Name: Shōhei Shinsetsu
Bloodline: Uchiha
Current age: 13
Alignment: Lawful Good
Gender: Cisgender Male
Sex: Male
Rank: Medic in Training
OOC Rank: B
Height: 4'9"
Major Elements: Wind
Minor Elements: Fire
Advanced Elements: Poison
Bloodline: Uchiha
Current age: 13
Alignment: Lawful Good
Gender: Cisgender Male
Sex: Male
Rank: Medic in Training
OOC Rank: B
Height: 4'9"
Major Elements: Wind
Minor Elements: Fire
Advanced Elements: Poison
In a word, Shinsetsu is meek. Desperate the fiery blood of the Uchiha clan running through his veins, Shin is much more a product of his nurture rather than nature. Growing up in a loving, but very coddling family, his personality has remained, perhaps not shy, but certainly reserved. He is definitely one to see the good in everyone, and treat everyone he meets with outright kindness, often leading him to be seen as a total pushover. Even in battle, he is often one to step back and wait for someone else to take charge. This wallflower disposition, however, hides a keen intellect combined with a fierce affinity for books and medicine. Reading a mountain of books late into the night, and waking up bleary eyed, usually to fall asleep in class, does its part to account for the accusations of laziness thrown his way. Despite his kind nature, Shinsetsu can be very picky about whom he befriends, often preferring to carefully observe those around him, getting a feel for them before he can let them get close to him.
Visually, Shinsetsu is pretty plain, and otherwise the spitting image of a member of the Uchiha clan; scruffy black hair with a pale complexion. He stands at around 4'9" with a scrawny build and can be seen standing with his shoulders slightly hunched and closed posture, donning slightly baggy, plain-coloured clothes.
Visually, Shinsetsu is pretty plain, and otherwise the spitting image of a member of the Uchiha clan; scruffy black hair with a pale complexion. He stands at around 4'9" with a scrawny build and can be seen standing with his shoulders slightly hunched and closed posture, donning slightly baggy, plain-coloured clothes.
It started with a letter. A summons to select members of Leaf’s ANBU force, compelling them to attend upon their Captain immediately to receive their orders for the upcoming assignment. A man among them, barely older than 18, stood to attention to receive the lecture, occasionally stealing glances at the other members of his Diplomatic Squad. It was supposed to be a twelve-month deployment to the Cloud Village, part of a habitual mission to maintain a friendly relationship between the two countries. It wasn’t a particularly fulfilling idea, spending a year abroad, however, being dislodged from a tense, uncomfortable home life in the name of duty wasn’t altogether an enviable position for the young Uchiha.
The journey passed by uneventfully, a days-long trip which had proven to be thoroughly exhausting. All the same, he was treading on different ground, gazing up into a foreign, murky sky., blissfully unaware as to the events he would set in motion by being here.
⁂
She was unassuming. She was beautiful. She was the most perfect thing he’d ever laid eyes upon. And though they looked at each other from either side of a pub’s bar, it was rather like they were gazing at each other from across an expanse separating two universes. At first, they exchanged no more than furtive glances, but, as the Uchiha visited the Suskino District each night with his squad after the day’s duties, these glances turned into long, babbling conversations. Hope, dreams, aspirations. They were different people but were feeding off each other’s opposite experiences - the tavern girl wishing for a life of adventure, and the overworked soldier, wishing for a calm, lazy existence. What happened next was inevitable.
“What… do you want to do?” The man asked
“Like we have a choice?”
She was holding her hand over the tiny bump that began to show around her middle.
The Uchiha was almost white in the face, frowning as he ruminated on what to do, on how he was feeling.
“If you don’t feel like you ca-”
“No,” the man interjected, holding her close, and hitching a smile onto his face, “of course I’ll stay. O-or you can come back to Leaf with me!”
⁂
It was done. And he had been there for her. In the back of a hospital, his fingers blue, he held his love’s hand as she disgorged her burden into the waiting arms of the medic standing in position.
“The-....It’s…”
The man couldn’t get his words out as the baby was handed into the arms of its exhausted mother, the medic watching them both expectantly. Concern was etched across the medic’s masked face; never before had he seen two brand-new parents looking so… unhappy. He’d seen confusion, terror, joy, euphoria, but never… whatever this was.
“I’ll give you some privacy,” said the medic, and hastened from the room.
“I… I don’t know about this,” said the woman, tearing her eyes from the baby in her arms to her love, tears in her eyes and defeat etched in every line of her face, “there’s so much I still want to do…”
The man nodded. Family back home, his career, his whole life… He was only 18.
“We can start a new life, back in Leaf, both of us.”
The year-long mission had come to an end, and the Uchiha man was due to return home the next week.
“I love you…”
⁂
The hallways were filled with cries and wails, the sound of an infant, which, on a maternity ward, wasn’t very unusual. This was where new life came into the world and the trainee Medic prided himself on welcoming it forth.
“How are you both do-”
There in the bed of the woman whose baby he’d just helped deliver, was the very same baby, all alone, neither mother nor father to comfort him. Tentatively, he took a step closer, his eyes inspecting the room before he arrived at the bed and lifted the wailing child into his arms, shushing him, bouncing him. There was a small strip of parchment left on the bed, covered in what looked like severely butchered penmanship, gibberish.
“How could you…”
⁂
It took a lot of discussion, a lot of time, and a lot of planning, but the child had a new home.
“They didn’t even give him a name?” Ryuichi, the medic’s husband asked, holding the baby in his arms.
“No, they just fucking legged it,” said Kosuke, the medic, with a bite of impatience in his voice, still nettled by the injustice.
“Hiiiiiii,” trilled Ryuichi to the baby, grinning like an idiot, “well, considering what they did… We should name him something that’ll be like a talisman for him, so he’ll never live his life like them. How about Shinsetsu?”
“Yeah, I like that.”
And so, baby Shinsetsu was to grow up with his adoptive family in Cloud, never knowing his true parents, but loved and doted on by this married couple as though he were their own. The boy grew up alongside a slightly elder sister, a child from Ryuichi’s previous relationship who had been similarly discarded by her mother. It was a good recipe for the two children’s closeness as they were raised as siblings together.
From a young age, both parents had ambitions on their kids’ behalf, namely that they should follow in Kosuke’s footsteps and prepare to join the academy to begin careers as shinobi. Ryuichi, while not a shinobi per se, thought that at least teaching his talents as a hunter and fisherman might be more useful as a complement to this destiny. While Kosuke put them through their basic physical training, and instructed them on basic first aid, to which Shinsetsu took particular zeal, Ryuichi helped them develop their physical endurance, taught them how to use a bow and arrow, and particularly, how to find food if they were ever stranded out in the wilderness on a mission.
Someone would say letting your children go out into the woodland with minimal supervision might have consequences.
That was the day of the accident. Shinsetsu and his sister had gotten separated from their father while on a hunting exercise. They both knew the best strategy was to stay put. But ever the restless wild child, his sister began to scale a nearby tree in the hopes she could spot Ryuichi and signal to him.
“See him?”
“No luck,” she said with a huff.
“Maybe you should come on down. Those branches don’t look too sturdy…”
It was almost as though Shin could see it happening before it did.
A loud, shrill scream rent the air. The sound of snapping twigs accompanied the falling body all the way down until she impacted the ground. The fall wasn’t immediately fatal, despite the height, however there was a more immediately pressing matter here. She’d received a deep gash to the neck on her way down. Shinsetsu immediately fell to her side, his hands quivering as he dithered over what to do. Taking a calming breath, he tried to think what either of his dads might do, particularly Kosuke…
“S-Stop the bleeding… a-and call for help,” he whispered to himself, tearing off a rag from his shirt and pressing it to the open wound.
“FATHER! PLEASE! WE’RE OVER HERE!”
It didn’t seem like anyone was coming, no matter how frantic Shinsetsu grew. He was so busy calling out, he didn’t notice his sister’s face growing blue as she tried to gag. She wasn’t breathing anymore. In truth, Shinsetsu had been taught to administer first aid to an adult, and not so much a child like himself, so he was, in fact, unwittingly, restricting her windpipe. Realising his mistake only too late, he found himself jerking his hands away.
The girl stared up unseeingly into the canopy of trees above her.
“SHIN! SHIN!”
Another voice ripped through the air as Ryuichi flew through the trees, collapsing to his knees at the sight of his daughter. The man’s eyes were wide with shock as he inspected her, checking for the nonexistent pulse, or breath of air against his cheek.
“What happened?!”
In that moment, while blank shock washed over the boy, his mouth agape, the whole world became sharp as a pin. Grief seemed to put everything into slow-motion, his eyes able to follow the erratic movements of the tiniest insect nearby. He thought he could see a vague, faint outline of chakra beside him, and lack thereof from the lifeless girl in front of him. Was it grief though? He thought for a moment he might’ve been having an out of body experience. Then reality caught up with him. He shut his eyes tight, unable to fight back the howl of misery threatening to burst free. The deep scarlet colour his eyes had turned was hidden as he turned to his father.
It took Ryuichi’s arms wrapping around him to provide any kind of calm. Both shook as they held each other. Shinsetsu was inconsolable, sobbing, trying to explain between gasps.
“She…She f-fell a-a-and… c-cut herself on-on the wa-way down…. I tr-tried… but sh-she….”
In time, this would haunt Shin. Perhaps not so much his sister’s actual death, but the later realisation that he had ensured her fate, that he had stopped her from breathing. But how could he ever come clean about that? His parents would never look at him the same way again. They’d abandon him just as surely as his birth parents had.
“Shhhh, no, come on,” said Ryuichi, barely able to keep his voice together. He lifted his son into his arms, and carried him back home, bows and arrows left forgotten. Little Shinsetsu, at the age of 10 now possessed one of two gifts bequeathed to him from his biological father.
It wasn’t until the training at the academy ramped up in intensity, that he was taught what was happening to him. During training, Shinsetsu had been under the impression he had some kind of strange battle reflex that overcame him, almost allowing him to sense an opponent’s movements in slow motion when it overcame him. The young shinobi remembered fondly the day when one sensei, one who’d taken more of an interest in him after learning the tragedy that had befallen the boy’s family, took him aside one day, into an empty classroom.
“You do know what this means, don’t you? The fact you can see things so clearly. I’d wager you see a kind of aura around your fellows too, don’t you?”
Shinsetsu gave a slow, bemused nod.
“You have a special gift, and I think we both know that it doesn’t come from your parents, at least not from the ones you lived with.”
After all, what else could account for Shinsetsu not knowing. Perhaps the boy had never even caught his reflection while he’d had it active.
“More to the point; it’s one we share,” the teacher said.
“What do you…?”
The man closed his eyes, and when they opened, it took the boy aback. Shin was sure he’d seen those eyes before; scarlet red with little black tomoe dotted symmetrically around the pupil. The name came instinctively to the boy’s lips.
“Sharingan.”
The teacher nodded, smirking and clearly impressed.
“Come on, Shin, I think it's time someone took your education in-hand.”
The journey passed by uneventfully, a days-long trip which had proven to be thoroughly exhausting. All the same, he was treading on different ground, gazing up into a foreign, murky sky., blissfully unaware as to the events he would set in motion by being here.
⁂
She was unassuming. She was beautiful. She was the most perfect thing he’d ever laid eyes upon. And though they looked at each other from either side of a pub’s bar, it was rather like they were gazing at each other from across an expanse separating two universes. At first, they exchanged no more than furtive glances, but, as the Uchiha visited the Suskino District each night with his squad after the day’s duties, these glances turned into long, babbling conversations. Hope, dreams, aspirations. They were different people but were feeding off each other’s opposite experiences - the tavern girl wishing for a life of adventure, and the overworked soldier, wishing for a calm, lazy existence. What happened next was inevitable.
“What… do you want to do?” The man asked
“Like we have a choice?”
She was holding her hand over the tiny bump that began to show around her middle.
The Uchiha was almost white in the face, frowning as he ruminated on what to do, on how he was feeling.
“If you don’t feel like you ca-”
“No,” the man interjected, holding her close, and hitching a smile onto his face, “of course I’ll stay. O-or you can come back to Leaf with me!”
⁂
It was done. And he had been there for her. In the back of a hospital, his fingers blue, he held his love’s hand as she disgorged her burden into the waiting arms of the medic standing in position.
“The-....It’s…”
The man couldn’t get his words out as the baby was handed into the arms of its exhausted mother, the medic watching them both expectantly. Concern was etched across the medic’s masked face; never before had he seen two brand-new parents looking so… unhappy. He’d seen confusion, terror, joy, euphoria, but never… whatever this was.
“I’ll give you some privacy,” said the medic, and hastened from the room.
“I… I don’t know about this,” said the woman, tearing her eyes from the baby in her arms to her love, tears in her eyes and defeat etched in every line of her face, “there’s so much I still want to do…”
The man nodded. Family back home, his career, his whole life… He was only 18.
“We can start a new life, back in Leaf, both of us.”
The year-long mission had come to an end, and the Uchiha man was due to return home the next week.
“I love you…”
⁂
The hallways were filled with cries and wails, the sound of an infant, which, on a maternity ward, wasn’t very unusual. This was where new life came into the world and the trainee Medic prided himself on welcoming it forth.
“How are you both do-”
There in the bed of the woman whose baby he’d just helped deliver, was the very same baby, all alone, neither mother nor father to comfort him. Tentatively, he took a step closer, his eyes inspecting the room before he arrived at the bed and lifted the wailing child into his arms, shushing him, bouncing him. There was a small strip of parchment left on the bed, covered in what looked like severely butchered penmanship, gibberish.
“How could you…”
⁂
It took a lot of discussion, a lot of time, and a lot of planning, but the child had a new home.
“They didn’t even give him a name?” Ryuichi, the medic’s husband asked, holding the baby in his arms.
“No, they just fucking legged it,” said Kosuke, the medic, with a bite of impatience in his voice, still nettled by the injustice.
“Hiiiiiii,” trilled Ryuichi to the baby, grinning like an idiot, “well, considering what they did… We should name him something that’ll be like a talisman for him, so he’ll never live his life like them. How about Shinsetsu?”
“Yeah, I like that.”
And so, baby Shinsetsu was to grow up with his adoptive family in Cloud, never knowing his true parents, but loved and doted on by this married couple as though he were their own. The boy grew up alongside a slightly elder sister, a child from Ryuichi’s previous relationship who had been similarly discarded by her mother. It was a good recipe for the two children’s closeness as they were raised as siblings together.
From a young age, both parents had ambitions on their kids’ behalf, namely that they should follow in Kosuke’s footsteps and prepare to join the academy to begin careers as shinobi. Ryuichi, while not a shinobi per se, thought that at least teaching his talents as a hunter and fisherman might be more useful as a complement to this destiny. While Kosuke put them through their basic physical training, and instructed them on basic first aid, to which Shinsetsu took particular zeal, Ryuichi helped them develop their physical endurance, taught them how to use a bow and arrow, and particularly, how to find food if they were ever stranded out in the wilderness on a mission.
Someone would say letting your children go out into the woodland with minimal supervision might have consequences.
That was the day of the accident. Shinsetsu and his sister had gotten separated from their father while on a hunting exercise. They both knew the best strategy was to stay put. But ever the restless wild child, his sister began to scale a nearby tree in the hopes she could spot Ryuichi and signal to him.
“See him?”
“No luck,” she said with a huff.
“Maybe you should come on down. Those branches don’t look too sturdy…”
It was almost as though Shin could see it happening before it did.
A loud, shrill scream rent the air. The sound of snapping twigs accompanied the falling body all the way down until she impacted the ground. The fall wasn’t immediately fatal, despite the height, however there was a more immediately pressing matter here. She’d received a deep gash to the neck on her way down. Shinsetsu immediately fell to her side, his hands quivering as he dithered over what to do. Taking a calming breath, he tried to think what either of his dads might do, particularly Kosuke…
“S-Stop the bleeding… a-and call for help,” he whispered to himself, tearing off a rag from his shirt and pressing it to the open wound.
“FATHER! PLEASE! WE’RE OVER HERE!”
It didn’t seem like anyone was coming, no matter how frantic Shinsetsu grew. He was so busy calling out, he didn’t notice his sister’s face growing blue as she tried to gag. She wasn’t breathing anymore. In truth, Shinsetsu had been taught to administer first aid to an adult, and not so much a child like himself, so he was, in fact, unwittingly, restricting her windpipe. Realising his mistake only too late, he found himself jerking his hands away.
The girl stared up unseeingly into the canopy of trees above her.
“SHIN! SHIN!”
Another voice ripped through the air as Ryuichi flew through the trees, collapsing to his knees at the sight of his daughter. The man’s eyes were wide with shock as he inspected her, checking for the nonexistent pulse, or breath of air against his cheek.
“What happened?!”
In that moment, while blank shock washed over the boy, his mouth agape, the whole world became sharp as a pin. Grief seemed to put everything into slow-motion, his eyes able to follow the erratic movements of the tiniest insect nearby. He thought he could see a vague, faint outline of chakra beside him, and lack thereof from the lifeless girl in front of him. Was it grief though? He thought for a moment he might’ve been having an out of body experience. Then reality caught up with him. He shut his eyes tight, unable to fight back the howl of misery threatening to burst free. The deep scarlet colour his eyes had turned was hidden as he turned to his father.
It took Ryuichi’s arms wrapping around him to provide any kind of calm. Both shook as they held each other. Shinsetsu was inconsolable, sobbing, trying to explain between gasps.
“She…She f-fell a-a-and… c-cut herself on-on the wa-way down…. I tr-tried… but sh-she….”
In time, this would haunt Shin. Perhaps not so much his sister’s actual death, but the later realisation that he had ensured her fate, that he had stopped her from breathing. But how could he ever come clean about that? His parents would never look at him the same way again. They’d abandon him just as surely as his birth parents had.
“Shhhh, no, come on,” said Ryuichi, barely able to keep his voice together. He lifted his son into his arms, and carried him back home, bows and arrows left forgotten. Little Shinsetsu, at the age of 10 now possessed one of two gifts bequeathed to him from his biological father.
It wasn’t until the training at the academy ramped up in intensity, that he was taught what was happening to him. During training, Shinsetsu had been under the impression he had some kind of strange battle reflex that overcame him, almost allowing him to sense an opponent’s movements in slow motion when it overcame him. The young shinobi remembered fondly the day when one sensei, one who’d taken more of an interest in him after learning the tragedy that had befallen the boy’s family, took him aside one day, into an empty classroom.
“You do know what this means, don’t you? The fact you can see things so clearly. I’d wager you see a kind of aura around your fellows too, don’t you?”
Shinsetsu gave a slow, bemused nod.
“You have a special gift, and I think we both know that it doesn’t come from your parents, at least not from the ones you lived with.”
After all, what else could account for Shinsetsu not knowing. Perhaps the boy had never even caught his reflection while he’d had it active.
“More to the point; it’s one we share,” the teacher said.
“What do you…?”
The man closed his eyes, and when they opened, it took the boy aback. Shin was sure he’d seen those eyes before; scarlet red with little black tomoe dotted symmetrically around the pupil. The name came instinctively to the boy’s lips.
“Sharingan.”
The teacher nodded, smirking and clearly impressed.
“Come on, Shin, I think it's time someone took your education in-hand.”
Last edited: