Those who named the Land of Fire, must not have done so during the months of winter. Or maybe they did, and just found humor in the irony behind naming a land covered in a foot of snow with winds cold enough to freeze off exposed skin and dry enough to shred the lungs, the land of fire.
That was a cheerful thought, winter in general was a cheerful time for the majority of Konoha citizens.
People would huddle together with their families in their warm homes and indulge in warm and filling winter delicacies, civilian schools would close, festivals would be celebrated and businesses would grow. People would enjoy the snow and the chill for a few hours everyday and then go back to their homes, and would do so for the two months when winter peaked.
It wasn't a surprise then that Winter was the favorite season of many in Konoha.
For 5 year old Aiki, it was hell. She hated winter with a passion. Which was saying something, considering how much hate she had in her little heart already.
She hated winter because shops closed early, people bunched up and food was scarce.
Sometimes she wondered if running away from the orphanage was the best decision she could make.
Her cell there was certainly better and warmer than her accommodation for the month (a shelter made up of sticks and cloth with a small fire in the middle of it, under a random tree in some random forest that divided two random Konoha districts), and the food she got there was better than the scraps she could scavenge off the dumpsters or swipe from some random shop or citizen.
People certainly didn't throw stones at her, or chase her away, or beat her up in her cell. She didn't know who the "Demon Boy" was or why his name came up as often as it does when people chase her away and call her the "Demon Girl", but nobody called her that in her cell.
She stopped this train of thought, grabbed some firewood and set it ablaze with a single mental command.
She then picked some snow, willed it to melt under the heat of her palms like she willed the sticks to burn before. She proceeded to dump some of the water into a metal pot she had picked up sometime back after some campers forgot to take it back with them.
Rest of the water she dumped on herself and willed it to wash the dirt, grime and dried blood off of her and then slide off her body and clothes.
She sat down on a bit of softened earth that was created from the hard ground around her by her command, and warmed herself with the fire she had started.
Finished with setting up her base for the night and making herself as comfortable as possible, she put her pot on the flames and let it boil.
As she tossed whatever scraps of food she could scavenge, steal or trap that day into the boiling water, her eyes were busy looking at the soft orange evening sky and the white and brown of the forest around her.
She might hate everyone in this world, but the world itself was something she loved very much. They would have never let her have her fill of the world.
Yes, it was the right choice to run away from the orphanage.
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Aiki's survival was something of a miracle.
Hiruzen Sarutobi, the Sandaime Hokage, had delivered her himself to the hospital's Intensive Care Unit on the night of the Kyuubi's rampage through Konoha. But that wouldn't really add anything to the chances of the girl's survival, not when a simple diagnostic jutsu showed that 90% of her body was covered in 3rd degree burns and her mouth and respiratory system was more soot than flesh.
It made the hopeful look in her eyes even more painful for her healers, who had already estimated her chances of survival through the night at around 5% and survival to the age of 3 as non existent.
The surgeon readied his chakra scalpel and started removing the burnt necrotic tissue inside her body, starting near the most vital damaged organs, and his assistant healers started healing the areas he cleared with their mystical palm jutsu.
It was the usual procedure for this type of unusual injury and to a layman it would look like the medics were doing all they could to save their patient.
But those who had worked in the hospital for a long time, knew the look in their eyes. They were waiting for the girl to die.
It was cruel, yes, but an experienced medic can take a look at the injury and know if the patient was beyond help. It was afterall, the first thing that is drilled into them.
Trying to heal someone beyond human help, was a waste of time, and time was not something they could afford to waste tonight.
Not when the demon fox had rampaged through their village and there weren't enough medics to go around.
It was a surprise to them then, when even after an hour of tissue removal and regeneration, the girl lived.
It was as if her body knew it wasn't her time to go yet, and refused to shut down till it was.
Tissue regeneration was not without strain on the body of the patient, if it was then no patient would die under the healing palms of a medic. But no matter how much of the dead tissue was removed from the girl, her body would always regenerate it back under the effects of the healing jutsu.
The only visible effects on her body were the slight imperfections in the newly generated tissue, which was common due to no medic having 100% control over their chakra (there were cases of newbies trying out the mystical palm jutsu and ending up giving tumors to their target.)
The look in her eyes, it wasn't just hope then.
It was a promise, a promise that she would survive, she would survive despite the pain this decision would cause her later.
The medics could respect that, and after 2 more hours of surgery, she was transferred to the nursery to rest and recuperate.
She had lived, but exposure to the Kyuubi's chakra had already done irreversible damage to her body.
The external burns on her body were more akin to acid burns, caused by the toxic fiery chakra of the Kyuubi, no amount of healing would cure the heavy scars on her body.
Her nose and ears had fused to her face when she was brought in and the doctors were only barely able to reshape them enough to let her use her senses to the fullest.
She would never grow any hair on her head and would find it difficult to regulate her body's temperature naturally for the first few years of her life.
As for her internal injuries, healing on such a large scale leads to the accumulation of small imperfections in the healed parts of the body.
Her respiratory system would function fine, but there would always be a very noticeable choking, rattling sound whenever she breathes and her voice would be little more than a hoarse, raspy whisper.
Her chakra coils too were not spared from damage.
Overloaded by the Kyuubi's chakra, they would never be able to output a large amount of chakra.
She could, later in life, choose to be a shinobi and expand her chakra reserves, but she would never be able to use anything but the most basic of ninjutsu.
She would never be able to push enough chakra out fast enough to even form the tiniest of fireballs. She could, theoretically, still excel in the fields of genjutsu or medical jutsu due to the delicate and precise nature of chakra output needed for them (if she ever got enough control over her chakra). But based on the current facts, the name Aiki would never be connected to a Ninjutsu mistress.
The future really wasn't setup to be kind to her.
This fact, was only proven right immediately, when the nurse (a young genin, interning in the hospital in an effort to make it out of the genin corp) who was tasked with taking her from the operation theater to the nursery, let out an audible sigh of relief after putting her in a bed and doing the bare minimum to not have a child's death on his record.
He couldn't have been happier to rid himself of her. It would be too soon for the nurse, if he heard that unsettling death rattle of a breathing ever again.
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The oldest and only happy memory Aiki could remember was of her fourth 'birthday' (no official records of her birthdays existed so the day she took her first steps, was marked as her official birthday, making her 1 year old in the eyes of Konoha's government.)
Due to her unique circumstances, Aiki was always always kept locked away in a tiny room, wrapped in blankets to help regulate her body temperature.
Her only window to the outside world was a male orphanage worker who would come to take care of her needs thrice a day.
The reason behind her being kept behind lock and key wasn't just to spare others the site of her or keeping her warm.
Officially, It was also to keep her from getting too distressed.
It turned out that little Aiki, was a chakra sensor.
The adults assumed it was the buzz of so many unique chakra signatures assailing her senses at once that distressed her so much.
Some, who had recently heard a certain rumor floating around (making it's way down all the way from the mouth of a certain Elder Shimura), had thought she was sensing the Kyuubi's chakra inside the Uzumaki kid, no doubt causing distressing memories to surface.
All of them, however, would only be partially right.
While Aiki certainly hated the crowd, what she loathed was contact.
Every time someone touched her or she touched someone, she could feel her thoughts twisting in a way that was out of her control, making her think all kinds of things about herself.
They were never any nice things.
Sometimes they would tell her that she was so ugly she should hide forever, that she looked so scary that she should never have been born, that even being near her was annoying for others simply because she drew breath, that she was a monster like the books her caretaker sometimes read to her (never out of any affection, simply because the village needed the kids to learn how to read and write).
The worst thoughts were the ones that started with making her feel pity for herself, then made her think that it would be better for her if she were to die.
By the time the contact ended (which really only was a few seconds at most), and she could control her thoughts again, the damage would already be done.
The thoughts of self loathing kept piling in her head.
A child's mind was not made to stew in hatred for self or to grow properly without receiving any affection.
She would cope with her dark thoughts by turning them outwards towards others rather than keeping them pointed inwards at herself.
She wanted to live, no matter how much others wanted her to stop. Who were they to decide, out of hate or pity, that she should die? She decided that she would live, if not for herself then to spite those who thought her existence an affront against nature.
When this thought took root in her little head, she gave up the hope of ever being loved by anyone, and started assuming the worst of everyone.
It was not a healthy way of coping with the issue, but it was all her kid brain, no matter how smart for her age, could come up with.
She had no strength to lash out physically, so she would lash out verbally.
Since the day she could speak, which was remarkably sooner than the average kids (a significant portion of the staff thought this genius was wasted on a wreck of a person like her), she would promise violence against those who so much as dared to approach her.
The threats would be made up of words, spoken out between rattle-like breaths and spoken in a raspy whisper.
This would often lead to her getting beaten up by some kid or the other, often older than her and in greater numbers. Each punch or kick that connected with her would not only hurt her body, but also her soul, with the whispers of hatred for her they carried.
The more she got hit, the more she lashed out...it was a vicious cycle.
When the pain got too much for her to bear, she would run away crying to the first dark and cramped corner she could find and try to make herself as small as she could (the caretakers would note down her excellent control over her chakra, when she subconsciously compressed it as tightly as she could when physically curling herself into a ball.)
To her, it was her way of showing the world that she was here and she was alive and she would do whatever she wanted with no care for the hate she got just for being the way she was, from anybody.
While liberating for her, it was also harmful, not to mention a pain to deal with.
So, the caretakers decided to keep her locked away from others in a little room, to keep her safe from others and to keep others safe from the knowledge that they shared this mortal plane with her.
That was the case for a little over an year, till she turned 4.
For the first few weeks of her solitary confinement, with no one to lash out at (no one that would react or take her threats seriously, that is), her thoughts festered and slowly turned self-destructive.
One day, at some random time, with no deep thoughts put behind the decision, she simply decided to stop breathing and held her breath.
This plan worked out well for some 30 odd seconds, but ultimately failed when her body pushed for her to start breathing again. So she came up the best solution she could, based on the resources she had available (the room was carefully stocked to have no choking hazards or small things that could block the nasal passages), to the problem of air rushing back up her nose.
She would wish as hard as she could, that it didn't climb back up her nose even after she tried to breathe.
She knew it wouldn't work, but it was all she could do, and so she did it. She held her breath and kept her mind focused on the thought that she did not want air.
And, it worked!
Till, the pain of asphyxiation broke her focus and the air rushed back up her burning lungs.
It took her a good 30 minutes to get over the pain in her head, but once she did, the realization hit her.
She had just manipulated air, with nothing but the power of her mind!
She tried to do it again and it worked, all her attempts to choke herself with the power of her mind were successful.
She decided to move onto a new experiment of trying to generate a breeze from her right palm to the left, but that ended up going nowhere.
She could feel air lazily circulating around her right palm but that's all it did. She couldn't quite figure out how to get it to move, visualizing the blowing wind would simply result in the air getting scattered, not the desired outcome.
She figured she would need to play around and slowly figure out how to get better at it. And play around she did, which after a few more months of her imprisonment led to the situation that again, expanded her 'power'.
On that day, her caretaker (jailer) caught her staring at him with eyes, that in his humble opinion, did not belong on a pest like her, their beauty wasted.
His hatred for her was not completely out of her horrifying looks, her unsettling breathing, or her voice that sounded like a torture victim. Majority of it came from her nasty attitude.
But the composition of his hatred mattered little. It did not matter if he didn't hate the girl like a monster that should die (like the kids in the orphanage) and only like a pest that should stay hidden away from society, he hated the girl all the same, and the girl knew it too.
That only made him hate her more.
When asked why she was staring at him so intently, Aiki's answer, "Wishing you don't breathe anymore", pissed him off enough to dump the glass full of water he had kept on her bedside to last her through the night, right on top of her head.
He knew Aiki lost body temperature fast and easily, and thought a night of shivering would be a fitting punishment for her.
Though calling it a punishment would be unfair because he inflicted this harm without the goal of teaching a lesson. It was just him putting an animal in it's place.
He didn't care if she died of hypothermia, he would be doing the world a favor.
Cold and wet, Aiki knew no amount of screaming or crying would get anyone to notice her worsening situation.
Actually, they would notice, but no one would come to help her through it.
With quivering lips and chattering teeth, she curled her shivering body into a tight ball and wished for the water to leave her. She knew simply wishing would not make her dry again, but it was all she could do.
And her wish worked, she willed the water away from her clothes and body and it slid off her and onto the floor below, where her feet touched the floor, leaving her dry. She was still cold, but it did not pass her notice that just like wind, she could control water with her mind as well.
The next logical step for her, was to wish for heat to warm her body that was already showing early signs of hypothermia.
She pictured a flame in her mind and focused on it and it worked near instantly. The pocket of heat that surrounded her body was both a comfort and a surprise. But it made clear to her that she could manipulate the five elements she was told about, with but a thought.
This she confirmed for earth when the ground beneath her feet grew softer or harder, to suit her whims, and for lightning when she collected more static electricity charges on her body than she ever did using a balloon anytime in the past.
She used these charges to touch and subsequently shock her 'caretaker' when he came back the next morning to collect the now empty glass.
To her delight, only her caretaker was hurt by the sudden discharge of the charges she accumulated.
That little stunt, followed by her satisfied smirk, caused him to manifest his hatred as apathy towards her.
He never reacted to her after that day, always ignoring her.
This caused Aiki no small amounts of distress and when her only window to the larger world chose to ignore her, she started becoming more and more grumpy.
Every night she would pray out loud for more power.
Power enough to hurt those that wronged her, power enough to hurt those that didn't, power enough to hurt those she hates, which was everyone.
She wished for more power, to be stronger, in the hopes that those who heard her wish the first time would hear it again and grant it too.
This constant stream of thoughts was the only reason she didn't lose the ability to coherently chain words together into sentences.
Turns out, there was someone out there who heard her prayers, but it wasn't a benevolent god who would grant wishes.
It was more akin to a businessman who would take something from her for every bit of strength it would give her. Her prayers for greater powers were met with a weird stirring in her gut. Like the universe itself was searching her heart and judging her very soul to see if it carried anything that could be taken to make way for her greater powers.
But her soul was dark, burnt by the fires of hatred others exposed her to, and her heart was empty, because no one loved her and she loved no one. So whatever was judging her to see if she could pay the price for the powers she wanted, always found her lacking.
Her wishes for power would always just end up with her feeling depressed and a horrible pain in her gut that would fade away in minutes.
This terrible experience ended up imprinting itself on her psyche and after a few times of suffering like that and having her mind and soul violated, she knew. She either had to get better with her current powers OR give up a part of her body and heart, that is her health and love for someone, if she wanted better powers.
Since there was no one she loved, she was locked out of the second option for the foreseeable future.
So, she did the only thing she could do in her situation and explored her powers everyday.
That and festering alone in her misery and making up little simulations in her mind of her standing alone against the world and snuffing out everyone that she hated.
Occasionally, on days when the world outside her walls sounded exceptionally happy and cheerful, she would be reminded of how much the world wanted to just leave her behind and move on.
On those days she would include herself on the list of the people she hated and wanted to end, the knowledge that love and happiness existed everywhere in the world but it would never find her, made her depressed.
She would bounce back from it quickly, her anger at the world cemented further and her resolve to outlast everyone strengthened.
After months of adjusting to this new way of life, it was only her heart and soul that raged at the world around her, not her body. Outwardly she was much calmer now, rarely speaking and never raising her voice.
She even stopped leaving her bed for the most part, in the months before her 4th birthday. The only noise that came from her room was the rattle of her breath. That, and the faint sound of breeze (no matter how much the staff checked her room for the source of it, they never found any) or spilled water.
The caretakers mistook her continued calm behavior as a sign of her being ready to be introduced to the rest of the world once more.
They gave her some new clothes and once she finished dressing herself, they opened the door to her room and led her outside for the first time in over an year. Once she was outside her little cell, they locked it up and left her standing in front of it to do whatever it was they had to.
Aiki's mind took an embarrassingly long amount of time to get used to the new situation she found herself in.
Having known nothing but her tiny cell for the majority of her conscious existence, the open world overloaded her brain.
There was too much to keep track of with her eyes, too many smells overloading her nose, too much noise, the air tasted funny, she felt cold and there was too much of that stuff (that she learned to associate with every living being) just buzzing around in groups large and small all around her.
She stood frozen in front of her cell door for a good half hour, her eyes out of focus and her mouth wide open. She thought if it would be better for her to be forever locked away just like she was before this morning.
Slowly, she made her way to the main gate of the orphanage's housing section.
Each step was slow and cautious, as if moving too far too quickly from her cell would kill her.
For any other kid who shared the orphanage with her it was the way from bedroom to playground, but for her it was her first steps into an unknown world, a world she knew hated her and wanted her dead at best or forgotten at worst. She wasn't sure she wanted to forego the safety of her cell.
That was, till she walked out into the open playground and looked at the vast blue sky and the wide world in front of her for the first time in her life (as far as she could remember.)
The sky looked down at her tiny form, but in it's gaze she found no malice, it's touch would not whisper dark thoughts into her mind. She believed if she were tall enough to touch it or strong enough to reach it, it would not have shied away from the contact.
The world too, she realized was too large to hate her. She could claim a tiny corner of it for herself and it wouldn't even notice.
It was a comforting thought for her and it took her a few minutes of standing in awe to realize the obvious.
She loved the world! She loved this world she was a part of. She loved it because it showed her that it didn't hate her. It was a low standard she set to earn her love...but then, none before had met even that.
She hated everyone in the world but the world itself was something she loved.
She would never go back to that wretched cell ever again. She would never be imprisoned and she would survive as long as she could.
With this, her next step was clear to her.
She ran towards the orphanage complex's main gate and exit as far as her little legs could carry her.
She didn't want to be confined to her cell again and the cell was the only thing she could describe the orphanage as, after her year long solitary confinement.
When the civilian gate guard tried to intercept her by grabbing her arm, she commanded fire, through her mind, to raise the temperature where the man held her and easily burned his palm.
His touch had made her experience a new wave of self loathing so hurting him had felt good to her.
Still, she didn't waste too much time enjoying the guard's screams of agony, instead she used that time to run far far away in a straight line into the forest that surrounded the orphanage.
She spent the next 2 days starving in the forest hiding the best she could and keeping her ears strained for anyone that might have come looking for her.
Nobody ever came looking for her.
She simply wasn't important or well liked enough for anyone to investigate her absence. She was simply one of many failures who couldn't survive in the orphanage and chose to either run away or died.
She was currently part of the first group of failures, but even at her young age she knew she was on her way to becoming a part of the second group if she didn't find anything to eat quickly.
The only good thing about the Orphanage, to her, was that it taught the kids to be independent.
So she started surviving the best she could.
She would steal food off of people when they were alone, or shops when they were unattended.
Whatever she couldn't find by stealing, she would find by rooting through garbage and dumpsters.
Her lifestyle didn't exactly endear her to the leaf's population and her appearance didn't help her either. If caught she was often beaten up, kids would often pelt her with stones and everybody would call her vile names.
The fact she would often hurt her attackers by burning them or electrocuting them on touch whenever she wasn't faced with superior numbers had led to her being dubbed the "Demon Girl" (she was as hated as the "Demon Boy" now.)
People went as far as trashing whatever camp she would create for herself within the districts of Konoha to limit her menace in their neighborhood, forcing her to shift her camp in the forests that divided the various districts of Konoha (even those were destroyed by people roughly monthly after they got fed up of her annoying their neighborhood.)
More often than not, only her powers kept her warm, comfortable, dry and alive.
People thought of her as a feral pest without self preservation instincts or the capacity to learn, but that was not the case.
Her time exposed to the open world had made her aware of her sixth sense. She had a way of sensing people before she could see or hear them.
She would use this sense to make sure she never messed with the people with "heavy" presence. Ninja, the people would call them.
She made sure never to cause trouble in places where a lot of these Ninjas gathered and always made her camps in forests that didn't border any "Ninja districts".
She would also spend a lot of time in the Leaf's Library.
The woman who sat at it's reception was a ninja, if Aiki's senses were right and wouldn't chase her away (she figured it was because she made sure to never mess with ninjas), like the rest of the people.
The place was air-conditioned and had clean drinking water, clean toilets and bathrooms and books. Lots of books.
On days when Aiki had nothing to do, she would take some books out and read. It started from simple picture books but over the year she had taught herself to read properly and also learned a little about foraging, fishing, trapping and survival (she still needed to steal, but more food was always welcome.)
She even read an encyclopedia once and learned a little bit about science. She understood enough about sound to know it was just the way human ears perceive movement in the air (the concept of pressure waves was a little too advanced at her age, even for a smart cookie like her) produced by the source of the sound, so she commanded the air escaping her throat every time she breathed to not vibrate.
This led to her silencing the horrible rattling that was a part of her breathing.
It would return every time she spoke, but she rarely spoke, if ever.
It was like this that she spent her days for over one and a half years. Surviving, Learning and slowly figuring out her powers. Which leads to the current day.
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Aiki checked if the mush in her pot was soft enough to eat and if the herbs she harvested were doing their job of masking the terrible taste of her would be meal. Seemingly satisfied, she touched the pot and cooled it rapidly with a mental command before the heat could hurt her hand too much and started eating.
It was a good night. Stars shone, trees looked pretty, and despite the cold she was warm and dry and with a belly full of warm food. This was more than she had on most nights. Only things on her mind were thoughts of the sleep that would follow her meal, and the book she would get back to reading in the library.
Then there was another thing that rapidly took up all her focus.
She could feel a presence approaching her camp, and it's chakra (she learned in the library that she had been sensing people's chakra all along) was denser than anything she had ever felt before.
That alone would be terrifying, but she could sense another 'layer' underneath the approaching chakra, barely perceptible, like the amount by which the saltiness of her food would rise if she dipped her finger in it for a second.
This hidden layer of chakra, however minuscule, terrified her. It was vile and angry and malicious and it screamed to her that it wanted her dead.
She tried to sense it again, but it was gone. Only the other chakra signature was left and it was still rapidly approaching her.
She chose to hide behind the tree she was living under. She waited and wished that whatever it was that was after her would go away, but she still kept an eye towards the approaching danger to see who it was.
It would do her good to know who to avoid in the future.
Soon the chakra signature came close enough that she would be able to see the person it belonged to if she focused. So focus she did, and soon her pursuer came into view.
Surprisingly, it wasn't a fully grown adult like she had anticipated but a kid. A kid that must have been around her age if she had to guess.
A kid with spiky blonde hair and 3 whisker marks on each side of his face.