Naruto Fan Fiction ❯ Way of a Shinobi ❯ Escapable Situations ( Prologue )

Chapter 1-Escapable Situations

 

Blood dripped off his katana slowly. He watched as the red life-giving liquid slipped down the silver blade and soaked the leather wrapped hilt. Eventually, the hilt was saturated and blood droplets flowed downward, soaking the gloved hand that was tightly gripping it. The wolf wondered idly at how much soap it would take to get the new stains off. He decided it would be easier to just buy a new one.

 

Not that it mattered of course. The rest of him was splattered with the red stuff and other bodily fluids. And this was not the first time. His armor was tinged pink even when it was freshly scrubbed. He supposed that years of bloodstains had taken their toll on his armor, and him.

 

The stench of blood clung to him and permeated the area, but for once, his sensitive nose did not mind. After 14 years as a shinobi, he was inured to such.

 

It was odd really. Shinobi were supposed to, according to a book he had read as a 4-year old, possess the keenest hearing, strongest sense of smell and the sharpest hearing. Yet the `best' ninjas he knew, the most proficient and experienced ones, were those who had learned not to see, not to hear, and not to smell.

 

Either that or they were completely insane.

 

You see it was easier to kill, to take a life not in self-defense or for a greater cause, but simply because you were ordered to, without your senses. Most of the ANBU learned to switch it off early on, or they went mad, died or left (or did all three sometimes).

 

Even so, there were the lucky ones, or not-so-lucky ones, who could perform their jobs without losing such an integral part of them. It did however, affect their sleep time. They relived every aspect of their kills, from the coppery tang of blood pervading the scene, to the sound of a sharpened blade as it slid through another man's head and the sight of red paint over it all.

 

Kakashi slept very little at night. He had done so for almost 8 years now. Not that he had been a particularly deep sleeper; not with his father's face looming in the background.

 

The past 8 years though, had taken their toll on him. Lost teammates, lost sensei, lost sleep, lost sanity. Indeed, somewhere along the way, he had completely utterly, lost it all.

 

At six, he had lost his innocence. At ten he had lost the cold shield protecting his heart. At fourteen, he had lost the last person who had cared for him. And at the grand old age of nineteen, he realized he had lost his life.

 

A sudden flare of chakra to his left snapped him out of his musing. He narrowed his focus and identified them via his nin-dogs; 2 shinobi, very strong…and friendly.

 

He relaxed at the realization and bent down at the corpse in front of him. He began to methodically strip the body of any useful items before moving to another. By the time his squad mates had arrived, the wolf had relieved 5 of the 8 dead shinobi of their possessions.

 

The boar and the cat said naught to him as they bent to aid him. The wolf was comfortable with these two. He had worked many missions with them and trusted them as much as he could trust another.

 

A hand reached out to him and he reacted without thought or hesitation. The wolf spun around with deadly grace and pinned the cat to tree, blood-soaked katana pressed to the other's throat, and froze.

 

`Shinobi who hurt their friends are lower than trash', the words of a dead idealist echoed in his ears.

 

`Always protect your team', the favorite saying of another dead ninja snapped him out of it. He dropped the katana and leaned against a nearby ruin, adamantly avoiding the sight of the single bead of blood that was slowly sliding down the cat's throat.

 

The trio did not stir until the remaining member of their squad returned. The four proceeded back in silence, the boar, the cat, the wolf and the weasel. They were the best. The incident would not affect them in the least. They were ANBU.

 

Later in the numbingly chill shower, the wolf realized that this was not true. The cat, you see, had just walked in with the boar. The young weasel, though the wolf knew age did not matter, was already drowning his anguish beside him. The weasel's black hair lay flat on his scalp and his eyes glowed an eerie red, three pinwheels in each of them rotating furiously at the ceiling. His naked scarred skin shocked many. The wolf though, did not care.

 

What made his shaking double was not the freely bleeding gash adorning the weasel's teenage body. It was not the dried blood which had turned the boar's white hair crimson. It was not even the glazed emptiness in their eyes which reflected his own.

 

The sight of a long line of reddish raised skin that glared at him from the cat's neck turned his stomach. The memory of spinning her around and digging the blade into her neck shamed. The memory of the insatiable bloodlust, that manic irrational desire to kill, to feel his blade sever tendons and watch blood spurt out in a glorious red fountain, scared him. For the first time in nearly a decade and a half as a Konoha shinobi, Hatake Kakashi was truly scared.

 

And for the first time in his life (the day was full of firsts wasn't it?), he took the coward's path. He ran away.

 

At the old age of barely 19 years, after nearly 6 years in the ANBU and gaining a place in the bingo books of virtually every other shinobi village, Kakashi retired.

 

He sheathed his katana and shoved it under the bed, broke his mask, burned his blood-soaked armor and all four sets of the skin-tight uniform. The wolf was no more.