Seven Colours (Naruto)

Spoiler: Important A/N

Alright, I bring you the one-shot that inspired the full story. It’s basically a retelling with less words or rather, the story you’ve so loyally followed for months now is a retelling of this. There are some altered things, narrative that flowed differently when I tried to get into detail, but it’s overall the same story. Which means I’m not sure it’ll be worth your time, but I promised to at least give you the option so here it is.

In other news, my new (NSFW) story Tempered by Fire is now up! Make sure to take a look if you’re interested in Fate/SN stories!

I was named Shimada Ran at birth, but that wasn’t the first name I ever carried.

At first, it was all very confusing. I’m sure you can imagine, waking up from a slumber you don’t remember taking to find yourself somewhere warm and dark. I can’t speak for every unborn baby out there, but I for one felt safe and comfortable.

Then the spasms began, and I was slowly but surely ripped from my safe place, into a cold and unforgiving world. Suddenly light hurt my eyes, still incapable of proper sight. Suddenly noises were all the sharper and unpleasant. Suddenly I required to breathe to remain alive.

Honestly, I have no idea how anyone does this the first time. I mean, I remembered what it was to breathe and everything and it took me a couple of false starts, but how’s the tabula rasa that’s a normal newborn supposed to do it?

Figuring out what was going out around me was another uphill battle. My eyes couldn’t pick up images beyond blurs of colour, and my ears didn’t have the precision to pinpoint specific words for a while.

I’ll admit the idea to count the solar cycles to have some awareness of the passage of time didn’t occur to me for a while. So I can only say it was some confusing blur of time and a month before I recognised the language: Japanese.

It wasn’t a language I was ever fluent in my last life, but knew enough to identify some of the simpler sentences. It was a great advantage to learn the rest. Still took a long while.

Along the way, I picked some keywords that sent a shiver down my spine. Words like 'Chakra', 'Konoha' or 'Kyuubi-no-Youko’. The first one might’ve been a coincidence, but the other two were a dead giveaway, I was in some part of the Elemental Nations, from the story of Naruto.

Ehm… yeah, maybe it’s a bit late to mention it, but I was born with some memories from my last life. Like reading a certain manga going by the name 'Naruto'. And watching the anime, and the OVAs, and reading the novels.

Well, I don’t remember how I died. Or how I lived while we’re at it. More like just… knowledge I’m fairly sure a newborn baby shouldn’t have.

How did this happen you ask? Why the hell should I know?

No, seriously, I have no idea.

I only know I used to be someone else, and now I’m not. And I was born at some point in between. For the second time.

I won’t lie, I was more than a bit thrilled when I finally accepted reality (Watching first hand a Kusa forehead protector really helped with that), and hurried to quickly recap everything I knew about the story I had been so conveniently shoved into.

Making a tentative timeline took more time that I would liked, since Kusa wasn’t connect to many incidents I could use as reference, but someone finally let slip how my grandfather had died during the Kyuubi invasion of Konoha (and what the heck was a Kusa-nin doing there I wondered). A couple of months before I was born.

Unfortunately, there was little I knew about this particular village, beyond their Blood Prison, being the supposedly birthplace of the S-Rank criminal Zetsu (How does that work? I know where Zetsu actually comes from, how did they fake his birth?) and all the shit happening to them during the Chunin Exams in Konoha.

Oh, and some super-weapon or another, don’t remember that part very well.

I only hope whatever time Zetsu spent here is already over. I seem to remember charges of cannibalism somewhere on his file.

Anyway, the only thing worth remembering about this place in particular is Uzumaki Karin. Lost, shy and abused Karin, who was viewed more like a walking band-aid than a real person and grew alone and sad in a place that never really accepted her.

That her escape landed her into Orochimaru’s hands for another handful of years didn’t really improve her situation, nor helped her personality. She ended up becoming a manipulative bitch with a rowdy character and hair trigger temper. The worst of Sakura and Naruto put together into a single person… yikes.

At that point, I had to chastise myself for getting my head in the clouds. What did it matter to me whether she was happy or not? It was not my freaking problem!

As often happens in stories about being reborn in your favourite manga world, I was letting my fangirl mentality get in the way of cold, hard facts. I didn’t really want to join the shinobi world. If you stop and think about it, you wouldn’t either. It’s a cruel and dark place of shadows and deceit, where puppeteers pull the strings of the unaware, only to be manipulated by the puppet masters behind them, all of them ignoring even the existence of the real masterminds, who lay hidden underneath the underneath.

And death, and carnage. A lot of ninja carnage.

Yeah, in this world, it’s kill or be killed.

So I would go civilian. Yup. bombing any test they send my way and raising hell as required so I wasn’t ignored. Yup, I would be a stupid civilian with nothing to do with all that crap.

I might offer to play with Karin if I met her in the park or something, but that was all. No dangerous shinobi life for me, no matter how cool it looks in the anime.

---

…

....

At least that was the plan, and I honestly believed it was working until I found myself sitting in my very first lesson on the Academy, first row seat too. Turns out the Shimada Clan is a very prestigious and influential clan in Kusa, even if I’d never heard of them before.

My family is one focused on excellence. Our clan techniques aren’t secret jutsus but work ethic and genetic stubbornness. No two Shimada follow the same path in one given generation, but whatever we choose to do with our lives, we’re expected to excel on. And I missed my chance to be an excellent merchant when Mother enrolled me into the Academy without asking.

Wasn’t the Academy supposed to be the Third Hokage’s legacy? Why’s there another outside Konoha?

This isn’t fair.

And how am I supposed to excel at anything anyway? I’m a perfectly normal seven year old brat with short and somewhat chubby limbs, a round face with generous doses of baby fat and short, thin brown hair. Even my eyes are of a dull grey colour. Maybe my most remarkable feature is how unremarkable I am.

Revising my plan, I decide to flunk everything. I’ll be an exceptional failure and Mother will send me somewhere else. Yeah.

That’s my new plan.

So my first year in the Academy passed. I was a mousy little thing nobody thought twice about, unless I was asked something by the teacher. Then everybody suddenly paid attention because my answers were as outlandish as they were hilarious.

At first I was a bit worried about becoming bully bait with my attitude, but turns out turning my class-wide popular answers into passive-aggressive slights against whoever decided to have a laugh at my expense nipped any potential problem at the bud. They were kids after all, sharp words could, and did, hurt them into submission.

Mother wasn’t very happy with the reports coming from my teachers, but there was a limit to what she could do about it. What’s deemed acceptable punishments for a brat my age barely left a dent on me. And I was vindictive enough to perform more than satisfactorily while training at home, which was driving her spare something fierce, by the way.

Yeah, it was a decent status-quo for me.

The first year flew by. At first, I brought manga to read in class, but after it was all confiscated and a strict policy of searching me as I entered, I actually decided to pay attention to the lessons. Out of sheer boredom, mind, even if I only fooled around when we were practicing in the training ground at least there I could do something. Also, there was a lot of non-shinobi material too, after all. Geography, History, and Language of Kusa and the Elemental Countries were all fascinating subjects for me. It was also fascinating to read all the blatant bias that plagued our textbooks. Seriously, this world doesn’t seem to know what ‘impartial account’ means.

With the second year, Karin Uzumaki joined the Academy. That surprised me a bit, when she wasn’t in my class I simply assumed we weren’t of the same age, but turns out her family had just arrived Kusagakure during the summer holidays. Huh, that explains a bit better why she was always treated as an outsider, eight is old enough for the other kids to be a bit leery of a newcomer, so if her family’s standing within the village wasn’t good, it stood to reason she was never properly welcomed.

At first I just minded my own business, but man was it hard to watch the piss poor way she was treated. And how she just rolled with it was just frustrating, the first time I called out for her I ended up accidentally calling her ‘doormat-chan’. Of course it stuck, kids are cruel like that.

But be it instinct or cunning, she figured out I wasn’t really against her and boy, did she capitalize on it. By the time I noticed, she’d attached to me like a specially stubborn limpet.

I didn’t mind overly much. She might not be the greatest conversationalist, and maybe her self-worth issues drove me up the wall, but it was refreshing to have someone beside me to comment on the latest History lesson, even if she looked at me funny when I pointed out the lesson’s blatant bias in Kusa’s favour. To be honest, being an exceptional failure was kind of lonely.

…

I’ll never understand how the schoolyard food chain works. Never understood it in my first life, never understood it here. When I was alone, all it took was a handful of sharp comments and maybe reducing someone to tears with words alone for everybody to leave me alone. I was outside the chain altogether.

But apparently befriending the loser doesn’t rise her to my level, instead makes me fair game again… somehow.

It was quite frustrating.

Since I wasn’t willing to back down and attempts at physical violence against us usually ended in bloody noses (hint, not ours), the smear campaign against Karin at me soon turned into something ugly.

When they put a flower pot on our tables, as if we had just died, I had half a mind to laugh out loud, but Karin’s miserable expression held me back. Instead, I made a flower crown to wear myself, and pocketed the vases to sell later and buy us some treats with the money. It seemed enough at the moment, but later on learned Karin’s father had passed up not a week earlier.

Why she didn’t tell me herself back then, I’ll never understand.

In any case, I was seething. So, when someone pulled something funny next, I kind of… snapped? Yeah, snapped.

When my parents were called for an emergency meeting and I was asked to explain myself, I very pointedly told them to look underneath the underneath like good shinobi, since they wouldn’t believe me anyway. I lost recreational privileges and pretty much any personal freedom for the remainder of the school year, and training at home became something gruesome, but the idiot who so unpleasantly laughed at Karin’s plight will be wearing an eyepatch the rest of her life.

You don’t mess with my friends, bitch.

Unfortunately that didn’t stop the bullying, and my family had run of reasonable methods of punishment. If I was caught in something else, I would be pulled out of the program.

Funny how that would’ve sounded fantastic a year ago, but now I was emotionally invested in Karin, against my better judgement.

So I switched tactics. Training incidents happen everywhere, and if they all seemed to befall the most unpleasant individuals in the class… well, it couldn’t have happened to a better guy. And if I happened to make sure to stare down the victim making sure he or she saw my vicious smirk. Well, I’m a resentful bitch and I can’t bother feigning worry about someone I don’t like, that’s just life.

Kids are stubborn, or maybe stupid. It took me almost two entire years to get them to back off and, by then, my reputation as a failure was in tatters. It was the end of my third year in the Academy by then, but I naively expected to regain it before graduation. No such luck.

During my fourth year I managed to laze around for about... three weeks. Then I had an interview with the Boss Dude. Boss Dude had a more dignified name, of course, but it always sounded like a particularly nasty tongue-twister to me, so I called him Boss Dude. He was the leader of Kusagakure.

Apparently the way my performance didn’t match up with my actual abilities had been a bit too blatant during the bullying war last year, and Boss Dude wanted me to drop the act and become a shinobi for good. I told him to suck my foot. Now that I think about it, I failed pretty badly at that ‘being a little mousy thing’... Meh.

He asked me why I didn’t want to be a shinobi, and I lied to him. Seriously, you don’t tell the head honcho of a village of assassins for hire you don’t want to do something because you’re scared of dying. Because then he threatens to kill you, and if you still say no he kills you for real, just to make a point.

So I told him shinobi life was full of death and I didn’t want to lose my precious people. I should’ve suspected something when he accepted that easy enough, instead I only thought he was a mighty sucker.

A couple of months later he called me again to tell me about Karin’s mother passing away the previous week. I inwardly cursed at Karin and her infuriating tendency to clam up about such matters. I promised myself to have some words with her about it. After hugging her silly for about a whole week.

Then he told me about the deal she had with the village, and how her family had been accepted in return for her healing their shinobi with her particular abilities. Actually, that’s how she died, overworked herself to death after some skirmish or another went bad for Kusa. I’m definitely hugging Karin silly for the next month, no excuses.

Problem is, as he knows and I know, even if he doesn’t know for sure I know but probably suspects, that Karin has inherited her mother’s ability. It’s not hard to see where everything will go from here. An orphan without value for the village, except for that one skill that requires no training or investment whatsoever.

Long story short, I was presented with an ultimatum. Take my shinobi career seriously or she gets pulled out of the program and headfirst into the hospital as some kind of human sacrifice. And I used to complain about Orochimaru’s cruelty… yikes.

I also have to graduate as rookie of the year or she goes directly there anyway.

Even later on, that would probably be her fate as soon as I mess up a mission.

So I had to become the next ninja prodigy of the Shimada clan or risk her paying the consequences.

Fan-friggin’-tastic. At least Mother will be proud of me.

That was also the moment I decided that if I couldn't get my way, then to hell with living a safe and comfortable life and plunged myself headfirst into the plot. I began my scheming.

---

I am… an obsessive person. I had a vague awareness about that fact from my past life, but during the remaining two years of academy I had enough time to realize how bizarre my personal insanity was. Probably my new genetics didn’t help much here.

Stupid Shimada blood.

My plan always in mind, I immediately dove into a new schedule.

…

Okay, not immediately. First I went to find Karin and had some very angry words with her about bottling bad things inside. Then (after confirming she had no better life plans that an orphanage), grabbed her hand and dragged her all the way to my home, where I shamelessly bargained the exact same deal I had with Boss Dude, this time in return for letting Karin live with me until she could afford to support herself.

As you probably realised, the Shimada being a bunch of insufferable overachiever our home had the room for an extra bed, and our budget the funds for an extra mouth or twenty, easy.

As of today, I remain unsure whether Mother bought my attempts to bargain with something I had already promised someone else or simply tolerated what she saw as a whim because, as long as I had the drive to excel, she honestly didn’t care.

But yeah, after that I immediately dove into a new schedule.

…

Okay, not immediately. First I had to make sure I really understood everything going on and what was expected of me. I mean, after three years I still had no clue what was all this shit about having our own Academy in Kusa, and only a vague understanding of how it worked.

In the end there’s nothing mysterious about it. When Kusa officially became Konoha’s ally, knowledge about the inner workings of the acclaimed Academy that had produced such outstanding shinobi since it’s foundation was the price the Leaf paid. A complete steal if you ask me but, as I was born here in Grass, I’m not about to complain. Their loss, my win.

Okay, now that it was all solved, I immediately dove into a new and improved schedule.

My routine began with the first light of dawn, when I extricate myself from Karin’s sleepy grasp for my physical conditioning. I didn’t want to become the second coming of she-hulk, so it was mostly aerobic exercise and flexibility, along with eye-hand coordination training. By the time it wasn’t such an ungodly hour anymore, Karin joined me in my cool down exercises.

Not to boast or anything, but my cool down exercises were enough to count as serious workout for a normal person.

After we reached the Academy, I trudged through lessons that bore me to tears via drug abuse. And with that I mean caffeine. Lots and lots of caffeine. Still, some classes were simply impossible. I mean, what’s a girl with advanced calculus expertise supposed to do during ‘Math for dummies’?

So I surreptitiously pulled out my books for different subjects and made sure I had them down to pat instead, becoming the first ever master of the art of Stealthy Study. I’m such a badass.

Evening meant more training, this time with Karin at my side for everything. Knowing what to expect of the future, I made sure Mother found a good personal tutor on the subject of chakra control. The [Mind’s Eye of the Kagura] might work without real training from the user, but those [Uzumaki Chakra Chains] aren’t going to manifest themselves without a firm control on her chakra flow.

After dinner, I cloistered myself in an underground room, where I got ready for my plans for the future.This was the hardest part, because I was developing a completely different skill set that nobody could know about. Fortunately it was something that could be done behind closed doors in a windowless room. There’s no way I would’ve managed to keep any kind of outdoor training secret in a shinobi village. Small mercies.

I woke up tired and went to bed completely exhausted, only having decent sleep to get ready for a test. My migraines were the stuff of legends and a low-level headache was an almost constant partner. My growth would predictably be stunted, even if I visited the hospital to ask about possible palliatives, they couldn’t do much for me beside recommending a healthy diet and… well, stop doing that to myself.

....

Fat chance.

I also became somewhat irrational due to my lack of sleep and constantly aching body, snapping aggressively against anyone and anything that bothered me or Karin. Except Karin herself, who was the only one with approaching privileges. Even Mother earned her share of sharp words. Not that she didn’t kick my butt for it, mind.

You could say I took the maxim ‘this is a time to learn’ to the extreme. Had any potentially lethal incident happened during this time period, I would certainly be dead now, because I was in no shape to react to the unexpected. But hey, I learned a lot and I learned fast. That was my part of the bargain.

And yeah, that was pretty much my life for the following two years, until graduation. It sucked so very much, but I honestly didn’t notice until it passed and I looked back. Obsessions are scary things.

---

I graduated, of course, as the number one rookie of the year. And man, didn’t that piss off a good portion of the male population. Chauvinistic shits…

Then the teams were announced and I realized the Boss Dude had pulled one on me.

Karin wasn’t on my team.

Fortunately, I had been sleeping well in preparation for the tests, and I was feeling a good deal more rational than usual that day. Because the urge to throw a tantrum grew something fierce. In time, I realized Boss Dude was trying to do us a favour, that we had grown too dependent of each-other for our own good. But at the time I really had my head stuck inside my ass. Obsessions can do that to you.

So I was shoved with a team I fantasized about painfully killing as a method of stress relief, and spent every single free moment with Karin. They weren’t many, Boss Dude made sure our schedules didn’t overlap. Manipulative bastard wanted me to focus on training.

At least I didn’t feel the need to keep my self-destructive schedule, and slowly regained my nonchalance. I wasn’t a cool Academy graduate, but I sure aimed to be a cool Chunin aspirant by the time it was relevant.

I would like to say my team wasted three months painting fences and walking dogs only to then be sent in a C-Rank that went FUBAR and ended up being an A-Rank. But that short of crap only happens in Konoha, and only to Team 7.

Truth be told, for the most part of the Elemental Nations shinobi were killers for hire, it was only in the Hidden Leaf you could find them reduced to gophers in what I consider a decent PR maneuver that apparently no other shinobi leader was able to understand. There, shinobi were part of daily life for every civilian and somewhat heroic figures to admire. Here, we were… killers for hire. Necessary, but not necessarily liked.

We leave the Academy for low-risk escort or courier missions, and we work our way upwards from there. And Grass is big on intelligence gathering, which means low chance of missions being miss-ranked.

As part of my efforts to remain the best, I took solo missions to pad up my CV. What kind of village allows genin to take solo missions anyway? Greedy pieces of shit...

We performed admirably, as I did by myself somehow, but never got the chance to really excel.

There was a bit of an upset when the Chunin Exams weren’t mentioned when I expected them to, but it was a false alarm, thank the Kami. Turns out our promotion graduated around five months before Naruto’s did, because our terms aren’t synchronized. People sure looked at me funny when I asked about the Exams anyway, apparently, I wasn’t supposed to know.

Well, sucks, most brilliant kunoichi of my generation bitches.

…

Remember when I said there weren't many misranked missions in Grass? Well, some was. Like the one that had Karin’s team die on her. She only survived because she was keeping watch of their camp when the rest of her team was engaged, and her detection skills allowed her to assess the danger and flee for her life.

Of course, I didn’t hear shit from her. Had to overhear a conversation. And I pretty much never eavesdrop conversations, damnit. It was friggin’ good luck I happened to be stretching after my evening training at the other side of a hedge that I ever heard that.

So I took a week off and another one in Karin’s stead (The fool intended to just keep working!) and stole her for a journey to Hot Spring Country. It was expensive as heck, but dedicating all my time to being the best means I didn’t have a lot of time to spend in… spending money. Even after buying quality tools I had more money that I knew what to do with.

Mother looked very amused when I complained about that. It’s apparently called the Shimada Curse.

...Stupid Shimada blood.

No, I’m not going to tell you perverts what transpired while on our vacation, but it probably wasn’t what your sick minds are conjuring. It had good times and awkward times and we blushed and laughed hysterically more often that I like to admit. Nothing happened beyond fun and relaxation and I wasn’t angling for anything else anyway, but we were both stepping into teen ages and suddenly a lot of things that had been harmless enough before were now embarrassing and/or suggestive.

In any case, we returned refreshed and happy, and everything would’ve been sweet and nice if not because Boss Dude decided to drop the news about the Chunin Exam in Konoha right as we returned. Karin was going as a filler for a team whose third member had already been promoted.

I… My team wasn’t as ready as I was myself, and I was supposed to join another team in the place of a weak member that wasn’t really up to the challenge. The leader of that group was a face I remember very clearly. It was a face Orochimaru wore during the test.

Well… Crap.

---

I honestly don’t believe I’ll be able to convey how I felt after hearing that.

Orochimaru was a hurdle I had no realistic way of overcoming. Not now, not in a hundred years. Give me a break, I’m and excepcional genin, not the friggin’ Rikudo Sennin incarnate. Nope, no way, no how, I was going to die.

Could I refuse to go to the Exam? Nope. Are you kidding, this isn’t Konoha, we aren’t getting a choice, just given a command and expected to follow or die trying, as I was going to do. Dying I mean. Also, I had grown a lot closer to Mother even since I began taking shinobi life seriously. Disappointing her now would hurt.

Could I kill all my team and maybe someone from Karin’s team too so we get sent like that? The killing part was feasible, if a bit far-fetched, but I wasn’t going to walk scot free afterwards. Also, if I did Orochimaru would probably kill us anyway to take our places.

Yeah, not my best idea, I was a bit sleep deprived by the time I formulated that one, leave me alone.

In the end, the answer came from Mother. Kami bless her.

I explained my problem the best I could, that is to say, very poorly, but she caught the important parts anyway. It was imperative I didn’t participate in the Exams as part of the team I had been assigned. It was imperative that such a team indeed made it to the exam. It was imperative I was in Konoha during the examt.

“It’s easy, just get a field promotion before then and get there as a spectator.”

I could’ve kissed her. But she probably would’ve kicked my ass for it. So I smothered her in the most intense hug I’ve ever initiated. She kicked my ass for it anyway, but did so with a smile on her lips. Maybe our family was a bit dysfunctional, but we made do.

Getting a field promotion was normally tricky business, especially in peace times. But there are loopholes. Of course there are loopholes, this is the shinobi world. With a couple of friends in high places, it can be conveniently arranged.

Fortunately, I was able to reason with Boss Dude, and that was a heck of a high place to have a friend in. Konoha has always been big on teamplay, and just soving me into an already existing team dynamic with barely a couple of months to figure out my place wasn’t going to cut it. Also, Karin was a weakness of mine and having her take the exam at the same time as me wasn’t a very good idea. I would give up any forced match against her for one. And I would very much prefer not publitice my fondness for her to all and sundry, thank you very much

At first I was, of course, offered Karin’s place instead, and you wouldn’t believe how tempted I was to accept it. So much pain would be spared that way… but all my plans laid in the Chunin Exams. I couldn’t do anything drastic, at least until the second test was over.

So I insisted on getting a field promotion. It was easy to explain it away as not wanting to ruin my best friend’s chance. To be honest I wasn’t sure Boss Dude wouldn’t call my bull, but in the end he let it go.

A mission was orchestrated to justify my promotion, I was sent on an infiltration mission far above my paygrade with a single High-jounin. He was a jerk about it or maybe was on orders and wouldn’t participate at all, just watch my performance and evaluate it.

Basically, a test disguised as field promotion. I wonder how often the villages get away with shit like this...

So I floundered around a field that wasn’t my specialty as a jerk took notes and, I’m sure of it, an even bigger jerk was laughing his ass off on his Boss Dude desk back in the village. I secured the information, inserted myself into the relevant secured location, neutralized the heck out of everybody around with a generous dose of toxic fumes and ran like the devil was at my heels with the payload.

It wasn’t elegant, it wasn’t fun (for me) and most definitively it wasn’t jounin material. But I had delivered as asked, and that was all it was about. If the suckers I had robbed silly even bothered to investigate, the would find Kumo-nin equipment hid away in an empty tree trunk near their base, but I doubt they’ll be capable of that so the identity of their assailant will forever remain a mystery.

In any way I had my promotion, and just in time for my celebratory vacation to match with the start of the exams in Konoha. Life was about to get a hell of a lot more interesting.

---

Boss Dude was a jerk, I knew it for a long time, but I didn’t expect him to give me an infiltration mission to ‘make use of all that time you’ll waste in the Leaf’. Seriously, that was a low blow even for him. Whatever, at least that gave me an excuse to remain there the full month. And to empty my accounts and grab all my sealed scrolls before leaving.

It would’ve been suspicious as heck to do that for a regular vacation, but nobody arched a brow at me preparing for a mission.

Thus prepared, I bade farewell to Karin and watched her leave the village. She would be safe. She would be safe, she would be safe. Even if Orochimaru attacked and killed the other team she wouldn’t even know and she would be safe. Even when her team ditched her in the forest of death and a bear tried to eat her whole she would be safe.

Hell, convincing myself of that was harder than I would’ve liked, now that I think about it.

In the end I reached Konoha by myself.

Why, you ask? Because I was sick of Karin keeping things from me and wanted to teach her how it felt for once, and this was harmless enough. The look on her face when she found me waiting for her at Konoha’s gates was priceless.

Then I took her to Ichiraku’s. I had no ulterior motives, swear, just wanted to treat her to some good Ramen while having a taste of one of the most well known food stands in the world (for me anyway). But it almost backfired when Naruto predictably was there. It was a very tense hour until Karin finally decided to take pity of my shrinking wallet and we left. The insufferable girl was probably taking revenge for my revenge surprise.

I felt like shit at not dragging her and Naruto together, but also inordinately relieved I wasn’t altering the plot. Not yet Ran, just a little longer!

Then some bastard called Naruto by his full name, and there was no way to avoid the meeting without it looking suspicious. Damn but I was going to curse this day and the troubles it caused me during the month that followed. Still, just the smile in Karin’s face when we made it back to our room was worth all of that and more.

Yeah, our room, the rest of her team were jerks, so she ditched them and joined me at the five-star hotel I was staying in. More cash than I know what to do with, bitches. The A-Rank I pulled by myself to get promoted didn’t hurt my account balance either.

My problem right now was, now that I finally was in Konoha, to put the finishing touches on my plan and make sure everything worked out. That involved a lot of walking around, as inconspicuous as possible, which wasn’t exactly easy with two Uzumaki tagalongs, but also doubled nicely as working for my ‘mission’. It also involved avoiding certain people like the plague.

Fortunately Naruto didn’t seem particularly inclined to introduce us to his old Academy classmates, as meeting Shikamaru would spell trouble with capital letters. The chance of Hinata catching a whiff of us during her regular Naruto-stalking activities was bad enough, but I could only hope she was busy getting ready for the exam.

---

The big day arrived, and I dropped Karin with the rest of the Kusa aspirants at the gates of the Academy. Damn but it was big and imposing compared with Grass’ modest facilities.

In any case, I wished good luck to Karin while very pointedly ignoring her jerkmates and then did the same for the other team’s leader, who I was pretty sure was already Orochimaru in disguise, but behave politely enough, if a bit distant. Good thing I guess, not sure how well I would’ve reacted if he’d attempted conversation.

Now, here’s where I would like to tell you about all the badass shady antics that took place during the week everyone was busy with the exams but I can’t, because I didn’t do shit besides walking around and familiarizing myself with the village. Besides, everyone from Kusa was interrogated pretty soon by a clearly unsettled Anko.

No, I didn’t know Shiore-san very well, nor anyone from his team.

No, I didn’t notice anything odd about him, but then again, I didn’t know him very well.

I was in Konoha on vacation, since it was a good chance to take it easy while cheering on my fellow Kusa-nin. Gosh I couldn’t wait for the finals, they promised to be epic.

Yeah, she was intimidating enough, excuse me if I’m not looking very shaken, I think I’m still in shock about a Kusa-nin being assassinated and impersonated by a Konoha renegade the hosts don’t seem capable of catching or even inconveniencing in any meaningful way. Or at all.

Oh, the interview is over already? Good, you should be out there trying to catch the bastard, not losing the time of paying visitors.

Well, fuck you very much to you too princess, I’ll now go back to my masseuse appointment, I’m late already.

...

Bitch.

After that more than infuriating conversation with/interrogation by Konoha’s security, I left the intelligence building fuming. I was pretty sure I wasn’t being followed, which was pretty scary since I knew I had to be being tailed. Stupid stealthy ninjas, you never know where they are…

Not fiddling with my sealed scrolls and convincing myself that I had everything ready was a real struggle. The action was in the Forest of Death, and there was nothing I could do to interfere. Heck, I couldn’t even worm my way into the tower for the preliminaires!

To be honest, those five days were kind of a blur. A long, unending blur of me restlessly walking all around the village only to suddenly change my mind and getting into any open training field I could find to vent out my frustration. Then just as suddenly I start feeling lonely and miserable and barely manage to drag myself to the hotel’s spa, where I would waste hours letting myself get dragged from one treatment to the next without paying attention to whatever it was they did or how much the bill fattened.

Yes, I didn’t enjoy those five days, not in the least.

When Karin finally stepped outside the place, I might’ve pounced on her like a tiger on a stalked prey which, in hindsight, might’ve not been the best thing to do to a nerve-wracked killer recently out of a deadly survival exercise.

I was a bit surprised when Uzumaki Friggin’ Naruto made to intercept me, and even more surprised when she tried to gut me with a sharpened kunai. They both failed, of course, I’m an Shimada shinobi and was on a glomping mission. It was still a bit unsettling, but the panicked look in her eyes once she registered what exactly she’d tried to do was pure blackmail material.

Once the mood calmed down a bit, the both of them tripped each other in their hurry to tell me about their exams, and I was pretty sure I had changed something important in the plot by then. One thing was Naruto knowing about Karin beforehand, but they were obviously thick as thieves.

Indeed. In this timeline, when Karin lost her team she didn’t wander alone for a bear to try and turn her into ours d'oeuvre, but used the [Mind’s Eye of the Kagura] to locate her distant cousin and regroup with his team. All in good time too, as she caught up to them the night Sakura spent taking care of them, but before she had any time to set traps. I would’ve been pretty miffed if the wallflower had ended turning my best friend into a human porcupine.

You’d be surprised how different the fight with the Sound team went after Naruto and Sasuke had a quick bite at her. For them telling me the story it was still a thrilling fight but, for me that knew how it would’ve worked otherwise, it was frankly hilarious.

Karin still earned a pointed glare and she had the good sense of looking embarrassed. I was not happy about her revealing her chakra's special characteristics around where someone unscrupulous like Orochimaru or Danzo could catch a whiff of it. It was bad enough in Kusa, no need for any big player to know what she can do.

Anyway, with Karin’s help they’d breezed the rest of the test, which was a bloody good point as it meant Kabuto didn’t join them this time (I asked). Whether it was because the team was almost guaranteed to pass and Orochimaru didn’t feel the need for a backup or because it would’ve looked suspicious if a second shinobi separated from his team joined them, I’ll never know.

Anyway, the three of us went off to do our thing. Sasuke hadn’t returned yet from wherever Kakashi had spirited him away to seal away his [Cursed Seal of Heaven]. Hmmm… sealed seal… talk about redundancy. Sakura, of course, wanted nothing to do with Naruto once the team exercises were over.

I was too relieved nothing had gone wrong to feel anything but happiness right now, but intellectually knew I was kind of fucked. Interacting with Naruto during this month was a big NO in my books. But! I would worry about it later, right then the two of them had earned their first decent food in days. Ramen, of course.

When the night arrived and we bid our farewells to Naruto before going back to our hotel room, I still had no idea how to distance myself from the hyperactive brat. Getting to bed with a particularly clingy Karin, I couldn’t bring myself to care overly much.

---

I hate perverts. I super hate super perverts. And there’s a special place in hell where Jiraiya will be sent to after Pein kills him. That is, if I don’t get to him first.

Okay, it’s probably not that bad, but I still didn’t take it kindly when he was caught spying on the onsen Karin and I were soaking in that morning. He also gave me the perfect excuse to avoid Naruto for the remainder of the month, as he’d just become his teacher. That earned him a wooden bucket right between the legs, never let it be said I’m not a thankful person.

Karin still met with him a lot outside training, but I begged off. Naruto went as far as to call me an oddball, but I’m sure Karin at least caught on something going on. Well, she never really got around asking, so I didn’t have to lie to her.

And like that, one day after another, it finally came the time for the finals. Karin was so excited about seeing her cousin fight that it was impossible to share a bed with her so, after futilely trying for a while, I left for the red light district, where I very pointedly spend the night drinking myself silly in a very visible place and then let myself get dragged to a ratty motel to sleep it off, where I overslept and missed the whole thing.

There were some overtures toward my person, but nobody attempted to take advantage of me so I guess that’s a point for Konoha. Or maybe just luck. Yeah, probably just luck.

In any case, my brilliant plans were cut short when a Sound-nin bursted into my room as soon as the invasion alarms blared. The fight was absurdly hard and I could only curse my luck at meeting who apparently was the only non-incompetent Sound nin in the world. I mean, the Sound Four were supposedly the creme of the creme, and a bunch of genin kicked their asses, feh.

When I finally slit his throat, the room was a mess, and I had cuts and wounds everywhere. I couldn’t have staged it any better. With the expertise of years of practice, I unsealed a corpse from one of my scrolls, sealing the man in its place. After placing the new body against a wall, I took a good look at it.

It was a young woman with approximately my body structure and a somewhat similar hair. Nobody would confuse her for me, and a basic autopsy would reveal the underdeveloped chakra coils of a civilian, but nothing of that mattered.

Because I set her on fire.

Burn baby burn.

Where did I get a civilian corpse you ask? Who are you, the police?

Then, making sure nobody had the free time to pay attention to me, I got into the shared bathroom (ratty motel, remember?), where I unceremoniously cut down my ponytail and tortured my remaining hair with chemicals that I’m pretty sure were against the Geneva Convention until it became wavy and lively, shining in a healthy golden. A pair of contacts painted the grey of my eyes a crystal blue, and a frilly blue dress Ran would never be caught alive wearing gave the finishing touches to my plan.

Shimada Ran was dead, she was killed during the Sound and Sand combined invasion to Konoha.

I was now Alice Margatroid, soon to be known as the Seven-Coloured Puppeteer.

Leave me alone, fuuinjutsu and puppeteering go hand in hand and are of the few ninja arts you can practice behind closed doors.

Plus, I used to like Alice Margatroid a lot, enough to want a try at being her. My future looked, if nothing else, interesting.

I mixed with the first bunch of panicking foreign civilians, praying for the chakra suppression drugs I took to fool any guards standing in our way, and subtly implanted the idea of leaving Konoha as soon as possible into their brains. All subliminal messages, of course, can’t cast Genjutsu while on drugs.

I wouldn’t be seen again until the mess with the Stone of Gelel.

Still, letting Karin believe I was dead until I was ready to make an appearance was going to be a bitch.

I knew this wasn’t the ideal time to leave Karin out of my sight. Konoha was going to face some unrest, that with Sarutobi’s death and the change of Hokage and all that. But I was reasonably sure it was still safe. I mean, there was a very slight chance Danzo tried to get his grubby paws on her, even if she was too old to be reprogrammed. But every option I could think of comes with risks, and this was the plan with the best chance of success.

There was no way she would return to Kusa, so hopefully Naruto would make sure she didn’t leave the village and she wouldn’t end up as Orochimaru’s pawn again.

He better.

Or else.

[The End]