Chapter Text
Far from the stares and the scorn, a pair of pale, light-filled eyes traveled on a current of air, their form dancing amid the song of seagulls and the swimming of clownfish against the restless waves that beat against the whitened stone of the coast of her world lost in time. Far from the beaches covered in her failure and the last skeletons of her people, she observed a small, fragile child, with an indomitable spirit, pure as the first snow of winter. She saw his greatness and how strong he would one day be, with his hair of sunlight and his eyes of polished sapphire.
Deciding that someone like this child, with his incandescent soul and dreams too big for his small body, she decided he would be someone she could trust with her dreams and the promises of her past, the same ones an elder of lost worlds could never fulfill. And all she needed was a small spark amidst the dry straw, far from the sharp eyes of the people of Konohagakure no Sato, their secrets, and the fear that had led to the destruction of their home. She knew there was something special in the way he continued to smile amidst his hatred and his own pain, and even more, she understood that he had the potential to be formidable.
All she needed was for the boy to raise his small hand without fear of reprimand, for him to hear the name of his people in the language of one of his descendants, and understand that he had never been alone. Curiosity had always been the driving force behind humans' progress, and the same reason so many civilizations had fallen in the war against fear of the unknown.
The voice resonated like hundreds of different tones, hoarse as if she hadn't used it in centuries. So many voices interconnect and unite in an ephemeral dance, detaching themselves and interconnecting, as if they were a single structure. Riding the open ocean breeze scented with hibiscus and dried sage, she watched him from the end of the world, sitting beneath the corpse of her home, and with warmth spreading through her icy veins, she gave him her dreams and desires. The voice spoke only once, a single word, but it was enough, she knew.
She said, amid the wind that tangled in her spiky, golden hair like a ray of sunlight,listen,and he listened.
─── 。 。 ─── ───。 。 ───
Paying attention in class seemed to be becoming increasingly difficult, and as he kept his head down and avoided looking at Iruka-sensei's tanned face, he wondered what he was really doing there. The days always seemed to bleed into the same repetitive pattern, and exhaustion seeped so deeply into his bones after yet another night spent awake amid the howls of the creature that tormented him. The truth was, he had sat by the window and watched the full moon as if in a prayer that the lamentation spreading through the pathways of his mind would end for once, but like all the others, nothing had helped, and he had lost another night of sleep.
It reverberated through his head like the sharp, booming sound of thunder, like a massive copper bell that rang for hours on end until the first rays of sunlight. It was always accompanied by the painful, bitter feeling of hatred, pure and unaltered, with its taste of blood and the image of bared, sharp fangs. The emotion haunted him for the rest of the day, so potent and ancient and terrifying, acidic enough to burn his skin with its fury on the worst days. Something else slumbered beneath the surface, all the resentment of the creature he had followed since the days he had first opened his eyes, a sense of something missing, akin to longing and a yearning for something far from the confines of the little Uzumaki's mind. He knew this feeling so well, of feeling trapped behind bars and longing for happier, better days he had never truly experienced. It was loneliness, pain, and wounds that had never healed, it was feeling trapped and isolated and hated even though he had never done anything.
Sometimes he wondered if that was the only emotion he really knew outside of his acts of spontaneity and overly big smiles.
He tried to hear what Umino was saying aloud as he paced the front of the classroom, but the words seemed too big and jumbled. Something in his bloodstream raced and raced without stopping, making him dizzy, while at the same time he felt a feverish need to move and do anything to quiet his inner self. He didn't look him in the eye on days like these, afraid he'd find disappointment in his gaze or the rejection he'd found in everyone else in the Hidden Leaf Village. He could feel a hot gaze on the back of his neck, burning with hatred and disgust, all the bad things everyone had always thrown his way. He couldn't feel anger, but the feeling of injustice bubbled in his blood as if commanding him to take action. It was a dangerous feeling that Naruto knew didn't belong in his heart, but it escaped through his thoughts.
An unusual sensation gripped his heightened senses, and around him, the room grew bizarrely cold, enveloping him and enveloping him in an embrace that would have been uncomfortable if he were accustomed to any kind of affection. Hearing his name called from somewhere in the distance, he finally faced the front of the classroom.
“Uzumaki? Is that a clan, teacher?” one of the students in his class had asked after one of the presentations about the history that dated back to the beginning of the Hidden Leaf Village.
"Yes, Mei-chan, the Uzumaki Clan was one of the Leaf Village's greatest allies before its destruction in the Third Shinobi War. In fact, the spiral on our jōnin's uniforms is the Uzumaki clan's symbol. Konohagakure and Uzushio were sister villages, known for working together in the early Shinobi Wars. Our first lady was Uzumaki Mito, the wife of the Shodaime, Senju Hashirama." Iruka paused briefly, as if the subject bothered him. Naruto could smell the bitter tang of a pain that had never healed.
"Uzushio was located on a small island in the middle of the ocean, a little off the coast of the Land of Fire. It took the combined forces of Iwa and Kiri to eliminate and destroy Uzushio; only a few survivors escaped, and the island clans were lost. This remains one of the Leaf Village's greatest flaws, which is why we wear the spiral on our uniforms," Umino said, scanning every face in his class of students, when his eyes landed on Naruto's. Something flashed in his eyes, but quickly disappeared, and he continued his lecture on the village's beginnings and the wars that had occurred over the years.
Sitting in his chair, his body finally remained still, paralyzed under the weight of his new knowledge and the phantom pain of mourning a people, a family he had never known. There, listening to the sound of the growl in the back of his mind, his heart pounded in his ears along with hundreds of other heartbeats that didn't belong to him. There, the weight of an entire generation rested on his shoulders.
Caught in reveries of white sand beaches and sun-dappled stone, and an entire island once ruled by people like him, Naruto couldn't focus on the pair of ebony eyes staring at him with recognition from across the room, much less on the Beast of deep hatred and bloodied tails singing its song of pain and loneliness in his ears. He could only see the air floating and dancing through its golden locks of hair, and the murmur of the waves crashing against the rocky shores of the Land of the Whirlpool.