Withering by eveningfall

1. (Tobirama)

The royal court had kept me well away.

They had kept me well away for a long, long time.

I agreed with this decision. It was a well-made one, as opposed to basically every other decision the royal court and their political whores ever made. They kept me well away because they suspected I was power-hungry, that I had my eyes on the throne and that I wouldn't limit myself in the methods I would use to claim it.

They were not wrong.

Well, they had been wrong in that I was power-hungry. The rest, however... Pretty good guesses.

I had been a natural, they had said when I was a child after I, just like every other male being born in a peasant family, had been put in the royal school of battlements. It sounded more prestigious than it was. It was basically just the most unfortunate workers of the court coming out to the cities, training the boys of close-by villages who had or would turn six years old that year for a week. The point of it was to select out a small handful of boys that were then to come and be trained at court by the very own Master of War Arts working for the royal family, to then become knights in their army. Almost every one of the boys tested was deemed unworthy, causing their families great disappointment as being a knight was always followed by great glory and riches. That was if you survived the wars, of course, but the peasant families were usually so poor that they were willing to take that risk, even with their own children.

I, however, had not only been deemed worthy; I had been deemed exceptional. I was brought in to court and was not only trained by the Master of War Arts working for the royal family, but the Master of War Arts directly responsible for training the offspring in the royal family. As a teenager, I was already known as the best knight of the country. But I was also known for my impulsivity, for my hot-headedness, for my dirty mouth and my brutality.

And rumours started to spread that I wanted the crown, even if it meant I had to kill the entire royal family.

I had never met the royal family. I hadn't seen them any more than any other person in the country. I knew they consisted of the king, the queen and their two sons, both of them quite a bit younger than me. But they definitely had their eyes on me, the king and the queen, so when I turned twenty, I was sent away to foreign country.

The royal family sold me for a hefty sum to the royal family of this foreign country, and I was shipped overseas like cattle. I didn't mind being treated as property in and of itself, but I didn't like being so far from my goal, which was the throne of my home country.

I hadn't understood why they would give me, the most dangerous man on the planet, to the enemy, but as soon as I got to learn the customs of the new country, I understood why. The new country had a powerful tradition of peace, and never went to war. The army was just for show, not even to protect against invasions as the country wasn't strategically beneficial, nor did it contain any riches or minerals that other countries could desire.

I was sent there to be kept at bay.

At first, I had fought against my establishment in the new country. I wanted to be out to fight, to be in the battlefield, to win glory to my name not for the sake of the glory itself, but to enhance my status as a dangerous man. But after a while, I had formed a different plan, a plan where I trained myself to increased my skill levels to an unpalatable level without anyone knowing.

And I saw the benefit of having been sent away. Of the vast mistake the royal family had made. They would no longer have any knowledge about my greatness. To them, I was a problem they did no longer have to think about.

So I started enjoying myself in this new country of mine; its hot climate, its date trees heavy with sweet fruit that were perfect for energising your body during heavy trainings, the salty ocean, the beautiful, dark-skinned women, all the while training vigorously for hours a day and indulging myself in books about the art of battle. I thrived, and seventeen years had passed since I was shipped. I was thirty-seven now, and still hadn't reached my prime; I could become more.