Haku

Slim and delicately built, Haku carried a look so androgynous that Naruto, on first meeting him, blurted out that the boy outshone Sakura and refused to believe he was male even after being told. At fifteen he stood pale-skinned beneath a sweep of long black hair, his eyes wide and dark brown.

In the field he wore the pinstriped Kiri garb cut off at the knee, layered under a green haori trimmed in white and cinched with a fringed brown sash wound twice around his waist. A white holder gathered his hair into a bun while two framing locks hung loose, capped with metal cuffs, and his forehead protector sat beneath a hunter-nin mask marked by curved eye slits and a red wave where the mouth would be. Off duty he let the hair fall free and slipped into a pink ankle-length kimono edged in faint red and dotted with plum swirls, finished with a white obi and a dark choker. As a starving child he had worn only an oversized, torn shirt sliding off his shoulders. When his reanimated corpse returned to battle, the whites of his eyes had gone black.

Gentle and obedient by nature, Haku held to a single conviction: that real strength awakens in a person only once they have someone worth protecting. For all his lethal skill he took no pleasure in killing and avoided it wherever he could, preferring to drop foes into a deathlike stupor rather than finish them, as he did to Sasuke. Zabuza judged him too soft for hesitating against the young Leaf ninja.

Much of that softness traced back to the emptiness Haku felt before Zabuza found him. Convinced he was worthless and wanted by no one, he latched onto the swordsman because the role gave his life a purpose, and when the Nine-Tails' power overwhelmed him he sank into such despair that he asked Naruto to end him. His devotion ran close to a son's love; on learning from Kakashi how deeply Zabuza had valued him, he wept with joy. Yet the boy could turn fierce when slighted, snapping Gato's arm and turning the man's bodyguards' own blades against their throats after they moved to strike him.

Haku was born in a snowbound village of the Land of Water, a region still raw from a civil war in which clans wielding kekkei genkai had sown terrible destruction. Fear of those bloodlines curdled into hatred once the fighting stopped. His mother secretly carried the Yuki clan's Ice Release and buried the truth to keep her family safe, but when a young Haku happily showed her that he could shape water, she struck him in terror before tearfully begging his forgiveness. His father had watched from hiding. Rounding up a mob, the man killed his wife and came for his son, only for the boy to raise a thicket of ice spikes that cut down his father and the others.

Cast onto the streets and scavenging refuse to survive, Haku was eventually approached by Zabuza Momochi, who told him they shared the same eyes. When the swordsman offered to make him a weapon, Haku accepted gladly, grateful for any purpose, and gave himself over to becoming the perfect tool. Zabuza drilled him in every technique he knew, and the results were staggering; he reckoned the boy had surpassed even the Anbu and the Mist's swordsmen, and Kakashi, on first meeting him, believed the youth outmatched himself.

His signature edge was raw speed, quick enough to strip the swords from two of Gato's guards before either registered the motion, and faster still inside his Demonic Mirroring Ice Crystals, a lattice of ice panes he flickered between until he seemed to occupy them all at once. Fusing water and wind chakra into Ice Release, he could raise a defensive dome that shrugged off multiple explosive tags, rain needle-like water down from every angle, and even coax localised snowfall. He formed hand seals with a single hand, a feat that unnerved Kakashi, and his study of anatomy under Zabuza let him drop a target into apparent death by piercing a precise point with a senbon.

In the Land of Waves he first surfaced in the guise of a hunter-nin, faking Zabuza's death to spirit him away and recover. When the rematch with Kakashi came, Haku sealed Sasuke inside his ice mirrors and pelted both boys with needles, placing Sasuke in a deathlike state to shield Naruto. Naruto's grief unleashed the Nine-Tailed Fox's chakra, shattering the mirrors and Haku's mask. Beaten and feeling useless to Zabuza, Haku asked to be killed, then sensed Kakashi about to strike his master down. He threw himself into the path of the Lightning Cutter, dying as a living shield so Zabuza might land a final blow. Betrayed soon after by Gato, Zabuza carved through the tycoon's men and was laid to rest beside Haku.

Years later Kabuto Yakushi revived Haku through the Impure World Reincarnation to serve in the war against the Allied Shinobi Forces. His body fought against his will alongside the reborn Zabuza until Kabuto scrubbed away their minds; as his awareness dissolved, Kakashi assured him he truly had fulfilled his role as Zabuza's tool, because the swordsman had perished avenging him, and Haku silently gave his thanks. When the technique was finally undone, his soul returned to the afterlife. The pair's influence lingered in Naruto, anchoring his refusal to ever abandon a comrade.