the battle is...Fū from Takigakure!" the proctor announced, as shakily, Fū got to her feet. At the other side of the arena, Naruto lay unmoving on the ground, his eyes closed. There was another long pause – and then the crowd rose to their feet, erupting into an uproarious round of applause.

The Suna medics were already moving into the field with a stretcher, but a silver-haired jōnin with a Konoha forehead protector – likely the boy's sensei – stopped them. Beside him stood the girl who'd interrupted their battle. Come to think of it, she was the same girl who'd been a headache to deal with in the preliminaries; Fū couldn't quite place her name. She was white-faced as she followed the jōnin, but just as they knelt beside the redhead genin, he stirred and opened his eyes.

"Naruto!" said the girl, looking quite relieved as she threw her arms around the dazed boy.

"Ow," he winced, and she immediately let go, apologizing. The jōnin asked him a few questions, to which Naruto shook his head no. Waving away the stretcher, the jōnin and the girl helped him get up. Silently, Fū watched as they hobbled out of the arena together.

"What's wrong?" Chōmei asked, sensing something was off.

"Nothing," she said, feeling a lump in her throat. "Chōmei, you saw what happened with his sudden chakra surge. Do you think that kid is a jinchūriki like me?"

"Everyone knows Konoha got their hands on poor Kurama," Chōmei said contemplatively. "Though we don't know who the vessel is right now. It's not unthinkable."

Fū cocked her head, her brow furrowed. "But his teammates don't hate him."

"Maybe he has a better personality than you," Chōmei offered.

With the help of several brave, but wary Suna medic-nin, Fū was soon patched up. Wincing as they healed her with the soothing blue glow of medical ninjutsu, she noticed Suzuru skulking around the bleachers. Oddly enough however, Mushimi had disappeared; even after scanning the entire stadium, she couldn't find him. She'd been half-expecting an abrasive rebuke about her entering her jinchūriki form...with a shrug, Fū stopped thinking about it.

After an hour, the Chūnin certification ceremony was held. All of the genins – having been more or less restored to a conscious state – stood in line before the Kazekage, who gave another boring speech about the honor that the title of chūnin held and the duty they owed their villages. And then, the names of the passing genin were called.

"Fū from Takigakure," said the Kazekage, glaring out at her from under his green pointed Kage hat. Hopping up, she collected her chūnin certificate of achievement to polite applause. Rolling it up immediately, she stuffed it in her strap.

"Uzumaki Naruto from Konohagakure." No surprises there; looking much recovered, the redheaded genin walked up and accepted his certificate.

"Kankurō from Sunagakure." This time, the Kazekage's face eased up just a bit as he looked down at his son. With a pat on his shoulder, the boy accepted his certificate with a bow, to enthusiastic applause.

"Hyūga Neji from Konohagakure." With a blank expression on his face, the boy took the certificate and walked away without any further response.

And so on and so forth; three more genin were awarded the certificate – two from Amegakure, and another one from Konohagakure. The Konoha boy, who had a scar running down his face, looked stunned as he walked up to receive his certificate. But as soon as the paper was in his hand, and he'd examined it to make sure that it was real, the boy began jumping up and down in excitement. As he distastefully watched the boy holler, the look on the Kazekage's face made it clear that he was beginning to regret his decision.

To end the ceremony, a row of Suna jōnin performed some impressive tricks with their jutsu, making fountains out of sparkling sand and giant structures that towered over them. And then, just as the sun was beginning to set, it was finally over. With an air of shooing the strangers out of their village, the Kazekage dismissed them all and disappeared.

It was then that Mushimi finally appeared. Pocketing something that jangled in his pouch, he exchanged a meaningful glance with Suzuru. Then, turning to Fū with a scowl, he motioned towards the village gates with a jerking gesture.

And so, they left Sunagakure.

As they began the long trek across the sand dunes back to their village, Fū couldn't shake off the feeling that something was off. Mushimi and Suzuru seemed to be avoiding her gaze even more so than usual; tense and sweating profusely, they looked around every now and then, as if expecting something.

She glanced around at their surroundings, but all she could see was sand. "Something's up," said Fū, eyeing the boys in question.

"I agree," said Chōmei. However, despite their unease, nothing happened the first day.

But on the second day, just as they were nearing the border between Fire country, Fū sensed them.

As she realized that she was being watched, her senses grew hyper alert. Without stopping, she began to pick up her pace, and soon, she had left her teammates behind. Her heart pounding, she raced across the tree branches of the heavily dense woodland.

Suddenly, with a blur, a figure landed directly in front of her, blocking her way. Fū came to a stop.

"Hold up there, kid." The man had slicked back silver hair, and was dressed in a long black cloak with red clouds and a chin-high collar.

Fū's eyes darted to the blood-red scythe he held in his hand, and snarled, "What do you want with me?"

"Honestly?" The man seemed to genuinely think it over, though his purple eyes never strayed from her face. A gruesome smile lit up his face. "I want to offer you to my god...and by that I mean I want to tear your face up with my scythe, and feel your agony as I rip through your nerves, cell by cell, reveling in your every –"

"Shut up and do your job, newbie." A gruff voice joined in; Fū spun around in shock to see a tall man in a similar black cloak, with a black mask covering much of his face. He wore a Taki forehead-protector, but there was a slash running straight across the middle. Taking in his bizarre appearance, Fū knew for sure that she had never seen him before in her life.

As she watched, the tall man tossed something to the side, and it took a second for Fū to process what it was; when she realized, she jerked back in alarm.

Mushimi and Suzuru's decapitated heads, still dripping blood at the base of their necks, stared back at her with shocked, glassy eyes.

"Not that I care," said the purple-eyed man, "but I thought we made a deal with them?"

"They had only half the money they promised," growled the tall man. He turned his pupil-less green eyes towards Fū, who took a step back.

"Let's show them what we can do, Chōmei," she said, ignoring the trembling in her legs.

After a long, hard day of traveling, they had finally left behind the deserts of Wind country and were at the edges of Fire country. However, with still a half day's journey left from Konoha, they had set up camp for the night.

After a satisfying dinner with some prairie chickens they caught and then roasted over the campfire, Rai and Mayu finally collapsed in exhaustion. Sporadically mumbling words like 'I passed!' and 'I'm a chūnin!' in his sleep, Rai snored away on the grassy ground. Next to him, Mayu dozed in her sleeping bag with a peaceful look on her face. And occasionally stoking the campfire with a stick, Kakashi read a book by the fire's light.

Unable to fall asleep, Naruto reclined on top of a nearby boulder that was covered with light fuzz of moss, looking up at the night sky.

Tomorrow, they would be back in Konoha. Naruto was just as happy as the others to finally leave behind the bleak, endless sandy plains of Sunagakure – but he didn't know how he felt about returning to their home village. He didn't want to see any of their faces; he didn't know if he could ever forgive what they'd done to him.

His entire life, they'd lied to him but still subjected him to their hatred and ridicule. They'd never even given him a chance to figure things out for himself, controlling him by tying him down with the Taboo Seal , as if he were nothing but a senseless, rabid beast.

If Konoha could do that to an ignorant, innocent child, what did the village ideals he'd always believed in even signify? The 'Will of Fire' was taught to every child, whether civilian or shinobi-born, as a symbol of peace and compassion, but it had never seemed to extend towards him.

Naruto supposed most of them had never even thought of him as one of them. His hands curled into fists by his side. That was fine with him; he no longer cared about them either. Or at least, he'd try not to.

However...

He gazed down at the sleeping figures of his teammates. The look on Mayu's face as she looked down upon him in the arena had been completely different from anything he'd seen before. There had been no fear, no disgust. There had been only trust, and an unwavering belief in him. And then in a bolt of realization, Kakashi-sensei's words had flashed through his mind:

"So you're saying your efforts were all to get people to acknowledge you? That doesn't sound like the Naruto I know."

Naruto hadn't responded then, but at that moment, his answer had been suddenly clear in his mind. He hadn't been striving all those years to hear praise from faceless villagers who spat at him. He'd been doing his best to stand out for that one day when someone – anyone – noticed him. Not as Naruto the village pariah, or Naruto the jinchūriki, but as Naruto the Konoha ninja. He had wanted the strength to protect them.

But in chasing after that dream, he'd gotten so caught up in its mechanics that he hadn't even realized that he was already surrounded by people who saw him for himself.

Naruto turned to look at the sleeping forms of his teammates. They didn't know, of course, that he had the Nine-tails trapped inside of him. Kakashi-sensei had told him that they would be going directly to the Hokage as soon as they returned to Konoha, but that until then, nobody else was to find out.

How would they react?

Rai's words, from back when they were in the deep underground caves of Suna, swam hauntingly around in his head: "I guess you already know that you were born on the day of the Nine-tails attack... My parents were killed on that day."

Naruto's heart sank. Surely they would realize that Naruto wasn't the Nine-tails itself? That he was just an unwilling vessel for the beast that had killed their loved ones?

Struggling to contain the raging thoughts in his head, Naruto sighed. Letting his head fall back against the moss-covered rock, he looked up at the star-filled sky. Raising a hand, he stared at the outline of his hand.

Several hundreds of feet away, tucked in the shadows of the surrounding forest, a solitary figure in a long black cloak with red cloud motifs silently observed the campsite. His face was obscured by an orange mask that spiraled inwards, opening up into an eye hole on his right. Ignoring the two sleeping genin completely, his red gaze lingered on the jōnin for a second before resting on the redheaded genin who lay awake.

The figure stood completely still, watching. He watched as the genin eventually drifted into a fitful sleep. He watched the jōnin sleep, periodically waking up to stoke the campfire.

For hours, he watched and watched.

Then, there was a hiss and then a distorted flickering in his consciousness.

"We've got the jinchūriki," a voice spoke in his head telepathically. "We're beginning the extraction process now."

Finally, he roused himself. With one last look at the sleeping ninja, he turned to leave, stepping on a leaf as he did so. At the faint sound, the silver-haired jōnin's eyes immediately snapped open, and getting up with a start, the man peered with narrowed eyes at where the figure had been silently watching. But there was nobody there.

He was gone now, but he would keep watching. He was always watching.

After several days of nothingness, Fū suddenly realized that she had been given bodily form once more.

She was floating in a pitch black world. There was nothing around her, above her, or below her. But somehow, she was there. She felt weak and tired, and even though she had just awakened, she wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep.

With a jolt, she realized that it was eerily quiet where she was. She couldn't remember the last time it had been so quiet. Where was Chōmei?

"Chōmei?" Fū called out softly, taking a step forward. Despite there being nothing there, her foot held in the blackness, so she took another step forward. "Chōmei?"

She kept calling out his name, but he never answered. After some time, Fū finally realized that he wasn't there. She was the only person there.

For the first time in her life, she was truly alone.

"You know...I really wanted those fireflies..." she whispered into the darkness. But of course, nobody responded.

Fū closed her eyes, and everything faded away.

A/N: Thanks to Kain Everguard, who patiently helped me with this chapter with some great advice.