Well, here's the next installment to Child of Uchiha. I've really got nothing to say, except that I hope you enjoy it!

Disclaimer: Oops, I forgot this in the last chapter. Well, anyway…I don't own Naruto. It all belongs to the genius mind of Masashi Kishimoto. I don't make any money off of this and only make this for my own enjoyment.

Chapter One:

Awakening

Breathe in, slowly. Breathe out. Now, concentrate. Block out any surrounding noise, feel the target, find it and attack. Breathe in and breathe out.

The personal mantra echoed in my head, the world pitch black around me. Chirps of forest birds and my own forced breathing were the only sounds in the silent forest. My toe scraped against the ground, soft from the rain a day before, my shoes forgotten at the moment. The earth smelled fresh, decaying wood overpowering any scent that might have registered in my small nose. It would be a beautiful day if I could see it.

Fingers deftly twirled a kunai in my left hand, my dominant side, restlessly. Behind a cloth band wrapped around my head my closed eyelids moved from side to side, tracing an invisible pattern. Stretching a meter all around me were lines upon lines of chakra that coated the forest floor. It had taken me most of an hour to form the crude net, but I was confidant that it would serve its purpose.

After two hours, that confidence began to slip away.

A bead of sweat crawled from my hairline to drip down from my stubborn chin. Another soon followed as the sun climbed higher in the sky, but I didn't dare tear my focus from the net to wipe it away. Although I was sorely tempted.

A silent shake of my head tore me from my stupor and I continued to retrace of my chakra pattern to detect any irregularities. So far nothing seemed out of the ordinary, until my mind's eyes came across a slight valley no deeper or wider than a footprint in the otherwise perfectly straight line.

I had found my target. A smirk played itself on my lips as I turned a ninety degree angle on the ball of my foot and released the kunai from scarred fingertips all in the blink of an eye. Automatically my fingers dipped into the kunai pouch secured to my left thigh and felt for the cool metal ring of the knife. I waited for the sound of my success, but the forest remained the same and I began to wonder if I somehow-

"Ten degrees," came the husky voice right in front of me. "Your aim was off by that much. Do it again," he ordered.

Immediately a frown pasted itself on my face, my chakra grid dissolving from lack of concentration. My body slumped from my battle ready position, muscles screaming. I crossed my arms over my chest in rebellion, refusing to set up the technique once more.

"This is stupid," I muttered and glared at the spot I thought he was in.

A frustrated sigh ghosted over my ears. I knew that I was acting like a child, but if he was going to treat me like one then I would act like one.

"You only think this is stupid because you can't do it," he pointed out.

"No!" I disagreed and stubbornly pulled down the course blindfold so that the dark blue fabric pooled around my neck.

I blinked a few times to get used to the sudden intrusion of light and quickly located the object of my frustration. He stood disapprovingly before me, twirling my errant kunai knife by its base and staring down at me with a quirk to his eyebrow. That meant he was amused, not angry. However, that didn't make me feel any better.

"This is only stupid because we've been doing this same exercise for the entire day!"

A stray breeze intimately touched the man's long inky locks of hair that framed his face and drifted across his stern mouth. His mirror image, though lanky and female, had the same attention from the tendrils of air and I reached up to brush away the obstinate strands. Maybe I should cut my hair, I thought, it's nearly as long as dad's.

"One day this stupid technique, as you have called it, may-."

"Save your life, Amaya," I mocked, matching the pitch of his voice. I unfolded my arms and brought them both up, facing each other and made talking motions with them. I moved my right fingers up and down and continued my impersonation. "A shinobi must be prepared at all times."

I moved my left hand and used a higher pitched voice. "Yes, I know. You've told me a thousand times, but I always need a reminder every time I mess up. Thank-you for your wonderful support."

Right hand. "I'm very sorry, Amaya. I'll try to be more supportive of you in the future. Let's hug and make-up."

I smashed my two hands together in the semblance of a hug, and was almost too distracted to duck the kunai coming straight towards me. It was a lazy throw, but I still wearily stood up to look at my father to make sure he wasn't going to toss anymore pointy objects at my person.

"Very amusing," he drawled in a voice that suggested it was anything but.

A shrug of my shoulders, "I try."

He shook his head at me and turned around. "After lunch we'll continue this exercise until you've mastered it."

I grumbled, "Then we'll be here all week," but picked up my pace to follow the sway of his mane of black hair trapped in a leather thong.

I swooped down to snatch my battered sandals in the crook of my fingers and struggled to put them on as I was walking. After a few minutes of effort, I managed to slip them on without tripping before reaching our temporary campsite. As a force of habit, I performed a chakra sweep of the perimeter-

"Stay behind me."

My head snapped up in surprise at the cold voice coming from my father's mouth. I quickly drew a kunai from my pouch and settled in a familiar position with my back against his. My wrist locked up, the kunai horizontal across my face, one leg forward the other bent a little behind me, and my mind racing trying to come up with an escape route. Dad only used that tone with strangers and enemies if he even bothered to speak at all.

Hundreds of different times we had been in the same position, my body didn't need my brain to tell it what to do. I relied on instinct to keep me safe. Sometimes thinking was too slow. But this time…I was nervous. I didn't dare let it show.

Ever since I was born and old enough to understand, I was told by dad to always run because being a breathing coward was better than being a dead fool. Hunter nins wouldn't come after me. I wasn't their mark. I wasn't their mission.

But this wasn't another regular ambush by the specialized shinobi. This was a clear day without a cloud in the sky and in the middle of the afternoon. The intruder had to be incredibly dim-witted to think that they could take on father without some sort of advantage the night could offer, or they had enough power to do without.

Somehow, I doubted my first thought.

A throaty laugh interrupted my musings, causing a shiver to race down my spine. It seemed to come from every direction, the raspy chuckle surrounding us. "Well, well, Sasuke Uchiha, it's nice to see you again. I hope you haven't forgotten me."

Dad didn't answer. I strained my senses to pick out where the cocky ninja was, but his signature was carefully hidden.

"I must say that you haven't changed since I last saw you. When was that? A decade past?"

He ignored the questioning man and leaned down to speak quietly into my ear. "Run, Amaya. Run as far and as fast as you can away from here."

"But, Da-"

"Be quiet and follow my orders!"

I clenched my mouth shut and nodded tightly, prepared to follow his hissed command. Chakra pumped into my legs and I leaped into the air, catching a hold on a towering branch of a tree twenty feet away. I would listen to my father, and then double back. I couldn't leave him alone. What if he needed help?

My sandaled feet came in contact with rough bark, my face inches from a smirking mouth. All I saw was red and black before pain blossomed in my chest. I didn't understand. It hurt…it hurt a lot.

An angry yell screamed defiance from behind me, his voice drowning in the deafening pounding of my heart. The tightness in my chest released all at once and I remembered the feeling of my feet slipping from the tree branch, air slapping at my loose fitting clothes, and falling, falling, falling.

If I knew what I would wake up to later, I never would have opened my eyes.

But I did, white light blinding me. A hiss of pain seethed through my teeth before I could close them again.

A light voice chuckled. "Just give your eyes a moment to adjust." If I hadn't been strapped to the bed, I would have jumped three feet in the air. I didn't even sense them. I must really be out of it to not notice. All that gave away my surprise at another person being in the room was a slight flinch of my hands. Fingertips brushed against empty space where a weapons pouch would be on my thigh and curled into a fist. Sharp nails bit into calloused palms, stopping the oncoming tears as the memory of my dream painted itself across my eyelids. A shinobi did not cry. Shinobi do not show emotion.

However, I couldn't stop a single tear that traced along the curve of my cheek to fall on the crisp white sheets below.

"I can give you some morphine for the pain," she sympathetically said. "I'm afraid that speeding up the process with chakra healing will cause even more damage to your internal organs. Only time can mend those wounds."

I didn't bother to correct her diagnosis. Pain, that caused no harm. I felt like I deserved it, this hurt. I had failed him. I failed the one person I cared for. Because I wasn't strong enough because I wasn't fast enough; my failure resulted in death and it wasn't even my own life that settled Fate's Scale.

Carefully, with the pain of my last try still fresh in my mind, I opened my eyes, squinting until I could open them fully. Stark white walls and the smell of antiseptic convinced me that I was in a hospital.

The nurse next to my cot cleared her throat and walked to the front of my bed. Click, click, click, her heels made across the tiled floor as she reached the clipboard that hung from the bed railing. Her white uniform blended into her surroundings so perfectly that I had to blink a few times to find her again when the room blurred. She inconspicuously scanned over the pages, her eyes flicking to me and then back to the papers.

She glanced up after a few quiet minutes and gave me a brilliant smile. "Well," she chirped. "You were quite lucky to have been found by a patrolling ANBU." She replaced the clipboard back on the base of the bed and clicked her heels to my bedside. "If they hadn't come across you when they did, you might not have made it through the night."

Her finger, tipped with pink nail polish, ran lightly across the IV connected to my arm and up to the machine hooked up to it I assume to make sure it was still working. She looked over at me for an expectant response. I, ignoring her, glared at my still clenched fists, bathed in linen bandages, in irritation.

The nurse went on as if there was no awkward pause. "Yes, you are a very lucky, little girl. But," she paused, "it sure is strange the way everything is being hushed up." Methodically, she arranged the bed sheets around my still body and touched her chin in thought. "I mean, Tsunade-sama has taken priority over your case and she'll try anything to get out of any type of work. Oh well," she sighed, taking my silence as a normal way to carry on a conversation. "It's none of my business and I just hope that you get better soon. Would you like to sit up?"

The deterred question from her useless babble surprised me. My fists relaxed and I realized that I was sick of lying on my back so I nodded. Another smile was my reward and she gently propped me up on some extra pillows she pulled out of an overhead cabinet, white of course. A hand across my chest prevented me from falling flat on my face and I became conscious of the fact of how weak I was at the moment. A stray breeze could knock me over. It was a major change from the independent girl who was raised on knives and fighting.

"There we go. Open or closed?" She gestured towards the window with off-white curtains framing the sides.

"O-Op-," I tried to say, but the words stuck to my throat.

Water was presented to me in a glass and I gratefully took a small sip as she held the glass to my lips.

"Open," I croaked.

Curtains flew open with a flick of her wrist and the warm sunlight did more for me than the drugs that flooded my system. Content in the warmth, I let out a sigh that released the tension in my shoulders and appeased the worries in my mind at least for a moment.

"Ah, it's a beautiful day outside." The nurse stopped to admire the cloudless sky, mind lost in a memory. "Well," she turned around and headed for the door, "I'll see what I can do to rustle you up some food. I'm sure you're hungry?"

A shrug of my shoulders told her that I didn't care.

She nodded. "Alright, a nurse should be by in a few minutes with some food and I expect every bite to be gone when I come to check on you later. Okay?"

Another shrug.

"Get well soon," was her goodbye and I couldn't help but scoff as the door closed behind her.

Who was she to act like the mother I never had? No right, she had no right. But how would I know what a mother acted like? I was born from a broken condom and a sake bottle. The woman that had carried me in her womb for nine months abandoned me soon after I was born and dumped me on my father when he passed unknowingly through the town, again. I was an accident. Unwanted. A burden.

The only reason he took me was guilt. He couldn't leave me with the people in the village. I would be killed as soon as my secret revealed itself. Kekei Genkai, bloodline limit, and the mutated genes running through my veins refused to be suppressed. The sharingan was my inheritance from my father's side of the family, the Uchiha. As one of the last living members of the nearly extinct clan, I couldn't simply be put aside. Too much potential locked inside my small body. Also, it would be all too easy to extract the secrets of my Mirror Wheel Eyes from my corpse.

So my father had no other choice.

But-but he said that I was the only thing-

The banging of the door to my claustrophobic room startled me. Hmph, some ninja I am. I cocked my head to the side as a head full of pink hair popped into the doorway with a tray stacked with food that nearly towered above her head.

A laugh bubbled from behind the plastic wrapped sandwiches and I couldn't help but smile a little at the pure, happy sound. "Sorry if I scared you, but this tray might have tipped over if I had reached over to grab the handle."

Without missing a beat, her sandaled foot caught the edge of the door and slammed it closed. She navigated her way to my bedside and set down the delicious looking selection of food.

She wiped her hands together. "Nyoko-san said that you were hungry so I brought lots of different kinds-!" The words cut off as she finally turned to look at me. A strangled gasp emitted from her throat as if she was choking on her incomplete sentence.

"Sasuke," she breathed.

Well, that's it for this chapter. I hope you like it, and remember to drop a review. Authors like those. If you find any mistakes or ideas, fell free to discuss them with me. Thank you! Ja ne!!