Neotory

To the villagers of Konohagakure, Uzumaki Naruto was a loud, abrasive, and obnoxious child. He wore colors that assaulted the eyes, screamed his ambitions to the uncaring heavens, and painted the faces of the village’s revered ancestors in broad daylight. He was a nuisance. A pariah. A demon wearing the skin of a blonde, blue-eyed boy. 

The night air tasted of ash, ozone, and the coppery tang of freshly spilled blood. 

 The alarm clock beside the bed did not blare with the frantic, adrenaline-spiking shriek typical of most teenagers’ bedrooms. Instead, it chimed with the soft, melodic trill of a classical piano. It was exactly 3:30 in the morning. Outside, the city of Musutafu was submerged in the deep, ink-black quiet that existed only in the fleeting hours before the sun dared to breach the horizon. The streets were empty, the streetlights humming a lonely, electric tune, casting long, undisturbed shadows across the pavement. 

 The world, Izuku Midoriya would learn at a very young age, was built on sound. 

 The smell of a hospital was something Izuku Midoriya would come to know intimately in the years that followed, but at four years old, it was merely an unpleasant collage of sensory inputs. It smelled like rubbing alcohol, starched cotton, and a faint, metallic undertone of anxiety. 

The world was not a canvas of colors to Izuku Midoriya; it was an ocean of noise. 

 The human brain is a fragile, finite thing. It is a biological hard drive prone to degradation, bias, and the slow, inevitable erosion of time. Memories fade. Details blur. The sharp edges of childhood soften into vague impressions, and the exact words spoken by a loved one yesterday can be lost to the ether by tomorrow. That is the fundamental nature of the human condition.