"OJOU-SAMA!" shrieked a dark haired woman in a rather ragged and torn long and puffy black dress. The remains of an apron and lace ornaments littered her dress. She was on her knees, extending her right hand forward, towards the object of her fright and desperation, for in front of her, was a man.
The man was a rather muscular person, tanned and sporting numerous scars. He wore baggy pants and a simple, black tank top. What was important was what he held in his hands. In one hand was a blonde child, a girl of a mere four years, with ruby red eyes and a frightened expression on her face. He held her close to his chest with his left hand. In his right, there was a simple throwing knife, a Kunai, which he held with its tip pressed against the throat of the girl he held in the other arm. "If anyone moves, I'll slit her throat."
"Damn!" yelled a man in a dark suit, with silver hair that defied gravity and any notion of styling, eyes narrowing as he dropped the man he himself was holding, a rather beaten up looking sod, who might've once been wearing a getup similar to the muscular man. "Naruko-chan…" he muttered. "We'll get you out of this. I swear."
"Now, nice and easy, you'll all let my teammates go, and nobody has to get hurt."
"N-Naruko-sama! Are you okay?" asked the woman in the dress, looking at the blonde girl, who was clearly petrified by fear.
The large man laughed. "I haven't even touched her yet," said the guy, hoisting her up a little and moving his large hand until his fingers met around her waist. "Such a tiny little thing she is, feels like a doll. Heh. I used to break my little sister's dollies when she would annoy me, though I preferred squeezing their little heads right until they popped!" the man said, laughing boisterously as he did.
"You won't get away with this, you fiend!" another woman in a dress, this one without the apron or lace ornaments being damaged in any way, other than being dirtied by specks of blood in some cases, spoke, her purple hair swaying with the slight wind that filtered in through the large windows in the dance hall of the Namikaze Manor.
"To be fair, none of us really expects to survive," the large man said, grinning. "Though you're gonna let my team get away, unless you want me to see how much pressure this here dolly can take before she pops…"
"Very well. Your teammates will be allowed to retreat without pursuit. As soon as you let Ojou-sama down," the woman in the torn dress said, taking a step back and focusing her eyes on nothing but the man who held a knife to a child's throat.
"I'm not stupid, ya dumb broad. We've all got radios on us. As soon as they give me the all clear, I'll let the brat down, and then you can kill me," the man said. "We got what we wanted, anyway. That blond jackass knows his spawn ain't as safe as he thinks it is."
"Very well. Ojou-sama's life is much too valuable for us to risk foul play, as you might well know."
"What—Uchiha-sama! You can't trust this man!" the woman in the pristine dress said.
"Silence, Uzuki-kun," the woman said, shaking her head. "As I said, Ojou-sama's life is far too valuable to gamble with."
"Uchiha-taichou is correct," Kakashi said.
The two men who had been engaged stood on their feet, and with nasty grins on their faces, calmly jumped out a window, smashing it as they went through, clearly intent on getting away. It was an agonizing half hour that followed, spent entirely in silence, as each of the three in servant gear awaited for a moment in which the slightest twitch that implied violence was made by the large man.
However, the silence was broken by the man's radio, strapped to his waist, buzzed to life. "All clear, cap'n! We're out of Konoha and heading back to base, over and out! It's been a pleasure, sir!"
The tanned man grinned an insane grin. With a flick of his wrist, the kunai in his hand was buried in Naruko's throat.
He didn't survive much longer, as he was instantaneously pounced on by two of the servants, while the third, their leader, quickly picked up the body of the injured child and, at a frantic pace, began running, shouting for medical assistance.
***
Life continued.
Naruko smiled widely as she looked at her birthday gifts, a mountain piled nearly sky high, or so it looked from the limited perspective of a child of six. "Mikoto-obachan, I think there's even more than last year!" she said with a cheerful tone.
"There are! I had Kakashi-kun count them, Naruko-chan, and he said there's sixty two gifts this year," she explained with a kind smile, grabbing one that seemed precariously close to falling out before putting it back at the foot of the pile. She smiled and walked around the pile, absent mindedly running one eye over the secure confines of the girl's room. Mikoto wouldn't ever have guessed that a girl could have a room that was so stereotypically girly. Plush animals, in particular foxes for reasons she knew very well, littered it, ranging from hand-sized to a life-sized stuffed bear, and all the pastel colored small equines one could think of.
It was a far cry from her own room, a spartan affair with little to decorate it but the first set of Shinobi tools she'd gotten, now blunted and made useless by age and overuse, as well as her old ANBU mask and a few photographs detailing the moments in life that she had cherished.
"Did you ask Daddy if he could come home tonight? He has to! It's my birthday!" she said, looking up with an expectant, almost painfully hopeful expression in her face.
Seeing it cut Mikoto deep, it made her heart ache, because she knew the answer. "He had a lot of work, Naruko-chan, you know he works very hard to make Konoha a fit place for you to rule as a princess," she explained, trying to give her kindest, warmest smile.
Naruko nodded, though her smile became noticeably strained. She was not yet anywhere near good enough to lie to a genin, much less so a jounin who'd spent a six years long tour of duty as an ANBU before taking this assignment. Her chances of succesfully lying to Mikoto were even less than they would've been otherwise, as she had been Naruko's primary caretaker for exactly a week less than the time she'd been alive.
"He works really hard," Naruko said, though she sounded decidedly less than enthusiastic about it.
Mikoto winced at the tone, but decided to instead encourage Naruko to go check her presents. It was a good thing Naruko's room was the largest in the entire manor, rivaling the size of a dinning room, even, because otherwise, all of her gifts could never have fit. Somehow, however, Mikoto didn't think that Naruko felt that the fifteen gifts that her father had sent her made up for the fact that he'd been absent, only arriving at his home well past the wee hours of the morning.
Poor Naruko had valiantly tried to remain awake to greet her daddy, whom she had only briefly seen that morning, but alas, she had been unable to remain long enough. Mikoto tucked her in.