1Hallowe'en
Naruto
Kishimoto owns it all
Rated K for most ages, I guess.
Characters: Naruto, implied Minato
On All Hallow's Eve, there are gusts of winds in the dark, like fingers.
Family/Angst/Supernatural
A/N: This would have been perfect to post in October but I just finally found it. Oh well.
The sky was dark as the moon hid its face behind a veil of fluffy clouds that floated around the earth like a birds nest, stacking the occasional drop of liquid until it got full long enough to drop rain upon the world as birds drop for their first flights.
The streets of Konoha had emptied, for the most part. The parties of Halloween, as many had come to call it, had ended hours before and parents were tucking their babes into bed to await nightmares. Single men and women had mostly rounded their way to their homes to sleep of the alcohol.
A young boy with golden hair sat on the edge of the carved mountain that watched over the people of the village. A streak of wind wisped by him, fluffing his golden strands like pillows that glowed like freshly washed ore. His eyes were blue and almost seemed electric on his face, shadowed as it was. He could not be more than five years old and in fact had just turned the edge of that birthday earlier in the month. October was the month of cooling, when the warmth of spring finally evened out in the warnings of fall. Winter was more than a month off but the tides of the cool air were coming through.
Konoha was quieting down from its jubilant excitement earlier and now they too were cooling down as if to ready their beds for a long sleep. The large entourage of people paying their respects for the dead because their lives were not over and now it was time to give a few hours at the turning of the month for those that had passed on. If they did not, the superstitious believed, then those that were unpeaceful in their death would come back to haunt them, to hurt them, to scream that the living had forgotten that death can take them any time.
For one so young, Uzumaki Naruto did not know what to think about that. Sarutobi-Oji-San had spoken to him over the ideas of life and death and the veil that lifted a little on Halloween. He had said that a long, long time ago before anyone could remember, the day had been called All Hallow's Day. All Hallow's Evening was coming though.
Slowly, candles in windows all over the village began to light up. Naruto could not see it but he knew that the Sandaime Hokage too had lit a candle in his home, and an ANBU had lit a much larger candle standing in the circle of cement in front of the village Doors that led to the outside world. Above the Hokage's tower, a large spark erupted and set the tip of the middle of the village aflame as if it too was a candle. The flame was large and unlike the rest that held their spots in windows and above home ports, it did not flicker in the wind. It was too strong.
Sarutobi-Oji-San had told him once that it was because the Hokage had the Will of Fire, whatever that was, and "that a Hokage cannot just bow to the whims of the dead. A Hokage must live a full life and serve the village." The man with the fun hat had been firm when he said this because "Every day I send ninja out of the village and watch merchants and caravans go out of those Doors and I know that sometimes they will not come back." The old man had looked sad then, but Konoha, the Village Hidden in the Leaves was a ninja village and the idea of Death was an every-day notion.
Or at least it was to Naruto. He had almost died many times in this safe place and he had seen bodies in alley ways and blood in the hands of people that were monsters. He is young though, and does not see this normal thing for him as a strange thing to other people. In a way, being an orphan differentiates him from so many people because he is not taught about things he should know. But who is there to teach him, to show him simple things? No one. The Hokage shows him some, tells him stories, occasionally takes him out for ramen-the-beloved-of-orange but he is not there all the time and does not serve as a parent to the orphan golden-haired boy with electric blue eyes.
Hallowe'en. He shivers in tattered clothing that is not fit to be worn on slaves as the air gets a might colder.
He wonders, softly but detachedly, if those feelings of cold that prickles his skin and sends a troop of invisible ants up his spine are ghosts that sweep into the village. Naruto's eyes are closed as he wraps his arm around himself in an effort to get warm, but it does not much help. He is unusually bendable to temperature though and the cold does not bother him. He will not realize for some time that it should, that he should feel the cold and the heat and that he should need a jacket as night falls like a cloud of poisonous gas amongst the earth, dousing anymore sunlight from reaching the world than the moon can reflect in all of its glory.
If he opened his eyes, his head would fall just a little more forward and he would realize how far the ground below him was from how high he was sitting on the carved mountain, but he doesn't. If he did though he would think nothing of it but 'how did it get so dark?' before shrugging. He is an orphan in a ninja village and death has never been much of a bad thing to him.
Sometimes, when the pain gets too much and the looks, the cold stares, the hot anger that sparked out from eyes towards him overwhelms his young mind and he asks aloud, "Wouldn't it just be better if I just left them alone?" because though he knows they hate him he does not know why. His mind though does not like to think about the bad things and instead looks up at the sky, at the birds who fly, at the faces that do not see him.
Inside he is an honestly warm person. Personality-wise, he would do just about anything to cheer up another person or bring a smile to another's face. He will likely never know that it is something he got from his mother.
The air was getting chilly and even with his strange knack for not feeling temperature for the most part when it was to his harm, the air around him felt electrified. He kept his eyes shut as he hugged himself, and titled his head back, enjoying it.
"I wish I could fly," her murmured.
Any parent in the homes below would jump from their homes and hurry towards him if they knew there was a child just an inch away from falling to his death. Most would just shrug it away or even cheer if they knew who he was. But Naruto was not bitter, not really. Most he was indifferent that most did not like him until it came to the time that he needed a hand as any child did, to some goal like tying one's shoes.
At the moment, Naruto's bare feet dangled from the cool stone like pillow tassels. They were inconsequential because Naruto was leaning back farther than he meant to. The wind had picked up and swirled around him, but the boy had become cold so suddenly he barely felt the chill.
Arms wrapped around his midsection tighter and if Naruto had done anything except for pulling inward and trying to enjoy the feel of almost flying, then he might have noticed how it felt like more than his own arms, how the wind was whirling as fast as a tornado, how the chill around him almost felt solid.
But his eyes were closed.
"If you see a spirit though, be sure to either look away," Ji-Ji had cautioned. Then he had smiled through the look of a grave old man, "Or look straight into the face because you never know if it might be an enemy ninja." Naruto had smiled too then, hopping up as he left for the day.
He was not a ninja though, even if he did live in a Ninja Village. So he kept his eyes closed and leant into the strange feeling of the wind breaking against him. His hair shot around his head like a halo, though it was cut short enough that his bangs only reached his ears in pieces and nothing was quite straight. It had been over a month since the last time the usual guy had come by the orphanage for the free trims for all the kids.
The air went on for some time, wrapping him in a cocoon of soft cotton and wool that was also hard as the stone beneath him. Sometime in the natural beating of the element, his arms had loosened and fallen to the stone. His knuckles made soundless little pops against the cold ground. Naruto did not notice though because as far as he knew, arms were still around him. He must have gotten some warmth, he concluded, because his arms had gotten warmed up against his skin as they held him.
In his half-asleep state, the golden-haired young boy can only believe that he was lying down against the stone because he felt the wind on his hands and legs but not his back. He did not feel the way he was laying in midair as if the wind itself had coalesced into a real figure. He could not have answered why there were strands running through his hair, but in his sleep it did not matter overly much. Nearly transparent, a golden-haired man and a shorter figure with long red-haired were at his back.
Eventually, after he had pulled his legs back up to turn sideways in his sleep, the barely conscious boy figured that the wind against him had stopped, but he could hear it moving somewhere close by.
What he could not see, and failed to notice, was the way one of the large figures had reached for his legs and pulled them up out of the air towards them. Inside a maelstrom of vibrating air, the transparent forms were barely visible but then neither was the boy so visible inside the currents that seemed to pick up fragments of solidity between the worlds of the living and the dead.
From his dreams, Naruto had no idea what was going on with his form, but even where his conscious lay enveloped in the make-believe, he caught unusually strong scents of cinnamon and mint, or ramen and some other strong form of tea. The world around his dreams was made of flashing orange changed only by other colors that flew through it occasionally and then ran away in paint changed.
Naruto awoke with the sounds of birds chirping around him and not picking at anything in particular. He laid still for a moment and just watched the creatures that moved as if he was not there. One particular sparrow jumped atop him and poked at a hanging thread before looking elsewhere for entertainment. A pale dove with two red stripes on its cheeks similar to Naruto's three whiskers upon each cheek and the boy almost felt a comradeship with it.
Eventually, though he had to move from his place and when he did most of the birds flew away. He hardly noticed though. There were sudden, unexplainable scents around him like sweat and life and... something he could not place. His eyes closed again and he breathed deep as if taking them in.
Blue eyes flashed open slowly this time and the red-cheeked dove was the only bird in sight, still sitting at the corner. When he began to stand it almost looked at him before facing the village and falling off, coming back up into the sky when a breeze caught under its wings and lifted it up like a pile of fallen leaves of green and yellow and brown in-between.
Naruto sat up and found himself far removed from where he had gone to sleep. He moved back to the edge and swung his legs over the edge to get a good look at Konoha's morning movements as the sun began to peak over the edge somewhere far behind him.
If someone had seen him, boney legs and arms, hollow cheeks and threadbare clothing, legs hanging from the stone as if they had no muscle to keep them still... the superstitious would call him a walking skeleton.
He stood with his clothes that had apparently been ripped to mere tatters in the hurricane wind and decided to hurry back to the orphanage for a new pair of clothes before the Orphanage Matron awoke for the day. His neck cracked and he raised his arms high up with a yawn. He cracked his back with a grunt but frowned as he rubbed at his neck. It had an uncomfortable creak in it as if he had slept in a strange way. It must have been strange because he always moved around in his sleep and he was used to the hard places up on the monument.
With a shrug, he descended through a little-known path at the back. He would have to cut through the woods and it would take a good hour before he made it to where he was supposed to have slept.
Naruto decided that Halloween was his favorite holiday, for now on, and that he could not wait for the next one hundreds of days away. Besides, every time he said the general term for the night, it made him smile so wide. "Halloweeeeeeeeeen." He smiled as he said it into the air filled with morning dew.
Others, seeing is golden hair and electric blue eyes, the guarded look mixed with the ambition to help... they would see him and think that Yondaime had come back from the dead inside this new vessel. They would think that their tributes to the dead had not gone counted and the dead did not rest. And in a way, they were all right.
Uzumaki Naruto.
Fin.
What did you think? I had this written a few months ago but lost it. Also, I think I was busy… yeah I think a I went with my best friend to a movie or something. We wore our costumes in. It was fun. I think we saw "Red?"
And if you have not noticed, I do a lot of Angst. I would not say I am emo but there are much more Angst fics out there than humor that aren't… erm… things I do not wish to read.