Just a quick A/N to give you all a little warning:

This story does have a sort of slow burn at the beginning. The plot is divergent from canon starting pretty early, so the Rookie Nine team formation isn't until chapter 11. There's a lot that happens between the start of the story and then that is important to explain why some characters are slightly or overtly OOC, so please be patient with me.

Naru was born a girl and everyone is aware of it. Right now, I don't have any plans in regards to pairings but if someone really wants to see something, let me know in a review and I'll consider it. If I do add a pairing, it won't be for a long while though. The story starts when Naru is almost eight, so she's not exactly looking for romantic love.

That should be it! I hope you like it!

As she grew closer and closer, the sound of metal striking metal echoed through the trees, coming at her with louder and more violent strikes. Voices drifted towards her and, ever so carefully, she inched her way nearer to the fight.

Judging from their headbands, there was a Suna team—each of the three probably fourteen or fifteen—and a single Iwa genin around thirteen years old battling it out. Even with the odds stacked against the lonely genin, he was giving the Suna team a run for their money. So far, one of the Suna genin was already mostly out of commission thanks to a large gash running down his side. His shirt was slashed open, showing the grisly wound made all the uglier by the blood steadily escaping him. The boy was somehow still conscious but too dazed from blood loss to help his teammates. His teammates, a boy and a girl, were trying their best to fend off the Iwa boy while defending their comrade, but the enemy persisted.

Naru watched with a curious horror as the Iwa genin was slashed across the stomach with the unhurt Suna boy's puppet. The Iwa boy looked down, shocked, before falling apart, melting into a column of mud.

He reappeared from the shadows of a tree and, pulling out a wide wakizashi from a sheath on his back, cleanly sliced the Suna boy across the stomach, a brutal vengeance for the damage done to his earth clone. Red bloomed across the Suna boy's dark blue shirt, dying the cloth an unhealthy black color. The girl yelled in anger and fear, launching a flurry of kunai and shuriken at her opponent as her teammate fell to the ground, coughing and gasping for breath.

Curious horror fell away to sick fascination as the Iwa genin, a savage grin on his face, swiftly defeated the girl. Then, calmly and methodically, he went to the genin and stabbed each through the heart with his wakizashi. He rummaged through the pockets of each before pulling a scroll from the girl's pouch. Content with his prize, the genin left behind the bloody mess and disappeared into the woods.

Naru waited ten minutes before daring to go down to the remains of the Suna team, biting her lip to avoid either crying or throwing up. She'd seen the aftermath of these small battles before but, to see the life leave the eyes of someone just a few years older than her… It was something very different.

When Naru finally built up the courage to go to the dead genin, she carefully arranged their bodies so that they were lying in a row, closing their eyes with a lump in her throat. She laid the puppet at the feet of its master but left their weapons otherwise untouched. She would give them that dignity in death.

Their faces were still frozen in terror and pain.

Naru forced her mind away from that day, returning most of her attention to the chart she was busily drawing in her notebook. When she was finished, she turned in her seat to face Inuzuka Kiba, one of the boys in her Academy class and one of the few she could stand. Kiba was fun, loud, and confident. He was the blueprint for her idiot mask, though Naru took it much further. Shaking the last of the memories away, she smiled broadly.

"See, it's cool! Each set means one letter. So, depending on the sequence, anyone could send a message through—"

"Uzumaki!" At the voice, Naru turned back to the teacher, a falsely cheery look on her face.

"Hai, Amaya-sensei?"

"What are you doing?" the female chuunin all but growled. Naru grinned brightly.

"I was showing Kiba Morse code." At the student's words, the chuunin scoffed derisively.

"Well, stop it. Morse code is a heavily flawed system consisting of pointless and outdated finger-drumming with no practical use for a shinobi. More so, it is not part of this curriculum. Perhaps if you focused more on the subjects I teach in this class instead of Morse code, of all things, then you would be doing better."

"But Morse code is relevant to shinobi life! During the Third War-"

"The Third Great Shinobi War has been over for over ten years. Coding and encryption systems have been developed since then to be more efficient and harder to break, nullifying any use to Morse code, Uzumaki. At this day and age, it is a useless skill that is not required for any level of shinobi."

"Do you know Morse code, sensei?" the nine year old asked back innocently. Amaya glowered at the young student.

"I just said that Morse code isn't required for any level of shinobi."

"Then would you like me to teach it to you? Maybe then you'd see how useful it is."

"That's enough from you," the chuunin growled, pointing at the door. "I will not have you wasting the time of students willing to learn the set curriculum. You may return when you are prepared to learn."

Taking the opportunity and trying her hardest to look crestfallen, Naru gathered her things, subtly placing the Morse code cheat-sheet in front of Kiba as she left, ignoring the snickers arising from the majority of the class.

As soon as Naru crossed the threshold and was out of sight, she took a shuddering breath. She was risking exposure by staying in class for as long as she did, but she needed to be able to explain why she managed to stay in the Academy program. If she was never in class, people might get suspicious and ask why she doesn't fail out. Her mask couldn't afford that.

Naru rushed home, customarily putting on a henge of a nondescript chuunin so she could easily run across the rooftops without being stopped or questioned. Once she was close enough to her dingy building, she silently dropped into an alley, intending to walk the rest of the way so she could be seen in public for appearances' sake.

As soon as she was safely within her apartment, she put her hands together in a single sign, muttering kai under her breath. At once, the genjutsu layered around her body fell apart and her appearance began to shift. Her cropped sun-kissed blond hair grew longer, just past her shoulder blades, and straightened out slightly, losing some of its spikiness. Her cerulean blue eyes grew just a touch narrower and a shade lighter, to match a cloudless summer sky. The girl's shoulders became slimmer, her arms and legs growing longer and more graceful. Her face lost some of its roundness as some of her baby fat melted away. The genjutsu now completely gone, Naru frowned as she rubbed her shoulders.

She was strangely lucky that she was normally kicked out of class—it meant she could get away and recover from the genjutsu's effects faster—but it was still discomforting to wear it for any length of time. She had once tried to wear it for an entire day but by sundown her skin was crawling and her stomach refused to accept food. That wasn't good for her; she needed to eat at every opportunity she could. She simply burned off the calories too quickly for her to eat like a normal kid and stay healthy.

Unfortunately, she had to wear it whenever she was in sight of the public. It was easier to pass off being weak if she didn't look physically strong. By making herself appear to be an easier target, she actually reduced some of the attacks on her, even if she didn't understand the civilian mobs' logic behind it.

At age nine, Naru had seen more than her fair share of lynch mobs. While they normally didn't get close enough to physically hurt her, the crowd's intentions of doing her in were plain enough. Shaking away the thoughts, Naru glanced around her flat.

Through some careful manipulation of the war orphan fund, the Sandaime had arranged for the three story building—which had been held in stasis after the original owner had died without any inheritors, leaving the property to be reclaimed by Konoha—to be Naru's residence after she was expelled from the orphanage. With no other residents in the building, it was hers to do as she pleased and the girl was happy to do some renovating. It was a trial and error sort of affair since she couldn't exactly hire a contractor but, by the end of her renovations, the building served her purposes nicely. Originally, each floor was its own apartment complete with two bedrooms, a kitchen, living space, and bathroom on each level. By reading a lot of do-it-yourself books, Naru converted the first floor to be her true living space. She kept the privacy and convenience of two bedrooms, but the rest of the walls had to go so she could easily see if anything was amiss in her space. This open floor plan made it more dangerous for her, given that she had fewer potential hiding places if anyone managed to get in, but one of her few nice neighbors—a half-blind old man that had been a veteran of the Second Shinobi War—knew a few things about seals and had showed her how to set up basic protections without killing herself.

The second floor had been totally gutted and, with a few personal additions, turned into a sort of gym. Since she couldn't afford the real things just yet, Naru had made improvised weights, such as milk jugs filled with sand, which now dotted the room. A few blunt sets of shuriken and kunai from the Hokage were neatly stored on a shelf on one side of the room. Stones collected over time outlined a rough track around the large room. A log—which had been rather awkward to bring to the building—was leaning on one wall. It was battered and cracked—showing both her successful and failed attempts at Kawarimi.

The third floor was dedicated to improving her mind. While not able to afford many books due to her status as the village pariah, Naru had relieved the Academy of a few unused books, from which she had learned the Kawarimi and the Henge. Once she'd mastered the Henge, she could buy more and more books at the normal price, and she began filling roughly made bookshelves with books on all sorts of subjects. Her real treasure, though, was the many clan texts she'd collected over the years. Once clan scrolls were deemed no longer usable, most of the clans merely copied the information onto a new scroll and threw out the original with the regular garbage. Only a few, such as the Uchiha, were appropriately paranoid enough to actually burn the scrolls once they'd outlived their usefulness. By periodically rifling through the trash, Naru had gotten scrolls or books unknowingly donated to her collection from the majority of Konoha's clans and well known shinobi families. She swore upon finding the first text that she wouldn't use the information she learned against her allies and, at the same time, there was a lot in the texts that she couldn't use without a bloodline. Even so, knowledge was power. From weapon comparisons from the newly established Arai family to shogi strategies from the Nara clan, Naru had a wealth of fun facts drifting through her mind.

It was the Kurama clan that accidentally contributed a basic genjutsu scroll to Naru's repertoire. It was from that scroll that she had learned the genjutsu that allows her to pass off as weak to the villagers.

Genjutsu was extremely difficult for Naru. It had taken mind numbing hours of chakra control exercises—found in a scroll scavenged from the Hyuuga—for her to even be capable of that one technique. She'd never regret those long training sessions though. She honed her chakra control enough to master the Henge and the Kawarimi, even if the Bunshin was out of her grasp. She simply could not manipulate a small enough portion of her chakra to make fewer than twenty passable clones.

Naru knew she'd have to get even better. While she was ahead of her fellow nine year olds by miles, there was a chance that the civilian council would still try to screw her over. While she didn't know exactly what she'd done to deserve their ire, Naru knew that the civilian council was out to get her and she knew that, to even be a genin, she'd have to be so strong that she couldn't possibly fail. But no one could know. Training her body with the older Academy students had gotten her kicked out of the orphanage; Naru didn't want to know what would happen to her if the civilians realized she was teaching herself ninjutsu. So she trained in secret, in the privacy of her home. She learned from her scrolls and books and watched as jounin senseis taught their teams.

One of Naru's first memories took place when she was just three or four—before she'd been kicked out of the orphanage. Naru remembered going with the other young children to see the village gates. While she was there, a chuunin squad was returning from a difficult B-ranked mission. One of the ninja, a man, had been injured and was forced to rely heavily on his teammate to even walk. Even so, without any visible cue, a small crowd melted from the hustle and bustle of Konoha and surrounded the four chuunin. The shinobi were congratulated, questioned, and acknowledged, even after what was obviously a partial failure. Naru aspired to one day be one of them, a kunoichi, and Naru was never one to bet against.