Naruto Shippuden: girl from whirlpools

beggings

Chapter One: Beginnings

Three children sat on the iron balustrade above the marketplace, looking down over the swathes of people flowing in through the village gates. One was a girl with tightly braided hair the colour of jet with eyes to match, wearing a pale indigo tunic. Her name was Ai. Beside her, swinging his legs was a boy twice her size in girth and height with a face that drew unflattering comparisons with a greedy hamster. He was Saburou. A little way off from either of them sat a boy shorter and skinnier than both his teammates with hair the colour of sunlight and eyes the colour of the clearest sky at the height of summer. His name was Namikaze Minato, and he was destined to become the fourth Hokage of Konoha and the greatest shinobi in living memory, though at that moment in time he was busy untangling a stick of dango that Ai had dropped in his hair.

"I don't get why they have to come here," Ai complained sullenly, glowering at the influx of weary, dusty travellers being rounded up into groups by chunin officials. "Why can't they stay in their own village?"

"Jiraiya-sensei says there was a 'coo day tar' in their country," Minato said. He was still picking at the sticky sauce in his hair. "If they go back to their village they'll be killed."

"So?" Ai snapped at him. "How's that our problem? Konoha won't be Konoha if half the people living here are foreigners. They'll overtake us and get free money and food and houses and stuff."

Minato thought hard and looked down at the refugees. "But we're at war," he said. "Isn't having more people on our side a good thing?"

"They're not going to fight for us," Ai said disgustedly. "They're going to leach off our generosity and eat our food and steal our women and they'll expect us to keep fighting to protect our own and now them too. Our resources are already stretched, we really don't need them coming and taking what we earned for ourselves."

It was the kind of thing Ai's father said a lot. Minato reckoned she was just reciting what she'd heard at home. He sighed and watched another group of 'Whirlpool' citizens slope through the gates. They didn't look much like trouble he decided. They didn't even look that much different from the average Konoha citizen, only a lot of them looked tired and sad and some were even crying. There were only a handful of Whirlpool shinobi down there in the crowd, and the rest seemed to be mostly civilian women and children. Minato wondered exactly why those women would 'steal away' the Konoha women.

"Where's all the shinobi?" he wondered aloud.

A large hand landed on top of his head.

"They stayed behind to fight." Minato looked up into the grizzly face of his teacher. He bore a sad sort of smile. "They gave their lives to help their families escape. It's nothing but a slaughter where they came from. We're lucky any of them escaped."

"Can't they start their own village somewhere else?" Ai asked petulantly, her arms folded.

Jiraiya gave her a slightly bemused look. "Easier said than done. Whirlpool was our greatest ally, Ai-chan. If Konoha was destroyed and we had to leave we too would depend on the kindness of our allies to make it through. We must help them because one day we might need their help." He stroked his chin. "And the women of Whirlpool are notoriously beautiful... it can't hurt to acquire such... assets."

The three students rolled their eyes and looked away. Down below a group of children were being gathered up separately from the other refugees. Minato frowned. "What's going to happen to them?" he asked his teacher.

Jiraiya shrugged. "The orphans? They'll be looked after one way or another."

That didn't sound particularly reassuring, but then Minato didn't have to think too hard what it must be like for them to be in a strange place with no family to look out for them. Minato himself didn't have a mother – only a father whom he doubted was even his real father (suspicion had gradually dawned after ten years of putting up with beer bottles being thrown at his head with accompanying remarks along the lines of 'I should throw you out,' because 'you're nothing but that bitch's bastard child!')