There were things in this world that were unfair.
Very much so.
And there's a certain boy who could tell you about a whole slew of those, and still have left over. And he'd tell you with a smile, while minimizing how much it must've hurt to be the one suffering from those unfair things.
This was the world of one Kazami 'Haruka', starting with his name.
Yes. His.
It was an odd thing that had accompanied him since birth, originally a nickname born from his actual name, Haruto, and one of the unfortunate aspects of his life. While the characters with which it was written differed, the pronunciation eventually led his parents to come up with the embarrassing nickname shortly after he was born… after they'd seen the bright pink hair on top of his head.
Truly, the intimidating hair color of a manly man.
Even worse, his mother liked his hair quite a bit, and liked to see it when it was quite long. Even despite the fact that it fell down his back in a messy cascade of spikes, she liked to play with and style it in different ways. It didn't help that it usually grew back very fast, even if cut, and seemed to take very well to all sorts of treatments done to it. Except, of course, hair dye. It just washed off.
Very much a curse, inherited from his grandfather on his mother's side, one Kazami Natsuryu by name. Except that man's pink hair had been dark enough to pass as red.
Bright, bubblegum pink had gotten Haruto confused with a woman so much that people genuinely tended to think his name was Haruka. It annoyed him.
Oh, well. There was no point in dwelling in such a thing. His mother liked it. His father didn't see any reason why he should be ashamed of the color of his hair. And while getting confused with a girl was annoying sometimes, at least he'd mostly avoided teasing because people genuinely thought he was a girl and as such didn't really care that he had pink hair. On a boy, it would've been funny, but on a girl, it was cute. Right?
Haruto wasn't quick to correct them.
***
By the time people started to notice Haruto as a boy more than a girl, there were very specific reasons why he wasn't picked on.
Some people liked to joke that he'd gotten handed bad genetics, until he started to resemble his father.
While he'd once been short and very girly, by the time he hit eleven years of age he had shot up in height. Where once he'd been shorter than a great deal of his peers, now he stood at the top of the height charts in his class. His hair was now cut much shorter, as well, and while still pink, at least it didn't draw quite as much attention as before. Not when people were mostly looking at the muscles that really shouldn't have been on a boy his age.
Particularly considering that he was a civilian boy.
Indeed, despite a retired shinobi as a mother, and a deceased shinobi as a father, Haruto had chosen the life of a civilian. Admittedly, his mother's reluctance to allow him to even train with his father in order to stay in good shape might have played a part in this, but Haruto liked to think that if he'd wanted to be a ninja, he'd be one. Because while his mother could piss and moan and scream and yell, she would NOT prohibit him from doing what he wished to do, no matter how horribly worried for him she might become.
He'd even mostly dropped his priorly regular workouts. Before, he'd kept on par with the exercises his father put himself through, yet these days he merely did enough to maintain himself in acceptable shape. He was still the best in just about every area in regards to his school work, outdoing his peers in academics because of his innate genius coupled with his mother's superb and superbly demanding tutoring and leaving them in the dust in terms of physical education due to his past Shinobi training.
He enjoyed no less than six years of Civilian education, until his twelfth birthday.
Of course, not everything can be this easy.
Haruto knew his father was a very well known shinobi, at least amongst the very few people at the top who were actually important. His family got a sizable stipend that allowed them to live comfortably despite the fact that his mother was retired and Haruto himself was attending a rather expensive school, and his father's Jounin jacket was never removed from the perch next to the door, where it'd been since the last time he had left. Even his headband, with the massive crack down the middle that had never been fixed, was still in his home.
It was only a matter of time before someone approached him to offer shinobi training to continue his father's work. He'd have thought it would've been perhaps one of his father's old teammates. He'd even half expected Maito Gai to show up, or even their shared teacher Roshi, offering training. But it'd been neither of them. Instead, one day, his family had hosted the Fourth Hokage.
It'd been, fittingly, the anniversary of his father's sacrifice.
A lot of people had talked about the man, and his family. A lot of people liked to gossip about who would be the next person who would try their hand at filling the void Uzumaki Kushina had left at the man's side, but Haruto knew full well that Namikaze Minato had rejected each and every single person who'd attempted to replace his wife. In a similar fashion, several men had tried to approach Haruto's own mother, but she'd soundly rejected each and everyone of them. Haruto knew that it wasn't his mother refusing to move on.
No, it was her simply judging the men who attempted to woo her and finding them lacking in comparison to her husband.
Haruto couldn't really blame people for trying to get at either of the widowers. Namikaze Minato was powerful, one of the most powerful ninja ever as well as the leader of an entire village, rich, mostly because of his ninja prowess, and handsome, at least according to his hordes upon hordes of fangirls. Kazami Risana, Haruto's mother, had the backing of a wealthy family and a great deal of political power, even if she never chose to wield it herself as a result of it. It helped that her kunoichi training had left her with the enviable body of a kunoichi even long after she'd retired.
Poor Haruto had more than once suffered as a direct result of the few male friendly acquaintances he had noticing the fact that his mom was, indeed, quite attractive. If he were less nice, he might've actually beat up a few of the people who went too far with their comments.
Incidentally, the Fourth Hokage and his mother were friends, and of course the gossip had put them together fairly quickly. Both denied it soundly, and completely truthfully. Part of the reason they were friends was that they could joke about people trying to seduce them. They'd been introduced to each other by their spouses, who had themselves been teammates.
On that anniversary of his father's passing, Haruto met, for the first time, the Hokage's daughter. And had found her terribly confusing, overbearing and, dare he say it, annoying. Unfortunately, he'd been raised by his mother to be a polite and kind young boy, and thus he hadn't told the then-little girl to go screw herself and leave him alone. Furthermore, she was family of a family friend, and as such, Haruto had to not only put up with, but also entertain her.
She liked to call him Haruka, and apparently genuinely thought that was his name. He had not been able to disabuse her of this notion.
The Fourth Hokage himself was a pleasant man, who was ready to treat Haruto like the mature young man he was rather than the child he appeared to be (when he was wearing long sleeved clothes that hid the rippling muscles on his body, of course) and avoid patronizing him. He hadn't been condescending or annoying. Instead, he'd lay bare the facts and reasons why he wanted Haruto to become a shinobi.
Indeed, it came down to Haruto's father, and his legacy. The shoes left to be filled.
Haruto had inherited several traits from his father. His body was chief amongst them. Even despite the fact that he'd never been formally trained, the man had been faster and stronger than the academy's teachers when he'd been entered—two months prior to the graduation exam he took—, and his amazing talent had allowed him to learn their moves and styles within that short a time. While he was a lost cause at anything requiring finesse, it hadn't been a problem in the middle of open warfare.
The pink haired boy knew full well he'd likely run into the exact same problems as his father, and he had the exact same advantages as well.
In truth, being a shinobi just seemed like an ideal job for people of his lineage. He started to think that his father had a bloodline limit that allowed them to be stronger and faster than others, as well as have massive chakra reserves. Unfortunately, it also rendered them essentially incapable of using jutsu, due to the accompanying extremely poor chakra control. There were ways to bypass this, and it was his father's discovery of this that allowed the man to become one of the most feared demolition experts in the entire world. The knowledge of the skills and techniques his father used had, in fact, been passed down to Haruto. Not for his own use, but so he could give the choice to his children if he wished to.
There were a lot of reasons why he would accept.
But even so, he had turned to look at his mother.
He himself was ambivalent. He enjoyed training, enjoyed fighting, even, but he'd never been a fan of true violence. He'd never been a fan of actively hurting another to reach your own ends.
It was then that his mother had solved the quandary for him. "Your father fought for what he believed in. Your father fought to protect me, to protect you, and to protect the village that had taken him in as one of its own. He didn't like hurting people any more than you do, and he enjoyed the few times of peace he could enjoy more than anything… But he was always ready to take arms to protect what he cared about."
"We as Shinobi do what we must, Haruto, to ensure the protection of what we love. We are the ones who endure that pain, so others don't have to," the Fourth had spoken.
It was again, a glance at his mother, that followed.
What he loved, then?
His mother—she had retired from that life. He knew why. It wasn't a very good life, and there were many things that hurt her, that kept her awake at night. Sometimes, he knew, she woke up in a cold sweat and crept into his room, to watch him sleep, as if to reassure herself that he was still there. He knew, because she wasn't as stealthy as she thought she was.
Was he strong enough?
He didn't know.
But he'd have to try.
At the very least, he'd try to live up to hopes of dreams that had been placed upon him by others long gone. He'd been enjoying the life of a civilian, but all good things must come to an end.
Sometimes, you have to take responsibility.
Perhaps, had he been raised to be any less than what he was, he would've shrunk upon himself when the Hokage offered him this chance. Would've retreated. Would've thought that honoring the sacrifices made by those who cared about him would've meant that he'd have to live as a civilian, away from the life of pain and suffering of a shinobi.
But he was a kind, selfless young man, and when given the chance to live up to his father's legacy, to protect innocents like he had, Haruto had jumped at it after relatively little deliberation.
Even if the Hokage's daughter was quite aggravating about it.