Hello everyone... First, I want to say that this fanfic is dedicated to a friend of mine... Who has long since entered an eternal sleep...

Secondly, I just wanted to say that I know that it's been a while since I posted a real chapter.(that crack one doesn't count). So to make it up to ya(since my mainstream is still under reconstruction), I'm making this side project(along with some others).

Summary: Everyone's heard of the legendary blind samurai. But what about the blind ninja? This is his story... Semi-dark powerful Naruto. Pairings undecided.

I don't know if I'll do any bashing this time around. We'll just see how it goes.

Disclaimer: I do not own anything made by Masashi Kashimoto!

First Sense: Sight

The sense of seeing. Located in your eyes. It takes up 85% of our concentration at any given time unless if our eyes are closed. This sense has the shortest individual memory span. Only a split second. Our sense of sight is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it allows us to see the world around us and let us communicate with everything non-verbally. It is a curse because humans rely on this sense of sight more then any other, despite the fact that the brain fools itself with what it sees. Remember this, one may be able to see something, but they might not be able to perceive it, to understand it.

Naruto stared the man in front of him down with a large scowl across his face. The chunin was smirking back at him, silently laughing up a storm in his mind.

The seven year old Naruto wearing bright orange clothes and a pair of sunglasses turned away from the man and slowly walked down the street away from the Hokage Tower. His sun-kissed spiky blond hair bounced with each slow step. His bare feet, rough from hot and bumpy streets, seemed to get heavier with each stride.

It wasn't fair!

Flashback

Cornered. Had to escape. They are coming!

The orphan quickly spun on his foot to look at a dark mass of people slowly approaching the whisker marked kid.

The last thing he ever saw was a broken beer bottle heading for his head.

…

"...sible. There's been simply too much damage to repair them."

Naruto slowly regained consciousness, and opened his eyes. Or tried to. He felt bandages on his face. He tried to move his body, but it wouldn't respond.

Finally relenting, the boy just, instead listened in on the conversation.

"Are you sure there's nothing that can be done," a deep and old cracked voice asked. The Hokage.

There was silence for the answer. After a few moments, the door to his room opened and the man walked in. His footsteps hard to hear over the louder ones of the apparent doctor.

"When will he wake up?"

The doctor sighed, "It's hard to say. There was a large amount of mental trauma. He had a lot of internal bleeding in various places across his body as well as broken bones and large external cuts as well. There is of course the large jagged cuts across his face leading to..." The doctor was silent for a moment more. "Of course he was healing even before Weasel entered the door, so the initial damage might've been even worse. He's taken a lot of damage. That level of damage is not something that grown men can come back sane from, much less a kid."

Naruto felt a hand brush his hair back.

"Is there a chance that his regenerative abilities might help his eyes?"

His eyes?

"No, Hokage-sama. Maybe if the seal was opened a bit more at the time of the occurrence, but by now the wounds have closed and the chakra coils around them have been too damaged. Even if there was more," the doctor paused. "In my professional opinion, sir, even Tsunade might not be able to help his sight. Not after the searing, at least."

A seal? A wound? His chakra coils? His sight? What's going on?

He felt the hand brush his hair back. The Hokahe's aged old hand was soothing on the boy's head. He spoke in a soft cracked voice, as if he strained it earlier, "I'm sorry, Naruto. I failed you."

Failed?

With that the weight of his hand left the boy's head and the two sets of footsteps walked out the door only to close.

Naruto tried to think what was going on. He tried to move his body again, but when his right hand twitched he felt a large amount of pain and passed out.

–

Naruto, currently sitting in his bed, was honestly bored out of his mind. Stuck in this white hospital room. Unbearable silence being the only dominate presence that Naruto could feel. He knew the room was white, just that the bandages on his face kept him from opening his eyes.

It had been a week since the incident, and Naruto was ready to take off his bandages and get out of this dull stuffy room.

The door opened and Naruto turned his head to it. The doctor came into the room followed by the softer footstep he came to recognize as the Hokage's.

"Naruto," the old man started, "How have you been?"

"Great, old man! I can't wait to get out of this stuffy room!"

Usually, the old man would chuckle and hurry the boy along with a smile.

This time though, his answer was only a somber silence.

"Naruto, there's something you need to know," the Hokage said slowly and softly.

Naruto stayed quiet for once, sensing this was something important, if the sad undertone the boy heard was any indicator.

The old man took a step forward, and touched this boy's face with his hand. A finger traced across the boy's eyes that were hidden under his bandages.

"During the attack," he hesitated. The old man never hesitated! Except for when the boy would ask why people would attack him. Connecting the dots, Naruto waited for his long time answer. "During the attack, someone cut across your face with a broken bottle which cut your eyes. Then he... burned the insides of your eyes away."

"So what, old man? They'll heal like everything else," the kid just wanted to get out of this damned hospital. He didn't get the answer as to why.

"No, Naruto. The burning was permanent. You... I'm sorry, but," The Hokage lifted the bandages from the boy's face.

Naruto opened his eyes, but all he saw was darkness.

"You're blind, Naruto," the old man finished with a sad tone.

Naruto slowly lifted his hands up to his face

End flashback

Naruto felt his eyes under his sunglasses. They were there, but according to the fire shadow, he did not have the blues of his eyes anymore. It was just white with a black spot where the irises used to be. That was almost a year ago.

At first, Naruto had to have an escort in the form of one Weasel, the only ANBU he could trust. The boy would stumble across the streets as his blue sandals would catch on things he couldn't see. He would sometimes fall. Sometimes the ANBU would catch him, other times he fell flat on his face.

After some trial and error, the boy learned that if he walked barefoot he could feel his way around the town better due to the cracks and bricks in the street had a particular pattern to them, so he would know when to turn and where to dodge. Now, he can walk clear from one side of the village to the other without so much as a single stumble.

However, despite his adaptability to his situation, he was barred from entering the ninja academy. They always muttered something about "Blind demons" not allowed into their school.

The situation only got worse as people started to attack the "blind demon" thinking he was weak and helpless. Because of this, Naruto's ability to hear had heightened. If he failed to hear an ambush before it came...

Naruto shivered. He had been in the hospital ten more times in this last year. After the eleventh attempt, which he barely escaped, Weasel approached the boy and told him how to hear the world around him and notice things about it.

As a ninja who has fought in many battles, the Weasel said, you have to learn how to use ALL of your senses.

When Naruto asked what the man meant...

"Humans have 12 senses, Naruto-san."

When he asked what the 12 were, all he got was a chuckle.

Naruto pondered what those 12 were.

So far, all he had were sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. That was 5.

He would've headed down to the library to read up on that, but two things bared his path.

One, he couldn't read because he was blind.

And two, the librarian was a Haruno.

So instead, he asked people he knew, like the two ramen chefs at that one friendly ramen stand. They gave the same answer he had from the beginning.

Naruto entered his apartment, only to stiffen when he heard a slight sound of someone breathing.

The kid quickly pulled out a kunai and asked, "Who's there?"

"It's me, Naruto."

"Weasel," Naruto acknowledged and put his kunai away.

"You sensed me, that was good Naruto-kun," Weasel said with some pride.

"Well, I had a good teacher, Weasel-sensei," Naruto said while sitting down on the couch.

There was silence for a moment, but it was a comfortable one to the blind boy.

"Naruto."

"Yes?" The blond lifted his head up and looked in the general direction he heard the voice come from.

"Remember when I told you about how humans have 12 senses," the man asked.

Naruto nodded.

"Well, I have to leave in two months from now, and during this time I wished to teach you the significance of those twelve senses to you."

Naruto smiled for the first time in a month though he wondered what his sensei meant.

–

Three months later.

Ever since the Uchiha massacre, things got worse for the blind blond. It got to a point that the blond had to wear brown and grey clothes to blend in with the environment. Without his escort turned traitor, the blond was on his own. He couldn't even get close to the Hokage Tower anymore.

They would chase him.

He was blamed for the deaths of the Uchiha clan. Word had gotten around that the kid's escort was one Uchiha Itachi. According to the rumors, he was the entire reason that the man had gone insane and exterminated his entire clan.

Well, almost exterminated, because the man had left his younger brother behind. The rumors around that said that the holy boy, one Uchiha Sasuke, had, at the last moment, made his brother see the light and the ex-ANBU run away with tears in his eyes.

Of course, the Hokage denied all of these accusations, but no one listened.

You'd think the old man would've learned by now... right?

However, today was the worst. Today was his birthday. He had tried to run, tried to use everything that Weasel had taught him, but in the end, a ninja, from how the man felt to the kid, had caught him.

The boy was being dragged on a rope by a man while many around his poke and prodded the boy with pointy objects. The rope around the boy's neck. He struggled to with his hands to keep it from choking him.

[Start song - "Ray Charles - Hit the Road Jack (2010 Digitally Remastered Studio version)" ]

The mob walked up to the gate. The boy heard the gate doors being opened.

The boy felt that he was picked up by two men and then tossed a large distance. The boy wailed in the air, but he knew that he was going to hit his face into the ground.

His small body bounced a few times across the uneven ground.

"And don't come back, you damned demon!"

"Yeah, we don't want your kind around no more!"

Why? Why did they treat him like this?

He tried to stand, only to get pain in response. It was no good. He couldn't use what his teacher taught him. He couldn't escape from a drunk mob. And now, he couldn't even move his badly damaged body.

His instincts kicked in, and the boy slowly dragged himself away from his once home with his only working arm.

He thought of all the times that the villagers sneered at him, and laughed when he was hurt. Of all the times that Weasel had come into his apartment smelling of blood and sounded wary of the world around him.

His mind knew that he had to find someplace to crawl into and lick his wounds.

He thought of the attacks on his person. The injuries sustained. The loss of his sight.

He squirmed his abused body into a tree.

The boy vowed to pay the village back ten fold.

–

The Hokage sighed. He took a quick look at a picture of his favorite blond kid.

With the loss of his sight, the blond had lost a lot of his apparently limitless exuberant energy, and instead channeled that to learn about his now limited world.

The kid just had things so hard.

Seeing as it was the kid's birthday, he thought to go visit the kid before he turned in for the night.

With that thought in mind, the old man stood up and shunshined his way to the apartment of his unruly grandson. He opened the door with a smile only to loose it as he took in the ransacked settings of the once clean apartment. He paled, and quickly called for his ANBU. Three men fell from their hiding places.

"Where were you! The boy should be in this apartment, safe. And here I find it ransacked. Explain."

The dog mask spoke up, "We don't know, Hokage-sama." There was a hint of something that made the old man uneasy. "One moment he was here, the next..." Dog gestured to the room.

"We'll talk, later, Dog," with that the old man flared his chakra. Several more ANBU entered the room. "Put the village on high alert. Naruto's missing, and we need to find him. Bring him straight to me unharmed!"

Many of them nodded, some were hesitant.

It would be many years until Naruto was seen again...

[ End song ]

–

End First Sense: Sightless...