Part 17

Hello Naruto,

If you are reading this, then some little creature should have found its way to your room in the Senju compound. It’s a special creation of mine. It’s a wooden animal that can change its form depending on what makes it seem least suspicious. A seal ensures that it will only reveal the letter hidden in its body when you infuse chakra into it by touching it. If anyone else touches the creature, it will self-destruct and my connection to it will be cut, notifying me of its destruction.

First things first, if you want to send a reply, just make sure to let the animal swallow your letter, it will then bring it to me.

I cannot exactly tell you where I am right now, but I need you to know that I really, really miss you.

Jiraiya has started teaching me about the Rasengan. I’ve been training with it for a while now, but I just can’t seem to get it right yet. I really admire that you managed to learn it so soon~.

You may have noticed already, but your little fox is quite special. I’ve drawn a few seals into it that might help you get a good night’s sleep every day, just make sure to hug it and send it some of your chakra every night, okay?

I hope to see you soon,

Uzu

Reading the letter in his hands, Naruto felt warm inside even though tear drops started staining the letter halfway through the first reading.

After weeks of not hearing from her, she had finally found a way to communicate with him. He liked the little game they played with the seals on their left palms, but … it just wasn’t enough for him. In fact … it might make it worse? It always reminded him that she just wasn’t with him.

He really missed her. He had half expected her to just … you know … truly leave him, but seeing this letter in front of him ignited his hope again. He vowed to wait for her, for as long as it takes.

Taking his time, he carefully worded his own letter before handing it to the bird who promptly swallowed it and flew off again.

Who knows how long Naruto would need to wait for her next letter, would there even be one?

…

Sensing a small cat jump on the inn room’s window, she infused some chakra into it and took out the letter Naruto had hopefully sent her.

She didn’t know if there was someone out there capable of somehow working through all the different security measures she had put in place, but if there was …

Scanning the letter and checking it for traps multiple times, she finally judged it to be safe and opened it.

Seeing the slightly messy handwriting that just screamed Naruto, she felt a smile tug at her lips.

It was a genuine smile, one that she showed very rarely these days.

When in company of strangers, she showed only her trained fake smile. Jiraiya had taught her how to make it seem genuine.

And it was only with Jiraiya that she sometimes showed a genuine smile.

He had also taught her how she could theoretically gather information. He still did all of that by himself though, she just stayed close to him and tried to pick up a few things that he might miss. Observing was something that she could do fairly well after all.

She read Naruto’s letter, laughing softly at times when he explained how his new teammate Sai seemed to be a really weird person. Especially with the nicknames he gave people.

Yamato was supposedly a nice guy. Naruto told her how grateful he was that she had left him the fox, it reminded him of her, especially the color of its fur.

Well, that’s why you wanted its fur to have that color, no?

After reading his letter a few more times, making sure that she hadn’t missed anything, she stowed it away in the storage seal on her right wrist.

It was different than normal seals, in a way that it didn’t have a real foundation. There was structure and certain balance involved still, but it was a step forward towards her goal of creating pictures that held seals.

Feeling Jiraiya enter their shared room, she began to pack her stuff and stored the cat in the storage seal as well.

Meeting his gaze, she heard him say: “Little princess~, it’s time to go.”

Yeah, there it is … for some reason he has taken to teasingly call me little princess. I don’t really understand how he got to that, but it does fit the persona that we take on while traveling.

Others see us as a father and daughter pair, so him calling me by that nickname seems fitting, it also makes others let their guard down.

…

One day, traveling along a deserted path in the wind country, where the village hidden in the sand was located, Uzu decided to ask Jiraiya if he knew something about Naruto’s time in the orphanage.

She had noticed before that he knew more about it, judging by the gazes he sometimes sent Naruto when she knew he was thinking about things that had scarred him in the past.

She had vowed to wait for Naruto to tell her about it himself, but ever since she saw Mrs Humura in the apartment just below his, she felt an ever-growing need to know.

And now, she just couldn’t reign in her curiosity anymore, she needed to know what bothered Naruto when she couldn’t see it.

“Jiraiya. Please tell me about Naruto’s time in the orphanage. Please tell me what happened to him. Tell me what scarred him so much. Tell me why he, who usually fears no one, looked at the woman living in the apartment below his own with fear.” She said, her voice conveying her seriousness in the chilling quality it took on.

She saw Jiraiya stiffen slightly before he continued to walk.

Meeting his gaze, she saw a seriousness that he so, so rarely showed.

There was an awkward silence for a while as they both observed each other’s faces.

When Jiraiya closed his eyes and sighed, Uzu knew that she had won the right to know by showing her genuine concern for Naruto’s wellbeing.

“Alright, when we reach the next village, I’ll tell you about it, okay? But … let me remind you, you did not hear it from me and me telling you about this shows that I trust you not to misuse this information. This is something that Naruto does not want people he cares about to know. He fears that it will turn them away, or so I think. I’ve never actually asked him for the reason that he did not want anyone to know. And even I only know because I have had the chance to read through the documents just before my sensei, the third Hokage, permanently removed those parts from the kid’s file. Not even the Hokage after him would be able to know about this. That was the kid’s wish and my sensei wanted to at least fulfill this one wish of his, he felt that he had already failed the kid way too much to not listen to him this once. Even if it might not have been the right decision to delete those files.” Jiraiya said, his face undergoing many changes during his speech.

Nodding to him, Uzu decided to wait until they reached the next village.

(A/N: No, they are not going to one of the shinobi villages right now, there are other villages in the world of Naruto as well, in case someone was wondering :3)

…

Sitting on their respective beds in their shared room, Uzu watched as Jiraiya poured himself a drink and promptly swallowed it whole, immediately pouring himself another one.

“Are you sure you want to know? What happened in that orphanage for decades … is cruel and inhuman. You know about the Root organization that Danzo created, right?” Jiraiya sighed.

Connecting the dots, Uzu said: “Yeah, I know. He used the orphanage as a way to get a steady supply of Root agents? Children are easily formable to become perfect soldier after all. Am I right?”

Seeing Jiraiya nod, made her body go cold, emotion drained from her face.

Just knowing that it was Danzo that in some way caused whatever Naruto suffered there is …

Her thoughts were interrupted by Jiraiya’s next words: “In that place, the caretaker Mrs Humura, a suspected former agent of Danzo’s that had to retire because of injury, tortured and formed hundreds of children into Root Anbu.”

“It was all about getting the strongest children into the foundation and weeding out the weak. I won’t go into detail … but it is suspected that more than a thousand children died from a variety of different causes. The most common one, though, is … suicide. The sheer psychological stress and scars and pain that these children experienced is worse than any of my generation experienced in real wars. When your personality and identity is still so fragile, you are easily influenced by the words of people that ‘know better’.” Jiraiya continued.

Uzu remained silent as she listened, her fists clenching into the fabric of her blanket.

“The kids were starved, made to fight against each other, tortured, experimented on and so, so much more. They were systematically forced to either abandon their emotions and survive, choosing to become a root member, or somehow escape that place. And, sadly, the only option to escape their life was suicide. Naruto was lucky. Just lucky. That’s the only thing that separates him and the children that killed themselves. He holds the nine-tails and that’s why there was someone that cared, otherwise he very well could have been dead.”

“As you know, Naruto feels emotions very strongly … and even though he has perfected his fake mask to protect himself, he was never able to kill his emotions. He was simply unfit for Anbu, no matter how much Danzo and Humura wanted him to become one. They focused especially on him, treating him especially cruelly.”

“The Kyuubi heals any injuries he has, or so it is said. They tortured him, starved him … and because he heals better and has more stamina than others, he is still alive till this day, though just being able to endure more than others doesn’t mean that he is unbreakable. It was later found that Naruto will never get children because the Kyuubi did not heal his injuries that scarred his fertility. But all that wasn’t even the thing that really broke him.”

“You know that he has nearly no friends, right? Well, that’s because the villagers hate him and they tell their children to hate him too … and being easily manipulated children, they do what they are told. However, the children in the orphanage don’t have parents that tell them to hate him. And you know that Naruto actually has a bright personality … well … bright, considering what he suffered. His heart can hold the world if it just accepted him. For him, hating someone is nearly impossible. Wishing to end someone else’s life is also hard, it warrants an extremely vicious and evil crime of that other person to really make Naruto want to kill. Something that is precious to Naruto would need to be taken away to make him lose his innate kindness.”

“And they used that kindness against him. They broke him, by breaking those closest to him. That’s the only way they managed to come close to forcing him to erase himself and to become a vessel for the foundation. But, thankfully, he somehow managed to get through it. All by himself no less. At that point, after he lost every single one of his friends to suicide, when he had no one left, he somehow managed to pull himself back up.”

“I won’t go into detail as to how exactly Humura forced them into suicide, but you can already imagine what they must have suffered. The one’s Humura ‘loved’ the most are all known as the … children of iron, and they suffered the worst, or so rumors go. Until now, no one but those children know what that actually means, so I can’t tell you. You’ll need to ask him that yourself though he might not answer and just distance himself from you once he knows that you know about him.”

“I firmly believe that his friends, the one’s that died, were the ones that formed his stable personality and managed to create the Naruto that he is today. With all his ups and downs, that is.”

“Oh … there’s another thing. We know that while most of Naruto’s friends killed themself, some of them also joined the Root, those kids were ‘adopted’, while Naruto never was.”

“The last thing I’m going to tell you … and probably the most fucked up thing about that orphanage is, that … Mrs Humura, when someone made a mistake, punished not the one that made the mistake, no, she punished the one that they liked most. Conditioning them to believe that whenever they got too close to anyone, they would, inevitably, cause that person to suffer. Also, living in the orphanage and being forced to witness every single one of his dearest friends’ suicides with his own eyes and then clean up the scene, made Naruto firmly believe that anyone that he cherished would sooner or later leave him. That’s why he does not allow himself to truly and genuinely cherish anyone.”

“He told me … that it was different with you, I want you to know that. He just could not break off your relationship even though he tried. Take this as a warning, even though I know that you also truly love him, if you hurt him, I will kill you, no matter what. Naruto is my godson … and I already regret not helping him and looking after him sooner … now he doesn’t even truly allow himself to trust me fully, even though he knows that I would never hurt him. The only one he truly trusts, which is painfully obvious to everyone that knows you two, is you. Remember that. Take good care of his trust, you could decide to kill him, and he would let you do it, that’s how deep his trust runs for you by now and it will only grow with time, as long as you don’t break him.”

Uzu was shaking by the time Jiraiya finally stopped talking and opened the next bottle of alcohol he had with him. This time choosing to just ignore his glass and instead just drink from the bottle, downing it all in one go.

Observing him through a rather blurred vision caused by her tears, she realized that Jiraiya’s way to deal with all the cruelty that the young Naruto has experienced (and with all the pain he feels at the fact that his young student has gone through so much shit), was drinking alcohol.

Closing her eyes, she made sure to burn his words into her memory, when she … finally got her hands on Danzo and that woman, she would make sure that they get the punishment they deserve.

However, thinking again, it wouldn’t be right for her to be the one that punishes them. That was the right of Naruto and the other children of iron, whoever they were, if some of them were even still alive.

Maybe a few from older generations were still alive.

Though, Mrs Humura seemed like a person that wasn’t easily … punished, seeing that she was still running around in the village.

Or, seeing that Naruto feared her, maybe their scars ran so deep that they just did not dare try anything against her. Maybe they were just content with hopefully never seeing her again.

But, Uzu did not want to even try guessing what they were actually feeling. She did not have the right to do that. It just wasn’t her place to decide what to do with Mrs Humura, even if she already daydreamed about what she would do to her.

She didn’t care much about Jiraiya’s threat, even without it she could never hurt him. Hurting him was hurting herself and that solved nothing.

Her eyes widened when Jiraiya spoke again: “Every year on Naruto’s birthday, he was sent out of the orphanage and into the civilian’s district. It was another one of their ways of breaking him in. The civilians then let out their anger on Naruto and most of the time, they severely beat him and broke some of his bones. However, one year, the Kyuubi took control and it attacked Humura, causing her to suffer severe injuries. The third Hokage then took him out of the orphanage, ‘kicking him out’, and gave him an apartment of his own. The orphanage was then reformed, it is, since then, no longer being controlled by Danzo.”

…

“Ah, you are right, the apartment Naruto is currently living in is not the apartment that Hiruzen-sensei gave him back then.” Jiraiya said, his eyes dimming.

Uzu’s brows furrowed, anger evident in her eyes at the thought of what might have led to Naruto needing a new apartment.

I figured that the one he took me to, wasn’t his original one … it’s too big for a child.

“His old one was destroyed … on his 8^th birthday. Two years after being expelled from the orphanage. He had spent some time in the streets, buying himself some food from his then already favorite-shop, Ichiraku. At least that’s what later questioning revealed. When he got back into his apartment, he noticed that his door was open and that the lock on his door was destroyed. He thought it was a regular theft and wondered why they came to him, his apartment held nothing of value. When he went inside to check what was missing, several grown men ganged up on him, viciously beating him, cutting at him with knives and ripping out his hair from their roots. Even with his healing capabilities, it still took him weeks to recover … and since the doctors refused to treat the fox, Hiruzen-sensei asked foreign medic-nins that had no village affiliation to come to Konoha to be his personal medics.”

Honestly, Uzu felt lost. She just did not understand how these people could be that cruel to a child … and she did not even begin to grasp how Naruto was even remotely functioning after all that he suffered. She, who had killed herself in her past life because she merely couldn’t be happy, ever, had no right to even …

She slightly calmed her spiraling thoughts by remembering the words she had hear sometime in her past life: “Suffering mustn’t be compared. Everyone’s troubles and everyone’s suffering are valid.”

He should be in pieces right now … if anyone deserved rest, peace and affection, then it is him.

She vowed to try to fulfill all of the wishes he had, as long as it made him happy. Across the months, she had thought long and hard about whether she loved him. And, honestly, while she still wasn’t quite sure about it, she knew that she would do anything for him … and that was enough.

That was enough.

…

A/N: We know a bit more about Naruto’s time in the orphanage now. Let me know what you think :/

What do you think was cruelest thing they did to the children? :c

(Umm ... if you liked the chapter please make sure to heart it? O.o)