Naruto : Monsters

"I too was rather vexed with the situation at first as I thought of all the countless hours I had spent training on what ended up proving to be an unsound investment, of all the years I wasted training a dying man. 

But then, Itachi managed to prove me wrong. Even when dying, Itachi found a way to serve his village. Till the end, he was the perfect ninja."

...

Danzo finally drifted off into silence, hand still held over his empty eye, while around us the crowd of disguised Root played their roles perfectly, to the point that I had unconsciously begun to tune them out despite knowing their true nature and the threat they posed.

When the silence began to stretch and it was starting to look like Danzo wouldn't speak again, I decided to speak up. "Forgive Danzo-sama," I said, causing the man to turn his head to me, "but why are you telling me all of this?"

He said nothing.

"From what little I've heard about you," I continued when he kept on staring at me, a rather uncomfortable experience, "you are not the type to give information away freely, not without a reason. And I find it unlikely that you have gone through all the trouble of ambushing me here, alone, with a crowd to mask our meeting," I waved an arm at the crowded restaurant filled with disguised Root agents.

"just to tell me about the possibility of Itachi becoming Hokage or how if things had turned out differently, you might have become my instructor. You do not strike me as the type to reminisce over what might have been Danzo-sama, so please forgive my rudeness but I must ask you again, why are you here?"

Danzo stared down at me with his single eye, his gaze almost like a physical weight.

I could not read the man, not even with my Byakugan fully open and focused on him, I had no idea what he was thinking. With the exception of that torrent of rage he felt at the mention of Itachi's disease, I might as well have been staring at a rock for all the emotions I sensed coming off him.

"Were you aware," he asked, breaking his silence, "that the Academy keeps a detailed psychiatric report on all prospective Genin?"

"Yes sir, I am." I nodded.

The psych profiling had less to do with the mental health of the students and more to do with determining the role they were most suited for. No one wanted to have a deranged ninja on their hands but they also didn't want to waste resources training someone only to find out they didn't have the stomach for the job.

Students with too much empathy are usually sent to the Medical Crops to be trained in the healing arts or even to the counter-intelligence division, while those with too little are sent to the Torture and Integration division. 

It was a very rare event for anyone to be exempted from the Academy due to results from their psych profile, however, and for good reason. No matter how potentially horrible a human being the child could grow up to become, they would always be able to find a use for them. After all, the worst people during peace tended to make the best soldiers in war.

"Then I'm sure you must know that there exists a psychiatric report on yourself. But are you aware of what it says?" Danzo asked, causing me to shake my head in response. "You should give it a look if you ever have the opportunity to do so; it makes for quite an interesting read. As it happened, it was what was written in your psychological profile as much as it was your talent which brought my attention to you, maybe even more so."

….What the hell did my psych report fucking say!?

As if reading my mind, Danzo pulled out a sheet of paper from his robe and offered it to me. Taking the sheet, I quickly began to scan through the page, recognising Iruka's handwriting. Skipping over the beginning, which held nothing more than general background information, I dove straight into the heart of the report.

In his time under my care, Hyuuga Hikaru has often exhibited behaviour that could easily be mistaken as psychopathic. Though he has proven himself capable of interacting and socializing with his fellow classmates as well as anyone else his age could – perhaps even more so as he proved capable of becoming quite charming when he needs to– he seems incapable of genuinely caring for any of them, barring one notable exception.

Highly intelligent and pragmatic, Hikaru uses his intellect as a tool to achieve his goal and show little compassion to anyone who happened to be in the way. 

While he has rarely demonstrated it, he has on occasion shown a willingness to manipulate his classmates if it would grant him an advantage, by using either his wit, charm or their current relationship to make it happen. And as far as I am able to observe, he does not demonstrate any signs of remorse or guilt for doing so, showing a worrisome amount of callous manipulation for one so young.

He also appears to hold little regard to the rules despite strictly adhering to them. Whenever he finds an inconvenient rule he, instead of outright breaking it like most children his age would do, finds a way to work around it, often through the use of loopholes or by using connections granted to him through his clan.

This leads directly to my next point. In addition to being self-confident, Hikaru has a grandiose sense of self – a belief that he is always in the right – which his high intelligence only serves to feed. 

When tested with a moral dilemma through a hypothetical situation – as we do with every student in the Academy – Hikaru has proven capable of justifying almost any action to himself through the use of logical reasoning and was capable of convincing those around him to come about to his point of view. There was rarely a point where Hikaru had ever stopped to consider whether or not he had a right to take such an action, he only saw things in cost and gains.

Another worrisome trait is his distinct lack of general empathy.

During sparring sessions, children often demonstrate signs of reluctance when paired up against fellow classmates or friends, either due to fear of hurting them or the possibility of damaging their friendship. This issue, in addition to preventing students from reaping the most benefits from training, often causes them to develop bad habits. It is for that reason that we extensively train them to put aside their emotions during a fight during their early years in the Academy.

This was not the case with Hikaru.

Since his arrival, Hikaru has never demonstrated any such hesitation during any of his fights. While careful not to harm his opponent any more than needed to – thankfully Hikaru has never exhibited any signs of sadism – Hikaru demonstrates an indifference that borders on callousness when it comes to inflicting the necessary pain he needs to win during these spars. 

He shows no hesitation in striking at a person he had just been chatting with, no remorse for breaking an opponent's nose who he had been trading jokes with the very same morning.

But neither does he take any pleasure in them.

Again, I would like to reiterate that though he shows no sense of guilt at inflicting the necessary pain that is needed to win a match, he also does not appear to take any pleasure in it. Neither in the pain or in the victory itself. 

It is almost as if he was indifferent to the entire experience, perhaps even detached. To him, those fights held no other meaning to them outside of what lessons could be learned for them; Victory and defeat mean nothing to him other than an indication to his level of skill and an assessment of his weaknesses.

I had become increasingly convinced over my years of associating with him that is how Hikaru sees everyone around himself, including myself. Not as individuals or people, but as means to an end, our only true value to him is on how useful we are. 

I sincerely believe that should I happen to drop dead one morning, the only thing Hikaru would feel beside surprise at my unexpected demise would be irritation at having to adapt to a new teacher. It is unlikely he would feel any real grief.

His distinct lack of empathy, combined with the other behaviour patterns mentioned above, all these points leave it impossible to deny that Hikaru exhibits many of the classic traits associated with that of a psychopath. In short, this has led me to believe I am dealing with a very mentally disturbed child.

...Well, fuck you too Iruka!

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