Konoha's Red Dragon

Brief Glimpses

She didn't see anything, but she felt everything, a bubble of calm and serenity. In this odd little world where it was comfortably warm and soft and nothing could touch her.

She could see her dome of purple smoke and mirror rippling like water. Before breaking and cracking, shattering into millions of shards of ice. She heard popping, unbearably loud noises followed.
A shooting pain pulsed with her steadily picking up heart just under her skin and she cried out. Hands coming up to scratch at her ears, her eyes, her mouth, cheeks, her own arms. Red puffy, scattered, chaotic raised lines, some pooling crimson under pointed nails.

She felt hands grip at her wrists and she sobbed, the urge to fight, fight, fight, fightfightfight.

A pinch in her neck and everything dulled in her body, her hearing slipping. Her clenched eyes and furrowed brow smoothed out and relaxed as she layed back into one of the softest things she'd ever felt, huffed a heavy breath and everything became static. The broken pieces of ice melting, reconfiguring to fire before smoke and mirrors took its place.
"Not your time to wake up, Little one."

<->

Aki was a timid thing by nature. Silent, never speaking a word, never uttering a sound, it was worrying.
It had come to the point that everyone thought she was mute.

Her footsteps are much too soft, much too unsure to be normal. The working theory was that she was abused, never taught to speak or afraid to speak in the case that a hand would be raised to her. The only thing she managed to answer was her name that she had written in a shaky scrawl that only a child could have.

Amethyst eyes watching like a hawk whenever someone came too close, moved too quickly, it only proved their theory more.

They tried to get her in speech therapy. Had a yamanaka do it, even a normal civilian therapist, but no such luck. She'd only look at them with anxiety and distrust.
Anxiety was the most evident thing they could diagnose her with.
"It is not your time to speak, little one. Too unsafe. I will tell you when you should."
 
<->

  She still managed to get into the shinobi Academy, how? Hiruzen and the ANBU had no idea, but she flourished.

She was still fearful of everything around her. Glassy eyes at one moment, sharp and clear the next when someone came within arms length.
Still much too quiet in her steps, and still silent as the dead.
But she was more sure, more confident, even if it was only in the practical part of things when they got to their third year in the academy. Less jumpy and a lot less unstable in her episodes of... scratching. When something freaked her out enough and she spiralled, nearly drawing blood with how aggressive she had clawed at her arms.

At this point she was going to have permanent scars.
She didn't seem to care.
"good , little one. I am proud. Keep training, you will live."

<->

Aki often found the lectures boring, she could learn so many other things, instead she was sat at a desk, listening to something she couldn't and most likely would never understand.
She would zone out on particularly bad days, static overtaking her head, making everything comfortably fuzzy and dimming the cacophony of noise that made up her world.

Listening to the calming, ever steady, chiming voice coming from deep in her belly, travelling to her fingertips, up her neck and into her head.
Loosening the muscles that she could never quite get the tension to disappear and noise completely dissipating whenever she spoke. Always reassuring words, calming and trusting words.

"I will always be here for you when everything becomes too much, Little one."
Aki woke up and paid attention to the lecture as the reassuring rumble vibrated through her being. Reaching the aching lines of her back that never seemed to stop throbbing.