A.N: Another New Beginnings length chapter as I didn't want to just dive back into normal stuff after the emotional rollercoaster of this chap. I am aiming for another chapter probably Thursday or Wednesday. Enjoy. :) ----------------------------------Sano sat crosslegged on the floor in her apartment, studying her scrolls and notes as she worked on creating fuinjutsu. For the past four days, she’d not left her room—skipping class and ignoring all knocks on her doors. Several ninja had tried to come through her window, but the fake explosive tags placed upon the window sill was enough of a deterrent to make them go away.
As she brushed a curved arrow symbol onto one of her custom-hypothetical fuinjutsu seals, someone had finally had enough of her pity party. She’d known that making a spare key for an apartment wasn’t a hard thing to do. The owner of the building probably had many. So, when she heard the clink of the lock disengaging, she shuffled and turned around, putting her back to the door.
From the sound alone, she knew that when the door opened more than one person entered. The footsteps stopped just behind her, yet she continued working on her seals.
“Sano. We must talk.” Uncle Jogan’s voice caused her heart to drop. It was involuntary.
Jogan didn’t wait for a response and walked to the window to casually start removing the explosive seals. During her… seclusion, she’d at least managed to figure out how to stick objects to things with chakra.
She’d not been doing well after her close call at drowning. When she’d awoken, alone and in her room, the harsh reality of this world and her situation seemed to truly sink in. This was not a world in which you could flutter about and throw fireballs for fun. There wasn’t time given to her to work on what she herself needed and enjoyed. She was an eight year old child soldier whose job after learning how to kill people better was to make explosives to blow people up. The jutsus the school gifted her were for killing people, not just to defend herself or the village. They were not willing to teach her the tools needed to speak again to become a ‘normal’ person.
A second pair of footsteps brought Tanaka-sensei into view. He sat down crosslegged directly across from her and gently moved the work she was staring intently at, which she was doing to ignore him, out of her field of view. “You’ve had a traumatic experience.”
But… Sano knew where this was going, and couldn’t take it.
“But—”
With a rake of her arms and a silent scream, she threw a tantrum like the eight year old she was—because why not act the age of the body you stole? The one that can’t even speak? Ink spilled and papers ruffled and tore as she knocked everything aside. Tanaka-sensei didn’t move a single muscle as she lashed out, simply waiting with a look of pity as he waited for her to calm down.
“Girl, you’re acting like a child.” Jiraya’s serious voice spoke from behind her. He sounded a mix of angry and disappointed.
‘I am a child!’ She signed all too quickly while holding her hands in the air for all to see. ‘I’m an eight year old who went to war.’
Knowing that signing was still a handicap, she had been prepared. Sano had written down her complaints well before their arrival. She childishly crawled over the ground to her futon and grabbed the pages stored beneath her pillow. She then stood, and pushed the stack into Jiraya’s arms. ‘Read.’
All three adults, sensing her angry conviction, slowly moved over to Jiray and read the pages together. Her complaints were not truly complaints, they were just the facts of her current situation and about herself.
‘My name is Sano Aburame. I am an eight year old child soldier who nearly died and lost my voice as the insects who called my body home decided to eat parts of me as they escaped the poison that had wrecked my body because of war. I don’t remember my family or friends and nobody but my uncle has truly cared since I woke up. I am constantly confused about many common things and need to learn about everything by myself that isn’t taught in school. In school, I am taught how to kill people better. I am beaten constantly at the end of classes everyday and spend the rest of my free time at the training field in hopes to stop getting bruises and pains by getting better. My classmates ignore me as they cannot speak to me. I have no friends.’
‘I have a clan, yet I do not. I am an Aburame, but I do not feel like an Aburame. I do not have their insects nor can I use their jutsus. I have spoken to three Aburame in the many months I have been awake. My uncle, and two gate guards who looked at me with worry when I visited to see more of my clan. I was ushered out quickly after I was given a quick tour. I was given a tour of my own clan’s compound. I am an outsider.’
‘I cannot even train to attempt to stop getting beat up anymore. I have been ordered to make explosive tags after school to help the village blow people or things up. The school gave me jutsu scrolls to attempt to help me be better at killing, but must have forgotten that nobody is there to help me learn them. I almost died again by drowning on dry land alone at night in a field after working all day making explosives while learning one of them. I live by myself because I can’t be with ‘my’ clan because the insects that decided to eat me and take away parts of my stomach and voice decided I am not welcome.’
‘I had a fuinjutsu teacher named Jiraya that dumped me at the quickest opportunity presented to him. He was the one who told the supply depot about me. Jiraya also didn’t bother showing up himself to teach me, instead opting to use Shadow Clones, which is another thing I want but cannot have.’
‘Recently, my sensei told me about the Will of Fire. I do not know what he was talking about. I do not feel that the things he said included me. Why would those before us wish us to fight in wars? Why is it my duty to protect those who don’t care about me?’
‘I am Sano Aburame and I currently hate my life.’
—-------------------------------------------
—Tanaka Izuno—
It had been awhile since a student shirked their studies and refused to come to class. Sano Aburame was actually the last person whom he’d expected to do so out of the fourteen children under his tutelage. The first day, he simply sent a note to her guardian, Jogan Aburame. When he arrived during his lunch break without a trace of sound, Tanaka wasn’t ashamed to have said he was a little spooked.
Then, Jogan told him what had happened.
Part of Sano’s absence was for him to shoulder. He had sat down with the young Kunoichi who worked harder than many of her peers in what he assumed was an attempt to power through her known handicap. He’d taken the liberty to offer her two ninjutsu scrolls as was his right as a teacher. While they were usually for non-clan kids, he could order and provide learning materials to any of his students.
He had known that Sano’s main issue was ostracization and lonelyness—not her lack of voice. Her classmates weren’t old enough to properly understand empathy to the level of an adult yet. They said things bluntly and didn’t tell falsehoods in their beliefs. Kazuya Uchiha was particularly bad at empathy. His view of the world for now was ‘might makes right’.
They didn’t bully Sano. They pretended that she didn’t exist for the most part.
But that wasn’t the main problem for young Sano. Her problem was outside of class.
The Aburame, to his knowledge, had been utterly devastated by the recent war. More than any other clan in the village barring the Uzumaki. Their numbers have dropped from four hundred or so proud shinobi… to a hundred or less. Sunagakure had created specialty poison which they opted to use liberally to take down the threat the Aburame presented.
Young Sano had even been targeted by the poison herself, not that she’d remember.
He should have known that Sano would have tried to learn the scroll by herself. She didn’t know any better, and he knew that. They literally just had a conversation about getting her help outside of classes and he still didn’t warn her. It was common knowledge to never learn a jutsu from a scroll by yourself… but Sano’s memories had made her forget that fact and he’d overlooked it.
So, yes. This was partly his fault and he’d willingly admit that.
But… to read what Sano had written as she locked herself away from the world tore his heart in two. By all rights, Sano Aburame should be a vaunted kunoichi. Her team had collected vital information during the war on numerous occasions. He had her records and had read them through with a hint of pride. While he hadn’t been the one to teach her during her previous time at the academy, she had the workings of a Chunin judging by her accomplished missions.
That Sano was gone now. Now, there was a child who saw the ugly truth of what she was learning. Her amnesia made her view everything around her from a fresh perspective… and what she was seeing was the horrible truth of the academy, especially when tensions were high or when they were at war.
They were not teaching peacetime ninja. They were molding ninja for war. She was being taught to kill people for her village—the same village who she holds no connection to. She doesn’t remember her time before and what her family was like. All she sees is war. War took her voice. War made her forget. War is what she is taught during the day. And war is what she betters herself in at night.
Normal children see why they are preparing to fight and why they should grow strong. To protect those who had protected you in the past. Your family, friends, clan, even the civilians. You are fighting for the village because the village is us. They had been taught this since they could walk and had been prepared for the life they were going to live.
Sano did not feel like one of us, and she was far too sharp—seeing between the lines of what they taught.
And she was eight…
He himself hadn’t graduated until he was thirteen. Steadily, the age of graduation and the pace of teaching had been pushed down lower and lower. They were sending pre-pubescent children into war because the village needed too to survive—just like the warring clans period of history. He would give anything for this not to be the case, but it was out of his control. He used his limited time to prepare the children, giving them every scrap of knowledge and skill needed to survive.
The village had failed her and her generation. To that, there wasn’t any doubt…
But several people had failed her in rapid succession when she had nobody else, and that made it worse.
—----------------------------------------------------
—Jiraya—
Jiraya read the paper the little school and work skipper wrote and his frustration and disappointment died. He’d come here with Tanaka and Jogan because; one, he felt just a teensy bit bad about dropping her off with Koji, even though it was a solid position to learn and improve fuinjutsu; and two, she made him look bad about not showing up.
Also Tsunade heard about his Shadow Clones teaching her and Hime got pissy.
He’d only really seen her medical files that Tsunade was all worked up over. That didn’t really tell him anything about the kid in question. Yeah, she was probably going to go places with her mind for fuinjutsu—judging by her semi-competent papers filled with the stuff laying about—but that didn’t instantly make him her sensei or something.
Three years he’d spent teaching the brats from Amegakure and completed his prophecy. Now, he had his own little Team 7 to watch over. As much as he hated to say it, Tsunade’s little blunder with her diagnosis didn’t mean Sano was his problem. Minato, Deikai, and Kaelen were his problems, and they were big enough problems to make him drink.
But man, did this kid have it rough.
Got hurt in the war—sucks, but it happens. Lost her speech and memories—probably a good thing, for the memories that is—then she gets dumped by her clan? Plus she isn’t buying the ‘lets learn cool jutsus and learn how to use them on each other, kids!’ Smart.
He flicked his eyes over the little twerp for a second, taking in the bruises she still wore like patches of honor. It’s been days and she still had’em. Yeah, she got stomped in sparring. Though, he can’t really blame her to be completely honest. If he started from nothing again he’d probably drink himself to death before the beatings did.
His eyes flowed over her fuinjutsu papers again, following the seals to figure out what she was making…
He nearly tilted his head and he put each of the papers together by sheer instinct. She’d separated the pages so that if someone took a single page they wouldn’t be able to figure out what it did… paranoid and smart. Each paper’s seal overlapped with each other, making it a robust seal with multiple functions and activation triggers.
While some might think that all fuinjutsu was difficult, you could create a giant seal just by chain linking a bunch of triggers together—making the seal look all pretty and artistic, but keeping the main function. Sano wasn’t doing this. This was something special…
He blinked his eyes slowly as he guessed the fuinjutsu’s purpose…
The kid’s either an idiot or a genius.
While he focused more on barriers, he wasn’t a slouch when it came to the other use cases of fuinjutsu. Sano was creating a chakra channeled helix with many layers, creating the approximation of a 2D compressed spring when laid out flat. In the end, with all the layers settled on top of one another, it’d look just like a standard circular seal. Yet, this fuinjutsu would have four different triggers, an on contact chakra siphon, a redirector-cross, and a defunct storage seal? He made out the fire, water, earth, and air symbols as well…
The girl was making a four element ninjutsu absorbing seal. It was shoddy work, cumbersome and inefficient… but it’d probably work. It’d only work on things niche enough to actually activate the triggers, which currently wasn’t a lot, but it’d work at least.
She should work on making her seals smaller and more compact… Maybe add a… No, that wouldn’t work… Then…? Hmm…
—-------------------------
—Sano Aburame—
Jogan took her written facts from Jiraya as he began to space out, mumbling to himself. Jogan read through her paper once more, then nearly crumpled it in his clenching fist. She hoped that finally letting at least her uncle know how she felt would help her mood, but it only made her feel worse. She wasn’t disappointed or mad at Jogan. He was the only person in the whole village who had her best interests at heart. He was the only person willing to actually help her, even with his surely busy schedule…
So why was she tearing up? Yes, she was frustrated, mad, angry, sad, felt hopeless, felt the world was unfair… She felt like a child.
Jogan knelt down and embraced her as the waterworks flowed free. She trembled and cried her silent cries as all the pent up emotions broke through the dam. “From now on, I will teach you after school.” He vowed, voice steady. “You will have to complete your work at the supply depot, as it is good practice and legally required… but that time lets me make some plans. Okay?”
Sano nodded into his shoulder, face buried within it.
“I’m sorry for not being there when you needed me. I will make things right.” Jogan said as they broke apart.