This is probably a pitifully short chapter considering the literal years to took before this finally arrived. I'm sorry about that, but this story was always somewhere in the back of my mind, waiting to be continued. Hopefully, it lives up to its long absence. Rest assured, the next chapter won't take years to come out.
TW: child abuse, suicide, murder via arson, PTSD, lots of trauma. None of it is too graphic, but please be warned.
Ayaka is born in the midst of a swirling sea of red.
Fire is in her blood, and etched into the deepest marrow of her bones. Perhaps that is why it is always in her history. In all of them.
Perhaps that is why, as the world around her once more explodes into red, as the Kyuubi's tainted chakra rips through the entire forest and prickles at her skin, burning her cold, lifeless body—-she remembers.
-o-
Standing just above her, cradling her cold lifeless body with desperate trembling hands that burn with alien red chakra, Naruto forgets.
He's still screaming, a wild animal sound, because he's not himself, not quite human anymore. Not when his first friend—his best friend—is gone. For the longest time, he was alone, and he thought, he was fine with that. He would paste a smile on his face, cause a ruckus, and cry himself to sleep, pretending it didn't hurt.
But the truth is, he doesn't want to be alone, and he's not fine with it at all. He doesn't want to be alone again, in a world without Ayaka.
The Kyuubi is all too happy to grant his wish, and the world burns, an explosion of red everywhere. This is what happens when one flame meets another, a fire that might just burn too hot and bring everything around it to ashes.
-o-
Ayaka is born in a blaze of red and gold, in a wildfire raging on a hot summer day.
Now, she remembers, she died in one too.
-o-
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away from the world she has come to know, there is a girl.
With her hair of gold and eyes of green, she looks just like the kind of fairytale princesses these stories are always written about. She lives in a castle of sorts too. It's under a different name here, a mansion not a castle, but it's all the same wealth and power implied. There's a large garden that makes up the backyard, and lavish furnishings everywhere you turn.
It is a beautiful place, but to the girl with golden hair, it is little more than a gilded cage that she cannot possibly hope to escape from. Because, this is just another story of a princess trapped in a castle, but here, there is no hero to save her.
Here, there is only a girl, weak and helpless despite all her hate and rage. Here, there is no happy ending to be found, no happily ever after.
-o-
There is only fire, burning wild and bright, turning everything in its sight into ashes.
-o-
But the flames, they are cleansing, and the burning light, it illuminates the truth that has been hidden in the shadows all this time.
The truth is this: Before she is a girl named Satō Ayaka, she is someone else.
Before, she is a girl named Alba Blackwood, and she lives in a world where ninjas are merely old myths, and chakra and jutsus are but a child's fantasy.
She lives in a world where buildings were as tall as the mountains that surrounded Konoha, and cars zoomed past on asphalt roads, on speeds far faster than even the fastest ninja running on the rooftops.
She lives in a world where Naruto is just the strange name of a Japanese comic that her quiet, shy little sister likes to read.
-o-
Dark hair and dark eyes set on a pale face, in slim scrawny body that was forever bent over the pages of some notebook, never looking up at her.
Her sister's figure morphed into Sai's, the tree in the yard of their family's mansion transforming into the tree in the worn down orphanage yard.
-o-
Alba Blackwood is the second born daughter of a rich and powerful family. They live in a large ancestral mansion, filled with enough staff to man a hotel. She has two sisters and one brother.
She has one sister, older by many years, who is always off on her own, travelling. They say that the two of them are splitting images of each other, different only in their eye colours (her sister's blue, and hers, green). But they are little alike aside from that. She is the face of the family, her father's shadow, a perfect puppet to their demands, and the exact opposite of her constant childish rebellion.
She has a younger brother, younger by years, who is barely more than a baby, and does little more than eat and sleep as a result. He is the new hope, a future man to mold in her father's exact image, and she shudders at the thought. She hopes he is nothing like him, nothing like any of them, because only then, will he truly have some hope of making it out of their family.
Perhaps she ought to feel lonely, with these siblings who are more like strangers.
But she has another sister, younger by only a single year, who she spends all her time with. This girl is dark-haired and dark-eyed, the dark to her light, and timid and shy where she is bold and loud.
Despite their differences, the two are close as sisters can be.
Alma Blackwood is the literal black sheep of the family, with her dark hair and dark eyes in contrast to the golden locks of everyone else in the family. Though the official stance involved claims of some similarities to some aunt somewhere, the whispers of infidelity are stronger.
Growing up amidst the scorn, she learns to keep her head down. She spends most of her time writing in her little black notebook, scribbling her thoughts down like her life depended on it. When she isn't writing, she is reading instead, head down, and eyes moving at the lightning speed as they scanned through the pages of some book or another.
-o-
Instead of reading about heroes like her sister, Alba wants to be one instead.
She doesn't want to read about a life beyond the walls of their too big house, outside the harsh boundaries their father has set for them—-she wants to actually go live one. But that's not exactly possible.
Not when they are but powerless girls, in a powerful family, who would sacrifice them in the name of even more power. Not when her sad attempts to run away are foiled as soon as she reaches the gate, and she gets nothing but more bruises on her skin as she's marched back inside their gilded cage by the guards who claim to protect them from outside dangers, but do nothing to save them from the monsters inside the walls.
There's a reason isolation is the worst punishment Ayaka can receive.
-o-
Most of the time, Alba cares little for the books her sister reads. They may hold stories of grand adventures and magical abilities, but they're still books, filled with long flowery passages that drag too long and barely hold her attention.
But when her sister starts reading books with pictures, well, she's more interested.
Naruto is about as far away from her life and all she's ever known as she can get, and she loves it immediately just for that alone. The main character is a loud, brash boy with a love for pranks, who quickly feels like a kindred spirit of sorts.
When he finds out he has a monster inside of him, she thinks she can relate, feeling the ever present thrum spark inside her, like a monster begging to be let out. It's a fire raging inside of her that cannot be tamed, can barely be controlled.
-o-
She has always been drawn to the flames.
There's a burning inside of her, a deep gnawing rage that wants to be let out and burn everything in its way. It feeds itself on every cut and bruise she gains, on every harsh comment and disdainful eye, on every inch her sister's shoulder lower in submissive fear. The fire grows inside of her day by day, trapped inside her chest, beating against her ribcage like a bird struggling towards the sky, until it grows into an inferno that burns everything in its path.
The day after Alma dies—kills herself, really—Alba sets their childhood home on fire, with everyone, including herself, still inside it.
-o-
Ayaka is born in the ninja village of Konoha. She is an only child, and an orphan, a nobody with nothing but her name to call her own.
All of these are true, and yet-all of these are lies too.
Alba had two parents, two sisters and one brother. Her sister killed herself, and she killed the rest of her family to make up for it.
Some part of Ayaka remembers, and some part of her knows the truth now.
-o-
Alba dies in a blaze of red and gold, in a fire she sets herself, that transforms a once beautiful mansion into a pile of ash, and takes the lives of everyone she loves and hates, including herself, in one fell swoop.
-o-
Ayaka is born in a blaze of red and gold, in a wildfire raging on a hot summer day, in a raging tempest made by Mother Nature herself, turning trees of green into blackened stumps.
-o-
In the clearing, the Kyuubi's chakra grows wild, the boy losing himself along with it. Most of the villagers have the sense to run as far as they can from such an oppressive, monstrous event, but the ninja of Konoha run towards it instead, none faster and more urgently than a man with a dog mask over his face.
He is the first to arrive at the clearing, the first to see the sight of his old mentor's son in the midst of transforming into the raging monster that had killed him. For a moment, he wonders what Minato would do, would think to see his beloved son reduced to this. But then, he remembers, Minato is dead. Just like everyone else he loves. Only he remains, forced to continue on, to hold onto his life like it actually matters at all.
Faced with such a horrific sight, faced with even more horrific memories raging through his mind, not even the Sharingan spinning wildly in one eye notices the way Ayaka's fingers twitch in movement, as she slowly, slowly begins to wake up.
-o-
To him, and to everyone else, there is only fire, burning wild and bright, turning everything in its sight into ashes.