Hashi Princess

The Hashigaki Princess:

It was on a mission with his team that Kagetsu Michishirube, known to his family simply as Michi, saw Kaou. With soft brown hair, unearthly blue eyes and her petite build it was love at first sight for the young Raikage elect, and though he glances the Hashigaki clan head's daughter only a moment she did not leave his mind. Their mission, a gesture of goodwill between the two well established clans of kumogakure, was to patrol the compound for the evening. The young men had no illusions, there was no danger in this, they were simply meant to conduct themselves with the very best behavior however Michi found himself watching for the pretty girl the rest of the evening though he would leave dissapointed.

A boy of seventeen, Michi was all that the kagetsu clan strove to create. He had great strength and skill, brains and leadership; all skills that had driven his uncle to name himut, having grown up around only other children with much the same skills he found the frail girl who could not have been much young than himself quickly become the center of his desires and dreams.

but as was the family tradition, his future wife had been choosen years before for their compatability. Determined to be all that the family excepted of him, Michi kept his desires to himself, allowing himself only the night to dream of meeting her.

And then, by chance or fate, they did.

On a rare occasion Michi's Uncle had been calledinto an important meeting which he could not include his training in, leaving the blond teen the afternoon. He decided, as only a vigilant man might, to patrol the village and so it was at the market that he found her.

What followed is as one might expect; romance blossomed. Hashigaki Kaou, raised in asimilarily priledged enviroment was a shinobi in her own rights despite how frail he had found her. She too had seen him that day in the garden and had, from the cover of genjutsu, watched as they patrolled her household. His love had not gone unreturned.

Over the next three years the pair would steal away from their home's to meet in secluded places, happy to share in eachother's love as a precious break from shinobi life. Kaou shared her fear of becoming blind, her wishes for the future ad the dreams she had for them.In return Michi told her of his difficult life, the burden of his position, and the emotions her held in his heart.

But the issue of family arose. the kagestu would never stand for this union and neither would the Hashigaki. There was only one man who could overrule the family, and that was the Raikage. A Kagetsu himself, The two felt little hope in gaining his help or for their future. And yet, as their desperation increased, so approached the year Michi would be expected to marry his choosen bride.

Three months before desperation turned to passion and under the canopy if Kumogakure's forest they came together.

Two months later Michi was summoned before a furious Raikage and livid Kagestu clan head; Kaou was with child and the Hashigaki clan were demandeding a marriage. Shocked and mortified by what he had done, Michi listened as the two most important men in his life argued and bartered, trying all they could to decide a way to avoid the union he had hoped for. They grilled him for information, trying their hardest to discredit the woman he had fallen in love with. They called her sickly, useless and yet in the past years he no longer thought of her as such. It shocked him to think that his life long odols could not see the strength in the woman he had given himself to.

And yet, he had to serve his village. Bowing before the Raikage he pleaded ignorance to his actions and, as humbley as he could, accepted the burden of marriage to one they considered lesser.

He could not have been less happy.

It would take several years for the kagetsu family to forgive Michishirube for his transgressions. While the rest of the village celebrated him as a great shinobi leader and general after teh waterfall war, the Kagetsu clan would continue to regard him and his children as traitors to the families way of life. Kaou would never be adopted into the family, their daughters would be forever scrutinized.

When, after Kaou's death at the age of fourty, Michi vanished suddenly Kumogakure, the village was thrown into turmoil. It would be a thirty year's later that his body would be found, resting, somehow, together in in same grave as his wife.