I do not own Naruto, the world of Naruto, or any other characters.

Haruka, Kazuki, Misaki (c) me, Zopponde

I wish I could take OCs but there wasn't enough of a response and I just kept going with my own. If the chapters posted get close enough to the chapters I've written, this may or may not change.





First Impression
Chapter 1

The sheets on the old mattress were dirty, but the injured girl in them didn’t know. She was still unconscious, just as she was when she was placed within them. The short dark hair that covered most of her head was still wet and dirty from her fall into the river, and was forming unattractive clumps in the longer front part.

Two other figures were within the room; both clad in the same black cloaks and straw hats. Neither had any kind of bedding; both seemed content to sit and lean in different corners and fall asleep that way, although it was hard to tell; neither showed many signs of being alive, let alone obviously awake or asleep.

The river’s movement could be heard from outside. It wasn’t really strong or anything, it was just close enough and the housing was old and thin enough that if anyone was awake, they would be able to hear the water rushing past within the barriers of the riverbed.

At some point in the earliest hours of the next day, the girl in the makeshift bed began to stir. They weren’t signs of awakening; they were more so the signs of a troubling dream. She twitched her hand and her mouth moved as she breathed just heavily enough that one standing directly next to her might be able to hear her murmuring, “Kazuki-niisan…come back…”

Eventually, her twitching became somewhat regular, in the same pattern: the motion of groping for something just beyond reach. Her breathing became heavier, and her words reached a volume about the same as the river, perhaps a bit quieter.

One of the black-cloaked figures happened to be in the corner closest to her. As her arm extended, it brought her body somewhat closer to where the figure sat, until her reaching arm touched the sleeve of his robe.

The girl’s hand clenched around the sleeve’s cloth. Her subconscious mind noticed that her body made contact, and, because of similarities in her dream, her subconscious woke her up when she called softly, “Kazuki-niisan!” as she pulled the cloth.

The cloaked figure, pulled by her subconscious tug, fell over as she woke, landing on her.

The figure sighed and returned to its previous position. The girl, however, was a bit more social.

“Um…hello?…Good morning?” she asked tentatively.

The figure turned its head, and the girl saw his dark eyes and what looked like worry lines on his face. “Are you feeling better now?”

“I…I think so,” the girl answered uncertainly. “I will be soon if I’m not already. But,” she added, looking around at the crummy old shack, “where am I?”

The cloaked man sighed. “We found you in the river on the border of Fire Country. You were unconscious, so we decided you could sleep here while you recovered. You seemed a bit injured.”

“Wow,” said the girl. “I never would have thought this would happen from my old life.”

“What was it like?” the cloaked man asked, not sounding like he really cared.

“…Do you really want to know?” the girl asked.

The man nodded.

The girl hesitated, suspicious. “Not a lot of people care about me. Let alone strangers.”

“I’d like to know if the life I saved was worthy of the help.” He pulled out the headband with a strip of metal attached, the symbol in that land that the carrier was a ninja from the Village Hidden in the Leaves.

The girl recognized it as hers. “Well,” she sighed, almost smiling tiredly, “I guess you saved my life, so you might as well know about it. My day used to start out like this…”

She went on to explain her life, how it began in the Sand Village, how her family all died or left her one by one, until the only people who could take care of her were her relatives in the Leaf Village. She told of her adjustment, how her family set her up with a person who controlled her very worst fear, and how that pushed her to run away, which had her end up in the river where the cloaked man said he found her.

As the girl spoke of her past, the other cloaked figure began to stir. As the girl came closer to the end of her story, the figure stood and moved to the pitiful excuse for a fireplace and began to cook something.

“…and that’s why I’m here,” the girl’s story came to a close with a distant look.

She was obviously not telling everything of her story. The cloaked man who listened to her tale began to say something about this when she changed the subject entirely.

“Is that food I smell?” she asked hungrily, sniffing the air. “Do you have any idea how hungry I am? Please tell me there’s some for me.”

The figure walked over to the corner in which the others sat with his finished product. “Barely,” he growled. “We were running a little thin on supplied even before someone found a helpless little girl in the river who just had to be saved.” He rolled his eyes. “Trust me, kid, you’re lucky. He doesn’t even give Misaki that kind of attention. Although he should, if it would make her shut up.”

The girl nodded her head to hide her embarrassment at being the cause of their hardship, even as she silently smiled at his comment about someone being too talkative and wondered who that person was. There certainly weren’t any girls here.

The vaguely friendlier figure glared at the cook. “You wouldn’t be very willing to give a girl like that the kind of attention she wants, either.”

The second figure laughed. “Says the man who went so far out of his way to make sure she got in.”

The girl smiled faintly as the cloaked men continued their argument about a girl she didn’t know. However, the second man had set the food reasonably close to her, and she reached out for it.

Both of their attentions snapped over to her. For the first time, she saw the second figure’s face, and she realized that his face was, oddly enough, blue. She would have stopped anyway, but she instead pulled her hand back and hoped that she could still have some. She could feel her stomach rumbling, and she knew that she’d need food to recover from the recent events in her life.

The blue man frowned and divided the food equally into two. He gave one dish to his partner and kept the other.

The girl sighed and made an expression of pure and pitiful envy. She was really hungry and knew that she would be even more so for the next week or so. Her stomach growled loudly.

The friendlier figure held his chopsticks in midair and looked at her tiredly. She returned a look that tried to say that she was okay as it was. He sighed and handed over his plate.

The girl was gratefully surprised, but the man’s partner glared at him. “I gave that to you, not her.”

The dark-eyed man looked at his partner tiredly. “I’m not hungry, and she needs it more than I do.”

A heavy silence settled among the three. The girl broke it nervously by saying, “Uh, thank you, um…”

The man who gave her his plate turned to look at her coolly. “Uchiha Itachi.”

“Uchiha?” The girl recognized the name, somewhere…she couldn’t remember where. It was probably the name of one of the other ninjas from the Leaf Village that she didn’t care about. “I think I might have heard that name once before…”

The blue man snorted. “What kind of Leaf Village ninja are you that you don’t know the story about the Uchihas?”

The girl stared at him with ice in her gray-green eyes. “Leaf Village never was my home, and it never will be. I do not care about what happens to other people there.” She turned back to her food and began eating huffily.

The blue man looked at Itachi, who just stared back coolly, before shrugging and going on to eat his own meal.

The girl ate fast; before three minutes passed, she sighed tiredly and set her chopsticks down on her empty plate. “I’m sorry,” she began, turning to Itachi. “I just ate all your food without even properly introducing myself. My name is Niroshi Haruka.”

Itachi nodded slowly and introduced his partner, who seemed too busy eating to respond for himself. “You know my name already, and my partner’s name is Hoshigaki Kisame.”

Haruka nodded to Kisame. “Hello, and thank you for the meal.”

An awkward silence fell on the three people. It held its grip firmly for some time and remained in place even as Kisame finished with his share of breakfast, and wasn’t broken until shortly after that when Haruka sneezed.

Itachi turned to look at her. “Please don’t get a cold. It would inconvenience everyone greatly.”

Haruka paused, looking distant and thoughtful, and Itachi was about to turn his attention away when she answered, “I’m in the lower stages of a mild cold. I can take care of it pretty easily…but do we have any more food?”

Kisame snorted. “Itachi, we should just go and leave the girl to beg for scraps from other people. People that have more supplies than we do.”

Haruka frowned. “There’s a river just outside, right? I think I saw some fish there—that’s why I stopped there, and that’s why I fell in. Does anyone have a fishing rod?”

“We generally pack our food ahead of time,” Itachi answered, “and we have money for food in town. We don’t usually need such things.”

Haruka sighed and sat up. “I don’t suppose you found a backpack anywhere nearby when you found me, did you?”

Itachi shook his head. “Just your forehead protector.”

Haruka swung her legs out from under the sheets. “Then I guess I should see if I can find it.”

Itachi stared at her coolly. “You have a cold and I doubt that anyone could possibly be recovered from that fall in the river already. You are not going out.”

Haruka raised her scarred eyebrow. “Did I forget to mention that whole thing? I guess I did,” she answered herself. She sighed and ran a hand through her crusted hair. “You know what a bloodline trait is, right?”

Itachi’s face moved such that he was probably grinning knowingly, but Haruka couldn’t tell because of his high collar. Kisame snorted. “Itachi’s a bit of an expert on those.”

Haruka smiled. “Good. Saves a bit of explaining. So,” she went on, “the Niroshi family has one such trait. And that trait is an ability to consciously and completely control every cell in our body. We can do whatever we want with any part of our body. But,” she added, “what a lot of people don’t understand is that not all bloodline traits are all good.”

“We know that,” Itachi interrupted.

Haruka paused, shrugged, and kept going. “Well, in our case, micro-managing our bodies takes a lot of energy, more than using medicines and other simpler cures, so we need a good deal more food than most people, when we’re using our ability. We get hungry easily, and that’s why I’d like to find my backpack with a fishing rod in it so I can catch some fish, which I will eat for energy to help me control my immune system and kill this cold.

“Also,” Haruka went on for clarity, “it means that I used some of my energy to heal my injuries from my fall in the river. They’re not entirely healed, but they’re close enough that I’ll be fine walking calmly along the river looking for what I packed.”

Itachi sighed. “Then go out and look for it. I don’t care.”

Haruka smiled at him and continued getting up. She looked down at herself; the dirty sheets and her wet body and clothes mixed together to make her rather dirty, but she knew she should avoid bathing until she cured herself or found a hot spring or similar. She wiggled her toes; they were crusted in dirt from the night before, when she dangled her feet in the river before walking around a bit barefoot, and the last she remembered of her shoes, they were still at the riverside. They probably ended up in the river one way or another, but she still might not see them again.

She sighed. Not a full conscious day gone, and I’m already missing some of those damn luxuries, she thought, slightly irritated at herself.

Haruka stretched herself out as she walked toward the door. When she reached it, she thought of something and turned to say, “Kisame-san, leave without me or not, I don’t care, but I’d kind of prefer to at least know when you’re leaving,” before she walked outside.

The shack hadn’t exactly been ideal for keeping the light out—Haruka hadn’t been surprised in the least to find that she’d woken at sunrise, whether or not she usually did—but she still blinked in the full sunshine. As soon as her eyes stopped watering, she blinked and smiled at what she saw: her backpack had washed ashore right at her feet. She picked it up and paused to consider what to do next before she slung it over her shoulder and looked around the river’s shore to decide which way to go. She looked right, upstream, and grinned gleefully, almost laughing softly, when she saw that her shoes had neatly reached shore not ten feet upstream of her backpack.

After her shoes were on again, Haruka sighed and took her backpack off. She rummaged through it for a short period of time before she took out her neatly packed traveling fishing rod and unpacked it. She sighed again. She really didn’t like fish, but maybe she could find something else in the forest nearby to wash it down.

Haruka put her hands together in a short series of ninja seals before a perfect replica of her appeared beside her in a small puff of smoke. One of her images took a seat with the fishing rod while the other went into the forest.

The flap-of-a-door on the shack parted, and Itachi walked out, without his hat for the first time that she knew, blinking in the sun much like Haruka had not a minute ago. Her remaining image turned to face him smilingly. “Hello, Itachi-sama.”

He blinked again, then proceeded to sit down next to her. “That was fast.”

Haruka grinned. “It was right here,” she said, pointing to the dirt next to her, where it had been before she picked it up. “And my shoes were just a little bit that way,” she added, pointing upstream. She paused a moment, then reached down and pulled them off so she could dangle her feet in the water.

Itachi sighed. “Why exactly did you run away?”

Haruka froze. “Wh-what do you mean?” she asked fearfully.

“You said that it had something to do with an arranged marriage, but that doesn’t seem such a likely excuse,” Itachi explained. “If that was the only problem, you seem the person who would run away from her family, not her village.”

“It’s not my village!” she snapped. “How many times do I need to tell you people?”

Itachi sighed. “Okay. The Leaf Village. Why did you run away from all that?”

Haruka paused, staring distantly into space. “I don’t know. I…I guess I just needed some time to myself, so I decided to go out here…”

“How long did you plan on being out?” Itachi asked.

“Oh, n-not long,” Haruka stammered, “j-just a day, o-or maybe two—less than a week, I know…”

“Really…” Itachi seemed to doubt this story.

“Y-yeah,” Haruka answered, relieved that he didn’t question further.

Itachi sighed. “Then maybe we should escort you ba—”

“NO!” Haruka jumped before trying to appear more calmed down, but there was still panic in her voice as she went on, “N-no, I’m not going back. I don’t want to go back, I never want to see the Leaf Village again!”

Itachi raised an eyebrow. “You don’t seem the person who would just leave for no reason.”

“No,” Haruka went on, “I-I’m not going to tell you, I’m not going to tell anyone, I-I’m not going to let anyone know what horrible things I’ve done—they won’t know what I regret and what I’m proud of!”

Itachi sighed, irritated. “You said that my name sounded familiar. Do you know a boy, a year or two younger than you?”