Sunshine

z e r o .

She couldn't say that truthfully though, so she kept her mouth shut and helped her older brother try and catch the butterfly he was enamoured with.

—

At age five, she found out that she and her brother would be going to the Academy for Aspiring Shinobi and Kunoichi. Or AASK, as she had told Naruto when he struggled to say the entire sentence.

In other words, the orphanage forced them into the life of shinobi without asking what they wanted to do with their lives. No, not the orphanage, more like the Hokage himself. She wasn't shocked; the old bat came to visit them time and time again. Always telling stories of all the adventures he'd gone on as a young shinobi. He left a lot of the death and gored out. She noticed that right away. He made it seem like a fun sort of game. It was like he was holding up a banner; Come put your lives on the line because it's fun! We want you to be apart of our friendly ranks of war-scarred shinobi, you pack of scrubs!

She wondered if he felt bad for doing such a thing. If he ever looked at them and saw Minato and Kushina instead of Naruto and Kumiko. Sometimes, on the days he visited and left believing the lies that the orphanage matriarch spouted, she hoped that when he looked at them, he felt the crippling sadness of knowing that he had been too late to help their parents.

She hoped that every time Naruto smiled at him, that every time she showed him a new book she was reading, he saw Minato and Kushina.

Their treatment at the orphanage started to go downhill too, meals became scarce, and the different pranks and problems that arose were blamed on them. Though she wouldn't be surprised if Naruto had been the cause of a fair few of those pranks.

As the months went on, their treatment grew worse. They received blatant abuse and neglect from the caretakers because their skulls were apparently, 'too thick for words to get through to them.'

Demons don't understand anything but pain, in their opinions.

The children followed in suit, acting as the adults did. She refused to allow Naruto to go through such treatment, even if he was physically older than she was. She took the beatings in stride and refused to allow them to even touch her brother.

He was hers to protect and love, and she was his home.

Every night was spent with bruises covered with hot cloths and black eyes with ice packs. The only good thing to come from their treatment was that she had no hard feelings about beating up children who were mentally younger than she was. She had learnt Taekwondo in her past life. Even if her muscle memory was non-existent, she could still remember the lessons she had received.

She found peace in the way she broke the older kid's noses when they picked on her.

She tried to give Naruto some normalcy in his life. The poor boy was five and didn't deserve this treatment, so it was only fair she tried to make him feel like a normal kid. So she played with him and sung him songs she had learned in her past life. She danced with him and showed him how to climb a tree. She did her best to give him a childhood that wasn't filled with rocks and bruises and incredibly mean words. In all honesty, the time spent in the orphanage would have been something akin to spending time in hell.

And maybe that's what it was, her own personal hell disguised as another world that she had once been familiar with.

They were two months away from the start of the Academy when the orphanage kicked them out.

(Her fists are raised, and she spits her blood at the matriarch's shoes, "I'll show ya' what a monster is."

Nana-san, the matriarch, sneers down at her, and Kumiko pretends that the heat nestled between the spaces in her ribs is a sign of bravery instead of rage. Naruto is thrown out with their belongings in two bags, and she is leaning heavily on him. She has a black eye and a broken nose, but the matriarch has a bite mark on her arm that will be infected if not treated and a fractured wrist.