AN: So this story is based off of a much more complex and multi-year long RP I've had. This one will be tweaked using concepts that were considered but not included, adjusted to flow a little better as a solid bit of fiction and dropping some of the more random and off the wall events that weren't justified narratively as much as "we were dared to do this".

So, essentially this story is 'heavily inspired by' a previous RP I was involved with like a movie based on a 'true story'. Good and bad.

A Dance of Flame and Shadow

Prologue

'Ghost-Girl!'

She was weak. She was a weak, cowardly girl, so she ran away.

The laughter behind her somehow managed to be full of both happiness and malice, and she hated it. Tears ran down her face, and she ran. Somewhere, somewhere in the direction she ran, she'd find home. Home would be safe. At home they'd leave her alone, they'd all stop chasing her and laughing at her. Home wasn't cruel. At home, her parents would wipe off her face and tell her nice things.

"Ghost-girl~!" The voice of the one who started making fun of her first called over the wind. "Where oh-where are you haunting now?!"

She tried to stay out of their way. She didn't want to be noticed. Nothing about her was worth being noticed over, but those girls...they always did. Her big forehead made it impossible to hide anywhere, they'd said. So, she'd started to cover her face and hide behind her hair. But...it was too pink, too obviously different and they found her anyway.

They'd started chasing her off when they found her now, calling her a ghost, insisting that they needed to rid the village of her before she stole away their souls.

She only wanted to be left alone.

Ahead of her, a rustle of robes caught her attention. She didn't recognize the person, but he was an adult. The sounds of the girls behind her were close now, so she ducked immediately behind him, clinging to his leg and crying in desperation.

For a few moments the figure simply stopped, silent. When the girls approached, though, he spoke in a gruff and commanding voice.

It wasn't at her.

With some reluctance, the girls turned and scattered away.

He said something to her after that. She thought it might have been chastisement, but she was too busy sniffling and rubbing at her face to hear what it was. Before he left, slim fingers tapped lightly on the top of her head.

)+(

Her first trip outside of the village wasn't to go anywhere else. Students were separated into small teams and then sent off into the forests outside Konoha. They were meant to be out for the afternoon, gather mushrooms, and then come back to their instructors.

It rained that day. She liked the group of students around her, none of them were the mean ones who made fun of her, and they were all just as excited as she was to go on their very first 'mission' outside the village. With all the rain, finding mushrooms would be easy, their instructors said, and they only had small bags to fill.

They weren't supposed to split up, but they'd only filled half of their bags and they didn't have very much time left, so all of them went different directions and promised to come back to the same spot.

It didn't take long for her to become lost. Even though her bag was mostly full, she couldn't remember which direction she'd come from, and everywhere she looked seemed familiar. When she picked a direction and started to sprint that way, the mud underneath her gave way and she slid violently down a cliffside.

Everything hurt.

Her back hurt. Her legs hurt. Her ankle looked bigger than it should have been, and when she reached out to touch it, pain shot through her leg.

Like this, she couldn't move.

Like this, no one would find her.

Like this, she'd never get home at all.

She scrubbed muddy hands into her face and wept.

"Fool."

She froze. The voice sounded nearly her age, but it wasn't familiar at all. Could it have been...an enemy...?

Hesitantly, frightened, she slowly lowered one hand to peek out in the direction of the voice. A boy only a little older than her scowled down at her. His shoulder and his chin and neck were all bandaged, but he didn't seem bothered by the injuries. Instead, he just glared down at her.

"You won't fix anything crying, stupid fool."

Her lip trembled looking up at him. "B...but...but I don't know how to get home..."

His expression turned to something like disgust, and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Home is that way. If you can't find your way back on your own, you shouldn't leave at all."

He walked on by her then, and no matter how much she called out to him, complaining that she hurt, that her ankle wouldn't work, he didn't answer.

She stumbled and limped in the direction he pointed, and after only a little while longer one of her teachers appeared, flustered, worried, and more than a little irritated that the students hadn't followed orders.

)+(

"Please...! Please just bring him back to me!"

She felt sick.

Her stomach knotted up, and she actually felt sick.

She'd felt plenty helpless, she'd felt hopeless and sad and frustrated before. She knew her life wasn't as hard as her teammates' lives had been. It wasn't hard at all, really. But she'd still felt sad, she'd felt all of the things she felt now.

She'd never felt them so keenly before.

She'd never felt so completely alone. She'd failed to stop Sasuke going, even when she knew he would. He never listened to her before, so of course he didn't this time, either. All of the hope she felt when he whispered those last words to her shattered into horrified despair when the team that went out - her friends who promised to bring him back to her after all - came back to Konoha in critical condition, all of them nearly killed trying and failing to bring him back.

She hadn't done anything. She couldn't do anything, everyone nearly died, and Sasuke was still gone.

Before she knew it, Naruto left too.

She felt alone, and now she was alone, and it was all because she couldn't do anything. She'd promised Naruto and herself that it would change. She promised she would do something next time. It didn't make him stay put, though. He still left, and she was still here.

They were gone, and life still continued, and somehow that life was one without them.

The Hokage accepted her as an apprentice, promised to teach her all the Sannin knew so that, in three years time when they would seek out Sasuke again, she'd be able to do something that time. The Hokage trained her so mercilessly, so brutally that often all she could do between sessions was sleep and struggle to eat to regain her energy.

On the days when she didn't, Konoha still had missions, and Sakura was still a genin of the leaf.

The team she worked with today were all out gathering food while she tended the fire and protected the camp.

So, of course, that would be exactly the time a small child (so young he might not have even been Academy age yet) stumbled into the camp. His dark eyes were wild with confusion and paranoia as he looked around the area, and then he settled his gaze on her.

"Hey!" He shouted, making her jump. "Where did you take me?! What did you do?"

"Wha-?" She shook her head. "What are you talking about? Who are you?" She stood, reaching for the kunai at her waist. It was weird, but maybe this was some kind of attack - appearing like a harmless kid and expecting her to be off guard. "How did you get here?!"

He took a step back, and settled into an admirable defensive position, pulling up a kunai of his own. "Don't pretend you don't know, Traitor! I was somewhere else, and you kidnapped me!"

"Kidnap-Traitor?!" She shook her head, confusion beginning to melt into frustration. For being such a tiny kid, he had a loud mouth. And he was rude. Why the hell would she be a traitor? "What are you talking about? I've never even seen you before!"

"Seen who?" One of her teammates sprinted up to camp from the treeline, drawing her attention briefly away from the child in front of her.

"The-" She cut off abruptly in frustration when she turned back to where he had been. "Damn it! He ran away!"

Whoever it was must have been some kind of a scout. If they didn't catch him now, they'd have to move the whole camp and set up somewhere else entirely.

And she'd just gotten the fire at the level she wanted it.

)+(

She flipped through the papers clipped into the metal board she carried. For the most part, all hokage duties were handled by either the Hokage herself, or Shizune her oft-beleaguered assistant. Every once in a while, a flood of paperwork required so much attention that it was just simpler to borrow an extra pair of hands.

It wasn't like she handled anything sensitive. Honestly, any jounin in the vicinity of the Lady Hokage could have done anything handed to her. Most of the jounin knew better than to linger in the woman's vicinity. She didn't mind, though. Helping with little things really was the absolute least she could do in return for all the instruction and help that the Lady Hokage granted her. Besides that, she wanted to help. She wanted to be useful.

Naruto and Sasuke had both been gone for nearly two years now, and the crushing sense of helplessness she felt whenever she thought of them hadn't alleviated at all. By the time Naruto came back, by the time they'd go and bring Sasuke back tomorrow, she promised herself she wouldn't feel it at all anymore. She'd make sure she was someone who wouldn't need to.

If reading and memorizing a few long reports from various jounin from time to time happened to be a part of that, she didn't mind.

She'd walked the path often enough that she didn't worry about looking up from the papers, so long as she walked at a reasonable pace. The people of Konoha generally had enough manners to get out of the way of someone walking, and it wasn't as if she wouldn't sense someone near her long before she actually bumped into anyone.

...She assumed, anyway.

A hand touched her shoulder, and thin lips pressed to her cheek just above her jaw. She didn't know when the person got close enough, she didn't immediately recognize them, either.

He showed incredible nimbleness to dodge the right hook she responded with.

"What the hell are you doing?!"

The man...actually, he looked about her age. She didn't recognize him at all, but part of the reason behind her lack of recognition could have been the lingering blind rage she still felt. He actually had the audacity to look annoyed. He snuck up on a kunoichi (somehow!) and stole a kiss! And he looked annoyed!

"What you asked." His tone was entirely too calm for narrowly avoiding a fist that would surely have sent him through a house or three. It was as flat as if she'd just asked him why they were hidden in the leaves.

Which made the least sense of anything that just happened.

"I did not! I don't even know who you are."

His lips twitched in irritation, as if he only just managed to suppress the urge to roll his eyes or say something derogatory.

Maybe she ought to make another attempt at avenging her cheek.

"And yet you asked me for a kiss all the same."

Why did he look so irritated? He was the one being unreasonable!

"First. No. I didn't." She pointed at him, settling for now on asking him questions before clobbering him again, just in case he forgot any answers between now and the end of his hospital stay. "Second, why would you even want to kiss someone you don't know, even if I had?"

His lips twitched, and he squinted at her a moment. Afterward, his expression smoothed to neutrality again and he shook his head. "Curiosity. It's not a request I often receive from strangers."

"Well you wouldn't." Yet, he seemed...perfectly serious. Annoyed, but serious. Not at all like the kind of lecherous pervert she'd expect from someone who randomly walked up and kissed strange women on the street. She found it disconcerting.

Come to think of it, actually, he didn't look familiar at all. He moved like a shinobi (no civilian, no matter how prepared, would have been able to dodge her attack so easily), and he wore a headband from Konoha, but he didn't even look like someone she'd seen in passing before. His dark hair spiked out in even wilder ways than Naruto's ever had, lines already started to form on his face that suggested he scowled far too often, and he had a distinctive set of scars she'd never seen before on his chin. He didn't look familiar at all.

Which was weird, because she lurked over the Hokage's shoulder often enough when the Lady Hokage gave out missions that she'd been certain she'd seen every face in Konoha at least once. Every face not hidden by an ANBU mask.

He watched her as if he were expecting something, and for a moment she worried that she'd missed a question.

No, he'd definitely just been looking at her, as if he were waiting for her to do something else. Maybe he was properly wary. Or maybe he was waiting for her to realize he wasn't a shinobi of Konoha after all. "...I've never seen you before."

His brows knit a moment. "So you've said."

Well...not in so many words. She squinted at him. "I've seen most of the people in this village."

"As have I."

He said it as if she weren't the Hokage's student and not the one under suspicion! It was like everything he said he specifically designed to make her angry ahead of time.

"Well then? Why are you stalling? Who are you?"

"You hadn't asked me before now." He frowned at her, expression a bit like she'd expect a teacher's to be if she failed to pay attention in class before a test. She couldn't actually decide whether to be flustered or angry about it, honestly. "My name is Danzo. And yours?"

She blinked at him in silence for a moment or two.

But-that was...

Wait.

She'd never personally met him, come to think of it, but she'd definitely heard descriptions which the man in front of her did not fit. There weren't two shinobi of the same village named the same thing, neither of whom she'd met, were there?

"You...what?"