Some time ago, before the current day, there used to be what seemed to be an almost glow to the world in Tei’s eyes. A healthy glow.  This glow was a certain happiness in the world that she cherished, and would have protected to the end of time, once. Laughter. Kindness. Devotion. Love. These were important things to her at one time. It was this glow of the world that Tei admired once upon a time, and she used this as her motivation for her duties as a medical shinobi. She wasn’t one that was fond of seeing the bad things of life for the most part. She was once a glass half full sort of person. She held her friends close, and the people who would do her harm even closer, living by the belief that kindness could destroy the darkness in lives.

Of course though, the glow wasn’t something that lasted in Tei’s life as the darkness began to encroach on even on Tei’s glass-half-full life. It was slow and methodical, like color dye being dropped in a glass of water, slowly spreading and affecting everything it touched. The precise moment that the glow she saw in the world began to dull, Tei wouldn’t be able to say but it was some time nearly five to seven years ago to the current time. Darkness has a nasty habit of sneaking up on someone unawares as they see more and more cruelty in the world. But, the moment that tipped her over the edge and made the glow disappear was the sudden reveal and awareness to a cruelty that happened to her when she was just a child.  A cruelty that was a truth to pain she received as a child, but the truth was too much, and as darkness commonly does with individuals, with Tei, it started with pain that was closely followed by hate, disdain and anger marching side by side.

This pain, not that she knew until she was much older and her father told her the secrets of her life, started when she was five years old. It was a twisted and cruel twist of fate that met them and caused the pain that made Tei’s happy outlook on life spiral out of control and into the darkness where she settled to become such a cruel and dark minded individual. This twist of fate started with an Iwagakure kuinoichi named Tsubaki, a woman tasked with the job of going after a Jugo man, named Shouta, and his followers that were causing trouble for the village.  By doing so she faked a relationship with him, and Tei was conceived on the night that she attempted to kill him.

The woman Tsubaki of course did not succeed, and it wound up with both of their lives changing directions in ways that the both would have never thought possible as both of them escaped the fate of death – at least for some time longer.  Shouta, who had been an enemy of Iwagakure for so long became an allied shinobi of the village and grew to have a stable family was tasked with going after a missing-nin to reconcile his misdoings.  This missing-nin just happened to be Tsubaki, Tei’s mother.  Of course, these changes weren’t immediate. Tsubaki first had to find out that she was pregnant with her daughter and decide that given the volatile nature of the bloodline that her daughter was likely to receive, to leave the village before she was born. She did, of course and for the first five years of Tei’s life they lived happily in a little Jugo village.

The young Jugo named Tei was a bubbly spoiled little girl of the time. She had two older brothers, Taichi and Shun, who were eleven and seventeen by the time that Tei was five. Taichi and Shun had been adopted by her mother because they were orphans. There parents had been some of the Jugo who had been going against Iwagakure under the orders of Shouta and Tsubaki had felt guilty for their parents being taken away from them. Of course, this wasn’t something that was so terrible, really. It didn’t keep her from loving the two boys as if they were her own, and the family became very tight knit, even if she was a busy single mother of three children, and these three children got along splendidly. They loved each other very much and took care of each other. They would do anything for each other despite the cost it would have.

Now, because this village was mostly a Jugo village, there were some dark natures to it, as there are in all Jugo’s lives because of their Kekkei Genkai. Their abilities are volatile, after all, but over all, they did their best to maintain what any other village would have, a normal life for the citizens. There were farmers, and shops, and joyous laughter spilled out into the streets almost daily unless something drastic happened. Usually it was just like any other village and there were fail safes in place just in case one of the members of the village went Berserk. It was kind, and almost everyone in the village had good relationships with everyone else. Of course there were the gossips, and the rare dislike of other people in the village, but for the most part everyone tried to get along.  And it was this village that Tei’s early childhood took place in.

The childhood home that Tei had was a simple one. It wasn’t that it was simple in the manner that they didn’t have happiness in their home. They were an extremely happy family. There were three bedrooms, one for their mother, one for the two boys, and the third for Tei as she was the only little girl of the family and didn’t want to share a room with her older brothers – she was spoiled. Then there two bathrooms, and a simple living room that merged into a kitchen. Laundry was something that had to be done out of the home as they didn’t have the machines for it in their home. It wasn’t bad though. Chores and things were shared between all the members of the family –though Tei was spoiled by her brothers and didn’t have to do much.  Because she was so much younger than them, they wanted to protect her and give her a pain free life.

They would have too, if the pain that they hadn’t been able to stop hadn’t come rushing at them to destroy the joy in their lives and create a darkness in the life of Tei that she’d only come to realize when she was much older.

The day that darkness slipped quietly into the family of four’s lives started just as any other day would. After all, unlike the fictional stories that one would find in silly story books, films, and other forms of fiction, darkness and pain doesn’t have a habit of sweeping in with rain and darkness displayed in nature. Nature does not respond to what goes on in people’s lives as much as humans would like to believe that it is so, as self-important beings. No. Nature does not care what goes on in the lives of the creatures it supports in each of it’s ecosystems. Nature is a much more care free and wild thing than to change itself when the glow in someone’s life decides to go and be snuffed out. Humans, as much as people would like to believe it isn’t true, are mere ants in the view of nature, and if nature were to take care to be dull and sad when bad things happened to each individual, the world would probably be a very dreary place, given the state of affairs.

However, though the day was like this . . . because it’s the last day Tei had with her family, she holds the memory of what happened that day close to her, though the disaster faded and distorted the memory when it happened. But the rest of the day was good. The morning of said day started with the simple chirping of birds to alert them that it was time to wake up coupled with the sun shining through the windows of their small home. Tei, as young as she was, was the first one to be awake in their home. There’s something about being little that Tei just had a natural bug about, and she was always the first person to greet the day. Of course, she was soon followed after her brothers and mother, not always in the same order. This morning it was their mother who joined her first in the awake world and moved to the kitchen to make breakfast for her three children.

Breakfast was always a lovely state of affairs for the family, and Tsubaki was a wonderful cook. It was one of the things that Tei remembers the most clearly about her mother. The meal that she made consisted of a traditional English style breakfast for a change in comparison to the normal Japanese style breakfast that they normally ate. That meant eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, toast, mushrooms, tomatoes and potato wedges, and the aroma that filled the home because of it was spectacular, and that was what woke the two older brothers and caused them to come running into the kitchen after their giggling bubbling sister. “Morning, mom!” The trio chorused as they moved to sit at the table to wait for the food as they normally did.

“Good morning, my dears.” Tsubaki smiled, her voice soft and lilting as she turned to look at her children where they’d sat for a brief moment before turning back to her cooking and beginning to plate up the food. It was a traditional English style breakfast, and as such, instead of sharing many little different dishes, she’d divided the food into portions on single plates, one for each of them with varying portion sizes depending on how much she knew her children to usually eat. After all, if they wanted more they could simply ask, and depending on how much they’d already eaten she may or may not say yes.

The children made varying noises of thanks and delight at the flavor of the food. Of course Shun was technically legally an adult at this point, but it didn’t matter. He was still one of Tsubaki’s children and he loved his family and their mother’s cooking just as much as he’d love his first mother’s cooking. Happily, over breakfast the four discussed what they would be doing for the day. It would be a day of enjoyment and training for the four children, and Tsubaki would be the one training them. She wanted her children to be able to protect themselves against things that could possibly happen in the future and was training them basic shinobi techniques.

Of course… Tsubaki’s efforts of training failed that very day. It was in the afternoon that Shouta arrived with a small group of his previous team of Jugo. The deal had been struck with Iwagakure for their safety, their end of the bargain was to take out the rouge shinobi Tsubaki and her children. If an entire small town was destroyed in the process, well, that was collateral damage and Shouta didn’t care. They began with the entrance and continued until they made their way to Tsubaki’s home. There she stood. She was going to protect their home and her children who she had forced to hide within their home despite their protests of wanting to be with her to help her defend their home. But she denied them that. They were young Jugo and she didn’t want to let them into a situation that would likely cause them to go berserk, as a lot of the villagers were already doing so as they fought against the intruders.

Buildings were already on fire as Tsubaki faced off against Shouta, and the flames were getting dangerously close to their own home. But at the moment her children were safe in their home. Hidden away from the cruelty of the rest of the world. She could have never imagined that it would come down to something like this. She had thought she would be safe there, but she supposed that it had been something of a mistake to stay in one place for so long. It had only been a matter of time before the past caught up with her. The tables had turned, and it didn’t take her long to recognize that this wasn’t simply a press for revenge for what she had previously done to Shouta. No, this was something that Iwagakure itself had organized. She recognized that. Oh how the tables had turned.

Tsubaki was an experienced shinobi, but so was Shouta, and after five years he had been training as well as building his own family, while Tsubaki had simply focused on her own family and the village itself. Shouta, it turned out, had grown more powerful than Tsubaki and he took her life after only a couple hours of fighting, leaving her body just outside the home before going into the bulding that was now starting to burn, the wood starting to give way to the flames. Taichi and Shun had lost another mother. They knew this when they heard the intruder entering their homes. The footsteps were much heavier than their mother’s and they didn’t hear her call out for them. They tried to hide how upset they were from their sister, but they couldn’t hide the tears in their gazes as they told their sister to stay put and rushed out to greet the man who had taken their mother.

That had been a mistake. The two of them could not match up to the strength of the man who had killed their mother even when working together. Shouta made quick work of the pair, finishing them off just after they had gone berserk. Their dying cries met the ears of Tei and caused the five year old little girl to begin crying. She was frightened and weak. There was no way that she could go to the aid of her brothers even though she wanted to, not that she knew that they were already dead. Still, as tears still streamed down her face, she somehow managed to push herself up and leave the hidey hole that was their place.

But, like it had been a mistake for Taichi and Shun to leave the hole, it was also a mistake of sorts for Tei to leave the little enclave. As she exited, the building, unstable as the fire ate away at the wood, a rafter came crashing down, hitting her. She would have died there if Shouta had not already been searching for the child who’s crying added to the crackling of fire and wood. However, because she had exited the place where she had been hiding, she was found by Shouta. Their orders had been to kill the children of Tsubaki and he almost hit the wounded little girl with flames licking at the left side of her head as she was trapped under a beam with a finishing blow.

But something gave him pause. A certain… fatherly instinct, that for some reason he chose to follow, and he rescued the little girl from the clutches of death, taking her as his own and taking her back to Iwagakure to live with him there. For all she knew, she was simply his rescuer. After all, weren’t shinobi of the great shinobi villages like Iwagakure supposed to be the good guys? Her mother had told her exciting stories of being a shinobi of the great village, and had never told her of the bad things. She had wanted her to be protected until she was older… perhaps that had been a mistake, as Tei would never come to realize the past until she was much older.