Dancing Bells Chapter 1: Flower Pressing Days, a naruto fanfic

Dancing Bells

Chapter One: Flower Pressing Days

Naruko had learned how to cook by the time she was six years old.

A freeze frame of a specific time. A six year old girl with blonde pigtails, blue eyes, and tan skin stood on a tall stool to reach the single apartment's kitchen counter. The stool had countless little wooden steps lined in blue ascending in a great arc, like a series of flattened logs, up to the top, where Naruko still stood on her tiptoes to reach the stove. She had a heart-shaped face with strange whisker shaped cheek markings, almost like scars, or clan tattoos, or war paint, but they were nothing of the kind. They were marks on her face, like freckles, they came naturally, giving a cutesy but foxy, mischievous tone to her visage.

The flat beige-brown top of the stool just barely lifted her up to the black open stove-top, where she was mixing up a big metallic pot of beef ramen with sauces and vegetables. One of her little hands slowly stirred the tall wooden spoon around.

The apartment around her was paid for by the Hokage, leader of Konoha village, and so by extension was paid for by his village council. He came by with a check every month, a little old man with a wrinkled monkey-brown face and a silver goatee who always smelled like wood-pipe smoke and was forever dressed in the official red and white robes and conical hat with veil. He intoned deeply and said many nice and wise things and then he left the check on the single apartment table and six year old Naruko went back to living on her own except for her appointments with the council-paid-for tutor.

Naruko found it strange, the things she understood and the things didn't. She understood that she couldn't be adopted because her birth mother wasn't around to sign away adoption consent. She understood that her parents had been killed in the fox demon attack the day she was born, the one the Fourth Hokage had saved the village from in a great demonic battle and then died in. But she didn't understand anything about who her parents been, and she didn't understand why no one in her village seemed to like her. The adults always kept their children away from her on the playground, like she had a disease, or like there was some great childish secret she wasn't in on. People were always looking askance at her like she was some fearsome alien descended from the stars.

She'd asked Grandpa Hokage about this and he had claimed with an impressively straight face to have no idea what she was talking about. She'd asked about her parents and he had said learning about them would only help her dwell on the past. And he'd made sure to sound very kind and deep and wise and solemn as he said it. He said a village raised an orphan child, but Naruko was pretty sure no one was raising her. Still, it had sounded good when he said it.

Then he'd left again.

So the apartment looked like what it was - the apartment of someone who didn't have much and had learned to look after a home and cook for herself by the time she was six years old. The room was bare, and it was trying to be clean but the tablecloth was sloppy and the floor stains were only half-scrubbed away. The room was simple, a family room and dining room and kitchenette all rolled into one, with not much in it except for a kitchen table, a single chair, a refrigerator, a curtained window, some potted plants, and a kitchenette with a tiny oven and a relatively nice stove. The whole front room had lemon yellow tiling and a faded yellow floor, and for a long time after she wouldn't be able to see light yellow, faded and weak like roses for the sick, without thinking of her first real home outside the orphanage. Down the hall was a bathroom that wouldn't even have held two people, an office with a big brown rectangle of a desk so vast it could easily have fit Naruko's whole body that was used only for tutoring sessions, and finally at the end the bedroom, which held a big bed, a Konoha symbol tapestry, a ramen poster, a dresser, a calendar, and a set of slippers and a tea-maker near the glass doors leading out onto a rickety old metal patio with no furniture that Naruko sometimes liked to pretend would creak and shake until she fell right through and plummeted to her doom.

And so there was Naruko, in that same freeze-frame, stirring her pot of ramen, barefoot on the tall stool, slightly grimy and wearing baggy old shorts and T shirt. The apartment was the nicest place she'd ever had for herself, and she'd just recently learned to cook on her own, so she was rather proud. This ramen, her absolute favorite, was one of her first big meals.

She sat at the sloppily-clothed kitchen table, a tiny girl in a big chair swinging her feet, and she ate up every delicious, piping-hot bite with her chopsticks in her little wood bowl with the flower and leaf patterns. And she was proud of herself as she did. She'd made this - and now she got to enjoy eating it.

A love was born.

Ramen was Naruko's favorite, but she learned to make lots of other foods. She didn't know much because no one liked telling her anything, but she watched the tiny TV across from her bed at night, sitting cross-legged on that bed in her shorts, and she knew that women - whether they had a career or they didn't, and many of them didn't - were the ones who were expected to be able to cook and look after children and a home.

Naruko wanted to be a ninja. She knew that right away. She wanted to be one of those fighters for her village that everyone looked up to and respected, one of those big and tall green flak vested people who passed by so serious in the streets to thrilled and admiring cheers. But more than anything, Naruko also wanted to be accepted.

So she decided that she needed to learn how to cook lots of different healthy, delicious meals that would feed lots of people. She decided that she could both have a career and be a woman.

She did not know there was anything revolutionary in her culture about this.

So she went to the bookstores with all of the spare money she collected. As always, a stifling silence followed her everywhere she went, as she browsed the bookshelves and bent over and squinted importantly at all the cookbooks displayed. People gave her sideways glanced and then sidled casually out of the bookstore. By the time she got to the counter with her purchases, the shop was always nearly empty and the clerk always looked annoyed.

But she got her cookbooks.

She went back to her apartment, bought the materials, and learned slowly with many mistakes along the way. She fought her way through each and every recipe, determined to master every one. She treated it more seriously even than she treated her tutoring sessions in reading, writing, and math, which were going at about the speed of an inchworm.

Slowly, she had a wider and more diverse array of things to make for herself. She kept a binder full of her favorite recipes. In the glossy, perfect pictures in the cookbooks, she also saw images of what it seemed a home was supposed to look like, and she began to feel ashamed of her own.

So she went to work. She got teary with frustration countless times until she slowly made everything in her apartment totally, precision-perfect clean. She decorated it nicely, and it looked beautiful, like it was supposed to, like it did in the cookbooks.

Other things came up. She learned how to bathe herself and her clothes properly, when to do laundry in the tiny attached washer and dryer for smelly towels and sheets, how to take care of herself when she was sick, how to clean up vomit, how to unplug toilets with a plunger, one foot stuck determinedly atop the rim of the toilet. It was very quiet in the apartment, and sometimes lonely. Mornings with slippers and tea on the patio that was going to kill her, quiet noise and bustle passing by below, were about as loud as it got.

But it was better than the orphanage, full of dirt and mess and squalor, screaming and bowls of slop and too many young kids. It was better, too, than the dusty streets, than escaping across the landscape of the village with its white plaster buildings and multi-colored, swirling roofs and squatting underneath the shade of one of the countless dark green trees for hours as she ignored the frightened looks of the passersby and watched insects crawl across her skin. The vast sandstone Hokage Monument loomed over everything, chalk full of glaring, intimidating adult male faces framed by an open, hot blue sky. Beyond the village were the forests, and then the great wooden wall wrapped around the only place she knew, and if she sat there long enough she became intimately aware of being trapped, hemmed in, and glared at from everywhere.

No, she did not like living in the streets.

This was better. She had gotten it because she had told the Hokage she wanted to be a ninja someday, so the council agreed like with many other kids to fund her training in hopes of what they'd get in the future. This was better. She had wonderful food and a clean, nice space to retreat to all to herself. So she told herself to put up with the silence, and with being alone. Being alone was better than putting up with angry women who dressed her roughly and grumbled over her and glared at her in the orphanage. Being alone was better than getting into screaming matches with those women amidst the crying squalor of younger kids.

She was moving up in the world. This was Naruko's next step forward.

She just had to be patient, and wait until eight years old when she could register at the Ninja Academy. Ninja, she knew, made real money. Her parents, she knew, had been ninja who fought the fox demon attacking the village on the day of her birth, the one the Fourth Hokage died destroying. Neither of those were the real reason she wanted to become a ninja - she wanted the respect the career offered - but they helped all the same.

Villagers, she knew, liked ninja. That was the point. It was the only reason she put up with her boring-ass tutoring sessions. Ninja had to know reading, writing and math. "The career requires education," Grandpa Hokage had said in his airy, dismissive way.

So she put up with all this, because it was better.

But in the end, her favorite thing - the only thing she truly enjoyed - was still to cook. Naruko loved food. She loved making good food, and then eating what she made. It was that simple. Comfort foods like ramen were her favorite, but that was the great thing about food - there was such a wondrous variety to choose from. She made a face, stuck out her tongue, and flipped the channel every time she saw a dieting or some other youth-obsessed commercial for women on one of those feminine TV stations.

There was fitting in, and then there was crazy. Only crazy people stopped eating food when they had a perfectly good meal right in front of them. Naruko had high standards for what she watched on television, damnit.

Naruko knew adult words like "ass" and "damnit." She listened to the adults she passed in the streets.

Her love for food was really cemented, however, by one particular day.

She was walking along a Konoha road one day when she saw a tiny shop, white with brown wood lining and a pointed roof, its door made of cloth. It was a ramen place called Ichiraku's, but what really interested her was the colorful, excited sign currently hanging above their entrance. "Eating Contest Held Today!" was painted across it in hysterical capital letters, ended with lots of exclamation points.

Naruko could eat four or five bowls in one sitting, and that was without trying very hard, so she was interested in this contest full of people who could supposedly eat more than her. And it was a ramen place, which made it even better.

But would she drive out their customers…?

She ducked hesitantly underneath the cloth door, letting a glance of sunlight momentarily peek through onto the floor, and then she quickly squatted in a shadowy corner of the shop to watch. It looked like fun. Big crowds were cheering down the long, warm wooden bar shiny with polish, a gleaming metallic open kitchen for making the ramen just beyond the bar. Everyone came close around the eating contestants, swapping bets, cheering and chanting and counting down as bowl after bowl was eaten.

Naruko was surprised, though. None of these people could eat much beyond what she could eat.

She looked down at her empty pocket with its little green frog wallet, Gama-chan. Gama-chan was happy when he was fat and his golden mouth was open to hold money. But right now Gama-chan was very thin.

At last, she stood up, pushed through many adult legs - mostly male - and walked up to the counter. She stood on a stool and tugged on the fat old chef's arm. He looked around, his apron stained, and paused, staring at her. The crowds suddenly went silent.

"People who win this eating contest get money, right?" she asked. She'd figured out how it worked. The restaurant gave away money to keep contestants coming in. But they got even more from the lunch-people visiting to watch the sight of people's eyes watering as they downed countless bowls of ramen as fast as they could.

"... That's right," said the pretty teenage girl who was the waitress, trying to smile. She had a round, cheerful face and long brown hair tied up under a white kerchief.

"I want to try," said Naruko. "To win the eating contest. But if I win, you have to give me the money."

"... How old are you?" said the fat old chef, bewildered.

"I am six," said Naruko matter of factly. There were a few chuckles and snickers from watching men, almost despite themselves.

"... Well," said the chef, grinning, "alright." He turned to the reigning champion. "Do you take the challenge?" It was a big bear of a man with strong laborer's arms and a silvery beard. Naruko lifted her chin at him and glared, arms crossed, standing on the stool to see eye to eye.

The man was smirking. "Yeah," he said, shrugging. "I'll take it."

So Naruko sat down beside him on a fellow red-seated stool. Big stacks of bowls of ramen were placed in front of each of them. Naruko knew her goal - she just had to keep eating really fast until her opponent gave up.

This was much easier than she was pretty sure being a ninja would be.

The grinning chef and the equally delighted waitress began counting down as more and more curious people began flooding into the restaurant in the back of the crowds. People pushed toward Naruko, jostling, and the heat became nearly suffocating. "Ready?! One - two - three - GO?!"

And so Naruko grabbed a bowl and began downing it.

She had her strategy. Focus on nothing but her food and the arm movements of the guy beside her. Finish her last bowl when his arms finally stopped going up and down.

Simple.

So she ate - and ate - and ate. The food was hot and her stomach got uncomfortably full, but there were worse things in life. Besides, she was determined to win!

So she just kept eating, counting bowls, until finally her contestant stopped, put his bowl down, ducked off to the side, and threw up. "Aaah!" people began shouting, raising their arms and stepping back as vomit splattered them.

Naruko kept her promise. She finished her bowl, then put it down with a satisfied sigh. "Ten!"

There was a pause - and then everyone began cheering. With a yelp, she was actually lifted up into the air. Surfing on a sea of hands and excited chanting, she slowly began laughing, the food rumbling around in an amusing way in her stomach.

Eating, she decided, was the best thing ever. And the very best food in the world was ramen.

She sat at the bar and chatted with the curious chef and waitress after. They were a father and daughter, Ichiraku Teuchi and Ichiraku Ayame, and they ran Ichiraku's together. They'd begun it to become closer after Ayame's mother had passed away.

Teuchi and Ayame watched Naruko talk, silently marveling at the change. Not only was there a change in the atmosphere - Ichiraku's was now a crowded, chattery, cheerful place full of laughter, with no one having any problem with Naruko and someone giving her an occasional pat on the back that shoved her whole body forward on the way by.

But there was also a change in Uzumaki Naruko, once someone was nice to her.

She was a high-voiced, girlish, bubbly chatterbox of a girl, the blonde pigtails somehow fitting her cheerful face perfectly. She said "dattebayo" a lot, a little verbal quirk at the end of her sentences when she got really passionate about something she said.

"I want to be a ninja who does nice things and helps good people a lot, dattebayo!" she said earnestly, leaning forward, big baby blues shining.

Then, inevitably, it happened. Some guy with glasses and a hard hat walked in and said, "Hey, isn't that the monster brat?" He sounded more confused than he did jeering or insulting.

But despite Teuchi and Ayame's silent fear… Naruko didn't get upset or teary. She turned right around in her seat.

"Hey, isn't that the stupid fucking four-eyed asshole not smart enough to go above working in construction? Dattebayo!" she snapped, losing her temper completely.

The man paused… and then he and all the people around him actually laughed. Somehow, it was more endearing coming from a six year old girl. "Hey, she's got you their, bud," one of his friends laughed, they all chuckled, and then their group began talking amongst themselves and Naruko turned matter of factly back to Teuchi and Ayame as if the whole encounter had never happened.

"So!" She brightened, beaming. "Are we friends now?" she asked in a high, cheerful voice, a total switch-around from just a second ago. "Can I come back here again?" She began kicking and swinging her feet furiously, moving in a bubbly and air-headed way back and forth on her stool.

Teuchi looked at Ayame. Ayame looked at Teuchi.

"Yeah, fuck them," Teuchi decided bluntly, turning back to Naruko and putting one massive arm and hand on his counter. "You can come back in here anytime you want."

Naruko brightened, thrilled, and from there Ayame was Ayame-nee-chan and Teuchi was Teuchi-oji-san and instead of them adopting her, she kind of adopted them.

Another thing Naruko learned from TV about women in her culture - and, slowly, from Ayame-nee-chan as well - was that they were said to work somewhat less but be involved in their community somewhat more. So she decided to try that. Getting involved in her community.

But she would approach big play groups or even women's groups, and they would all send her back where she'd come from, pointing, turning her away at the door - sometimes even the physical door. No one wanted to play with her.

Finally, getting fed up one day, she ran down the street, squatted underneath the eaves of a shop, and cried for a few minutes, fist held against her eyes. No one stopped to help her, but she did not expect them to, so this was not disappointing. Finally, she decided she was sick of crying, and she lay her back with a frustrated thump back against the shop wall, hoping the shop-owner wasn't about to kick her off of his premises for "loitering."

"What can I do?" she asked the clear blue sky in exasperation.

She thought about it for a minute… and decided that this rule just meant women knew who they were outside work better than men did. Well, she didn't need someone else to do that! There were plenty of alone activities she could do. She could… knit, or work on puzzles, or something.

… Neither of those things sounded very appealing, but she would think of something! She leapt to her feet, determined once more.

She walked back to her apartment, stuck the key in the lock, jiggled, opened up the faded white front door, looked up… and paused in surprise. A slow smile formed over her features.

Plants.

She'd wanted potted plants in her apartment from the very first day she was here. She named each and every single one, cried real tears when one died, and she thought they made her much-improved apartment, which was now full of warm red checkered cloth, much, much prettier. She also liked the feeling of living things needing her.

So what if she started a garden? But she didn't have a place for it!

Then she looked up, determined. That was a stupid reason not to start a garden. She didn't have a place for it? Ha!

She could fix that.

So the next day, she went to the big round council building, greyish-eggshell-blue and full of huge bulges and many stories. She entered the main doors past the green flak vested guards and walked up the many, many, many steps to the Hokage's office. She walked up to the guards standing on either side of the big double doors in the commercial-carpeted outer waiting room.

"I want to see Grandpa Hokage," she announced.

They didn't even flinch or move their heads to look down at her. They continued to stand at attention, looking straight at the far wall.

"Oh. Excuse me."

Uzumaki Naruko cleared her throat and took a deep breath.

"I WANT TO SEE GRANDPA HOKAGE! AAAAAHHHH -!"

They had just scrambled to quiet her down when the double doors opened. Naruko blinked and looked up with big blue eyes from where she'd sat down on the floor on her butt.

"Oh! Hi, Grandpa!" she said with a bright, sunny smile, as if they had just met coincidentally in the park.

"Naruko. I thought I heard your dulcet tones," Grandpa Hokage sighed, opening up the front door. "Let her through. Come on in, Naruko. I have a free hour, so of course you would come now."

"That's right," said Naruko, walking past him. "I have excellent timing."

"Indeed," he said dryly, and shut the door on the faces of his bewildered and indignant ninja guards. "So." He sighed and turned to her. "What do you need?"

She'd sat down in front of his huge brown wood desk, a big rectangular thing with an open square underneath for people's legs. Naruko had seated herself in the chair in front of the desk, legs swinging above the commercial carpet. She looked around curiously, not remotely afraid, the vast glittering floor-length windows behind his comfortable desk chair looking out over stunning views of Konoha that she was by now used to. Quiet calligraphic pieces of his own design hung on the walls.

Sarutobi Hiruzen, Third Hokage, sat his creaking old bones down in his desk chair. "Naruko," he reminded her, and she looked around, startled. "You wanted to ask me something?" he said patiently.

"Oh. Right!" She beamed. "I want a house! Dattebayo!"

The Third Hokage sighed, put two fingers to his nose, and then took out his wood-pipe. He would need a smoke for this.

"You want a house. With the apartment or instead of the apartment?" he clarified. He lit the pipe with his lighter, took a deep breath of smoke and blew it out in a ring, eyeing her like they were bargaining. One never knew with Uzumaki Naruko.

"Instead of the apartment," she said in a very certain voice, nodding once.

"Ah. And why do you want a house?"

"I want a garden." She frowned. "Nobody will play with me and I want a garden."

Hiruzen relaxed and felt himself gentle. Maybe he was just a sucker for little blonde pig-tailed girls who needed his help, but his first thought was that she could have been out trying to figure out how to commit thievery or mass murder. Instead she wanted a garden.

"Okay," he said, smiling slightly, putting his wood-pipe in his mouth. "It is the first time you have ever asked me for extra money. Therefore, you can have a house."

"Yay!" Naruko cheered.

"But you have to take good care of it. Like you do with your apartment," he added sternly.

"Okay!"

"And take good care of yourself, too."

"Okay!" This one was said with more impatience, Naruko's hands spread and her expressive face exasperated.

"Well then. Since you want a garden. Perhaps a quiet home on the outskirts of the forest surrounding the village would do nicely?" he said crisply. "Anything downtown would be a compound and -"

"That costs too much money. Yeah, yeah," she sighed. It occurred to Hiruzen that she was too young to deserve to truly understand what that meant, and yet she did. Naruko noticed prices; she had to pay for her own things every day. It was why math was her only academic subject that was progressing well in tutoring.

"Very well then," said Hiruzen. "I will find you a nice little home with a place to form a garden in a forest on the outskirts of the village."

Naruko thought that might be preferable anyway. Less hateful villagers around there. She'd never liked the glares she'd sometimes gotten from her morning patio perch.

It would still be quiet there. But she was used to quiet.

Naruko methodically, squatting on the apartment floor, picked up the last of her things and put them in a little cloth bag. The apartment was empty. The floor was entirely cleared. All her things were gone; the plants, the curtains, and the things hanging on the walls were gone; it was as if she had never been and that was a very lonely feeling.

She had asked Grandpa Hokage very seriously to give her plants to a nice person who would take good care of them. She had cried real tears again when they had left, going with some official-looking ninja. Everything else was coming with her. The boxes full of her stuff had been moved by a moving company hired by the council, already sent to her new place.

Naruko picked up her cloth bag and walked to the door. "Goodbye," she told the creaky old yellow apartment, saluting it, and she closed the door and left it forever.

She felt very grown-up walking down the streets toward her new house, her little bag in tow. This was what being an adult was all about, she felt.

She picked her way underneath the shadows of the massive dark green trees all growing together, past their deeply grooved dark brown trunks, climbing her way down the dim, cool dirt path she had already practiced walking several times. Leaves crunched underneath her sandals. She suddenly came around a corner and to an opening leading to a vast clearing. The reveal was startling and impressive.

There it was, she thought, smiling. Her new house.

It was a one-story traditional-looking abode, all pointed roofs and rice paper screen doors and natural wood. It even had a lifted porch the house sat on, one which wrapped all the way around. The nice thing about being out here was that she could leave the screens open in summertime to listen to the crickets. No one would bother her all the way out here, not like in downtown Konoha with its bustling streets.

The space around the house was bare soil, all fresh and nice for a garden. She brightened, pleased.

She walked down the little embankment and ran to the house, stepping up quickly onto the porch and sliding off her shoes. She slid the big main door aside, entered - and stopped, her feet coming against something.

She looked down and smiled again. By her feet were bags of soil, little plants in cloth wrappings, and several books on how to create a Zen-style garden like those found in temples and teahouses.

Grandpa Hokage, she thought fondly, shaking her head.

And so even before she had gotten totally unpacked and put her warm red checkered cloth everywhere, too excited to wait, she started out in crafting her garden. It would ideally wrap all the way around the house, both front and back.

She started with stepping stones and a property-wide layer of moss. She added in rounded bushes, trees, a little waterfall pond, and scattered natural-looking flowers. The soft trickling was nice in the quiet. This quiet was peaceful - full of life and nature sounds beyond in the tall lines of trees and the forest.

This quiet was not lonely at all.

She added in a little stone bench to sit on and have tea in her slippers in the mornings, completing the picture.

Of course, it wasn't all that quick and easy. She had to learn how to take care of all this. But she found that enjoyable, kneeling and digging away in the soil, the satisfying snap of pulling out offending weeds, the wonderful peace of watching nourishing water from a hose flow into plants that needed it. She would talk to the sick plants as she worked on them, asking what ailed them.

Grandpa Hokage caught her doing that once while bringing her council money and joked that as long as the plants didn't start talking back, it was okay.

But in a way, the plants did talk back. She saw all their little symptoms and signs, and she learned what would make them feel better. It was like cooking. In the end, what did she get out of it? A warm, tasty meal. A beautiful surrounding garden.

The inside was mostly empty rooms with matting and rice paper screen doors. She made herself a little palette by a usually open screen door leading out to the back garden, stocked the kitchen well with lots of delicious food, and left her pretty, warm, humble decorations all over the place to warm it up. But that wasn't enough, she decided. These bare walls needed a little extra… something.

The next thing she asked Grandpa Hokage for was painting lessons from an instructor from the Fire Country capitol with its Daimyo. Why not? She had a few extra hours each day. It was amazing how much time you had when no one wanted to talk to you.

The teacher who came to her house for months thereafter was a straight-backed, thin, prim woman with long dark hair and her pale, sharp nose stuck in the air. But in her own cold way, she was a good teacher. Naruko hadn't trusted her at first… until she'd seen her start to work. The easel and paints were set in front of her… and suddenly her hands and her words flowed.

Here was a woman who threw all her joy, all her personality, into what she did. Her face just lit up as she painted, as she taught. Naruko could understand that, so after that she trusted her more.

And so Naruko learned the joys and frustrations of painting. She got her face and hands messy with paint as she was taught first-hand about shapes and strokes, brushes and colors, foreground and background. She was treated like a sophisticated older student, and she liked that.

"You are unusually good at this for a young child," said the teacher, pleased, and Naruko privately thought it was interesting that, as she'd suspected, a teacher from the capitol treated her better than a teacher from Konoha would have.

And so slowly, she painted colorful murals across her home's walls. Some of them were wild landscapes, others landscapes only from her own imagination - dreams, fantastical surrealities. She had what she told Grandpa Hokage and the Ichirakus was "the beautifulest and most colorfulest house in the village."

They always smiled when she said that.

Eventually, she wasn't sure what sort of test she had passed, but a year before Ninja Academy entry was legally allowed, Grandpa Hokage came to her house very solemnly one day carrying an old, sea salt-encrusted wooden crate full of shifting scroll sounds inside. She paused at the open screen doorway of her front door, and then stepped aside. "Come in," Naruko told Grandpa Hokage, surprised, barefoot and in short jean shorts and a tank top.

She was seven by then, and happier. This little place out in the quiet and peaceful forest amid gardens, her trips to Ichiraku's, her painting lessons in the comfort of her own home with a nice person, even the increased funds for her bigger place - they were helping a lot. As her new clothes and the shiny pink baubles in her blonde pigtails could attest.

She stepped aside. Grandpa slipped off his expensive white slippers and padded silently inside with the crate full of scrolls.

"These," he set them down on the floor uncategorically with a sigh of effort, "were your mother's."

Naruko stood very still, a feeling inside her like she'd just been punched in the gut by a very cold, ghostly hand. Her eyes were wide, her face pale.

"The Uzumaki were a ninja clan," said Grandpa Hokage, his face unreadable.

Everyone knew what ninja clans were. All villages full of ninja had many of them. They were long-standing ninja fighting families all grouped together under one set of abilities. Some of them even had distinctive clan markings.

Naruko had just had no idea she was a member of one. Yeah, her parents had been ninja… but that wasn't the same thing as saying they were powerful enough to be in a clan.

"I want you to have your mother's birthright - as her daughter," the Hokage continued, carefully expressionless and toneless, staring straight ahead. "These scrolls contain your clan's fighting techniques and ninja teachings. You get them a year before Ninja Academy signups. So you'll be somewhat ahead of the game. How far ahead is up to you and your willpower, your work ethic in ninja techniques training."

"Why - why am I only now hearing of this?!" Naruko demanded.

"I didn't think you were ready," the Hokage admitted. "Now, you are."

"Grandpa… what were my parents and my clan like?" Naruko pleaded. "Please - why does everyone hate me so much, dattebayo?!"

"... I cannot tell you that," the Hokage admitted, unusually honest.

"Why not?!"

"Because you are not ready."

"Goddamnit!" Naruko whirled away, furious tears that she hated in her eyes. She despised crying, she decided. It never did a damn thing.

The Hokage stood there, very still, and then moved past her to the door. "Train with them if you wish," he said, his back to her. "Do what you will with them. A scarf of your mother's is also in there. They are all yours."

He slid open the door, his body framed by sunlight, and then he slid the door quietly closed behind him.

Naruko stood there, fists clenched and chest heaving, angry tears still in her eyes. Then she took a deep breath, closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were calm and deadly serious.

She walked over to the sea salt-encrusted crate of scrolls and stood over them, looming. It was time to start reading and training. If this was her only connection to her parents and her clan, then it just was, that was all.

She would have to make do.

She reached into the crate, brushing parchment scrolls aside - and grasped onto a warm knitted blue and white striped scarf. She picked it up, held it to her face, breathed deep. It was wool. Her mother's. Her mother, an Uzumaki clan member, whoever she was, had worn this.

She would never wear it. Instead, it would carry a treasured place on a high shelf inside her house. Tender care would always be taken care of it.

And so Naruko fell to Uzumaki clan training with her family scrolls. She did, after all, have an entire year of free time mostly to herself alone out in the forest aside from housekeeping, basic academic tutoring, and hobbies.

First, the Uzumaki had a very particular healing technique. Naruko had always heard amongst other things that women were supposed to be healers, so she learned that one first. Then she would move on to fighting techniques, she decided.

Again, she did not think this particularly revolutionary for the culture she lived in.

How it worked was, either the injured person would bite the Uzumaki or the injured Uzumaki would bite themselves. Uzumaki chakra flooded the injured person and healed them. Naruko didn't have anyone else to practice this with, so she practiced on herself, cutting herself with a kunai knife and then biting on herself and trying to heal the cut.

This didn't work too well at first, and eventually she figured out it was because she didn't know how to access the chakra energy inside her that she'd read about in those scrolls. Chakra was supposedly a combination of physical and spiritual energy that moved through the body in veins like blood vessels. Ninja used it to do impossible, seemingly magical things.

There were also these things called bloodline abilities. They were chakra related abilities passed down through the generations of a family or clan - they were called "genetic." The Uzumaki genetic inherited ability was huge chakra coils and loads of really strong chakra, which was why they could flood a person with chakra without hurting themselves and heal that person.

So first, before biting-healing, she had to learn to access her chakra.

She did what the scrolls recommended. She sat down, closed her eyes, and focused on her center - her hara, or diaphragm. This was where all the chakra coil veins emanated from, where they all supposedly centered. She eventually felt a burning sensation there - and she pulled on it.

She opened her eyes and gasped. Waves of visible blue energy were emanating out around her in circles, everywhere she looked. She could suddenly feel the chakra running through her body like veins, that burning, tickling sensation running, coursing through her body.

She let it go and then she was just sitting there on her living room floor cross-legged again.

She tried biting herself again, this time focusing on her hara… and it worked. The cut glowed and healed over instantly. She beamed and jumped up in triumph, cheering.

She could heal people! She really could!

That, it turned out, was one of the simplest techniques an Uzumaki could learn. It already almost came to them naturally, this ultra-fast healing, and it made them nearly impossible to kill. After all, if someone could continually re-heal themselves with more chakra… and they almost never ran out of chakra… how was anyone supposed to kill them?

Next, she tried the two most useful things it looked like the Uzumaki had available to them, in her young eyes - taijutsu and ninjutsu. Instead of practicing sitting in her living room with a kunai, as she had with biting-healing, she practiced these out in her back garden.

Their taijutsu, or hand to hand combat, style was called Water Weaving Fist. She began trying the katas and sequences of moves for it, working out every single day and practicing taijutsu moves and stances according to the scrolls over and over again. The Water Weaving Fist was a method of hand to hand combat in which the fighter never let themselves be touched - that was the goal. They did this by flowing around counter-attacks, instead of directly blocking them and thereby touching their opponent. Water Weaving involved lots of acrobatics, surprise moves, speed, and flowing sequences around attacks. Water Weavers attacked through these surprise acrobatics - by touching in and then flipping over the opponent and leaping out of the way. To touch in and then pull back out would not gain a full attack effect, so instead the user followed through with their attack and then leaped acrobatically over their opponent to land behind them, thus surprising their opponent and neatly avoiding counter-assault.

She practiced speed and agility and acrobatic-intensive workout sequences, because those three things were the most critical to the style of taijutsu she had chosen. Happily, perhaps because of genetics, she thought she seemed to prove a natural talent at those styles of workouts.

Next came ninjutsu - chakra based techniques that looked like magic to the untrained. She'd honestly thought ninjutsu would be harder than it was. But it turned out that when it came to big techniques that required a lot of chakra… even a young Uzumaki already had all they needed. So from there it all came down to a matter of personal prowess.

Naruko wasn't entirely sure how good she was, but happily, she got the basics for her own clan down quickly.

She practiced speeds of hand sign sequences until her hands hurt, practiced molding her chakra countless times and flowing chakra through her hands to create techniques, and slowly she improved.

The Uzumaki's main staples were Wind elemental ninjutsu and Water elemental ninjutsu. So she focused on mastering the two separately first. Just basic. She practiced blowing out a gust of cutting wind with her hand, and she practiced aiming a jet of water at a specific place. Not even a real technique. Simple stuff.

The Wind part was easy, especially in lower level areas of power. She just made the air around her blow out in a cutting gust of wind and injure a far tree at the edge of her back garden clearing, leaving a deep groove there in its trunk.

Water was harder. Because here was the thing about Water. Usually, one required a nearby body of Water in order to create Water ninjutsu. They took the Water from the pond, for example, and used it themselves.

This was frustrating, because usually it made Water the most limiting element of the lot. Earth was everywhere. So was Wind. And Fire was actually created from heat inside the human body and blown outward through the mouth. But Water could only be found in certain areas.

So she practiced picking up a jet of water from her pond and blowing it at the same poor, abused tree. This came relatively quickly.

Now to try the bigger thing.

Certain Uzumaki had so much control over their natural element of Water that they could summon it from the Water in the air. The Senju in Konoha were famous for this, particularly the Second Hokage. But the Senju were cousins of the Uzumaki, and the Senju had gotten it from them.

So theoretically, she could do this.

It tooks weeks of effort. Mostly it was frustrating effort, too, because she was standing there in a hand seal with a really red face, ejecting chakra, and nothing was happening. Finally, she decided to imagine something - she tried to focus on imagining little tiny droplets of water in each molecule of the air as she made the effort.

Why not? What could it hurt, right?

But she looked up - and she gasped, amazed.

Hundreds of little droplets of water were floating, hovering and trembling, in the air around her.

Naruko grinned, and the droplets all fell to the damp, mossy cool forest ground at once with a splash and a sparkle.

So then she continued practicing Wind, this time father out in the forest, even as she practiced summoning Water from the air and getting the same jet of water that she had before with the pond. It was hard. She passed out a few times, woke up on the forest floor the next morning, and walked calmly, yawning, back to her house with a pounding head and a dry mouth that she had to fix with lots of food and liquids.

That was what happened when a person lost too much chakra at once. Luckily, since she was an Uzumaki, it always came back quickly.

Next came the final step. She did this just as she felt she was getting good at the Water Weaving Fist in her other area of study. An Uzumaki could also combine Wind and Water together in techniques. Their name meant "Whirlpool" and that was why they had chosen that name. Everyone thought it was because the Uzumaki clan had originated on a green foreign island surrounded by turbulent seas.

That was not it. An Uzumaki was an Uzumaki because they could use Wind and Water at the same time.

There was this thing called the Grand Whirlpool Technique. And so even as she practiced other small-level Wind and Water ninjutsu that did various things from her scrolls, she also tried on a larger level mastering the Grand Whirlpool Technique - the quintessential Uzumaki staple technique. In this technique, a massive whirlpool of wind and water appeared from the air above the victim and slammed into the victim, at least breaking several bones if not drowning them altogether as it threw them about.

There was really no way to block it.

In the midst of practicing this, she passed out a lot again.

Naruko wasn't sure how far she'd progressed in comparison to others. She had no one to compare herself to, so she wasn't sure how remarkable her improvement was. She just tried the best she could every day.

Meanwhile, she did a lot of study and reading. These were two things she'd never thought she'd enjoy, but this clan reading was interesting.

First, the Uzumaki were experts in sealing. But in order to learn seal fighting techniques, one first had to master basic intellectual seal study. So that was what she set out to do. Seals were basically just scientifically precise drawings on something that changed whatever they were placed on when a bit of the seal-mistress's chakra was ejected into them. Some seals could entrap impossibly huge things within them. Others could change the chakra of whatever they were placed on. Those were just two examples. There were even objects or people who could contain demons in seals inked onto their bodies. Those people were called jinchuuriki, and she studied them. But a person must have enormous natural chakra reserves in order to contain a demon inside their bodies. Usually, the jinchuuriki seal was drawn onto the hara, or diaphragm - the center of all chakra. There were varying kinds of seals used, and different seals and symbols could do different things. There was societal prejudice against jinchuuriki, who were thought to be mentally influenced by their demon, but this was imprecise and incorrect - a jinchuuriki was almost never mentally influenced in any way by what they contained. This general rule applied to all kinds of sealing.

The whole thing was all so fascinating.

So she studied these scientifically precise, intricate drawings and puzzles, figuring out what different symbols meant, reading up on different methods of seal creation, and practicing drawing her own seals. She was surprisingly good at this, and she wasn't sure why. Something about figuring out the intricacies of a visual puzzle and then writing some out of herself, getting ink stains on her fingers against the parchment, was just interesting in a way her tutoring sessions were not.

She spent hours on the floor of her house, bent over sealing scrolls, scribbling and practicing away in surprisingly silent thought and concentration.

But this wasn't all she read from the Uzumaki. The scrolls on the clan makeup and where they came from were just as enlightening.

The Uzumaki were originally from a green island surrounded by turbulent seas called Whirlpool Country. They'd been the kings of their own village full of ninja - they weren't from Konoha. Their village, the village Naruko supposed with painful longing, with nostalgia for a place she had never been, that she was supposed to have grown up in - their village had been called Uzu.

The Uzumaki had become powerful enough that Uzu had been destroyed by enemy forces during the Third Great Ninja War. It had taken two villages just to destroy her one clan. Most Uzumaki were slaughtered; the rest made a run for it and scattered to the winds. There was only a single scroll on this fallout, more freshly written than the rest - probably written, Naruko realized with a pang as she stared down at the handwriting, by one of her parents.

This meant her parents had been foreign refugees; they'd come to Konoha and become a clan here to seek refuge. It also meant Naruko's clan was gone. She might be all that was left.

It was strange, mourning for a people you'd never met and a home you'd never had.

But this did explain a lot. Why did the villagers dislike her, why did the adults keep their children away? Because they didn't feel she belonged here. She wasn't supposed to have been a Konoha ninja. She, like her parents she supposed, were outsiders and invaders, the remnants of a people who weren't supposed to be around anymore.

This reaction to what they were made her strangely angry, and Naruko wasn't sure she liked that feeling so she pushed it away.

Grandpa Hokage had mentioned her mother in particular, she realized, pondering later. And it was her mother's, the scarf that she had. Why her mother in particular? Had her mother been the more powerful Uzumaki - not her father? Were the Uzumaki matriarchal?

Her scrolls didn't say. There was so much she wanted to know that she didn't.

She did know that Konoha's Senju and Uzu's Uzumaki were cousins. That Konoha and Uzu had been allies. This was probably why her parents had come here. The swirl designs on Konoha ninja leaf green flak vests - that was the Uzumaki symbol, Naruko realized proudly, repeated over and over again. A sign of Konoha-Uzu friendship. The Senju were now nearly gone, so she was all that was left among her generation on either end.

There was one thing that puzzled her. All Uzumaki were supposed to have blood-red hair and light-colored eyes. It was a sign of their clan, a marker. She did have light-colored eyes… but her hair was blonde. And as for her whisker cheek markings? The Uzumaki scrolls said nothing of them.

It was almost like her father hadn't been an Uzumaki at all. She didn't like to think about that, so most of the time she didn't. She told herself that Grandpa Hokage had said both of her parents had died fighting the fox demon on the day of her birth - fighting so the Fourth Hokage could get there in time and die destroying it. Both of her parents had been brave. So they at least must both have been registered as Konoha ninja… mustn't they?

But she had her mother's surname. And Grandpa Hokage didn't seem to want to talk at all about her father.

So she didn't think about it too much.

(But she did wonder, deep down, if another reason people didn't like her was because she was a half-Konoha bastard.)

Naruko was signed up for the Ninja Academy on a snowy January day, about two months before classes were due to begin.

Signup day happened all at once. All the new eight-year-old trainees arrived with their parents. The parents went inside to sign up at the big table in the front entryway full of green-vested teachers with the standard Konoha hitai-ate marker bands tied somewhere on their bodies - each band engraved with the Konoha leaf symbol - while the children wandered around, checking out their new school.

The grand Konoha Ninja Academy, one of the best and most powerful in the world.

While most kids went with their parents, Naruko went with a ninja assigned by the Hokage. He went in his own green flak vest and hitai-ate marker band up to the table to sign her up for classes while Naruko ignored the glares of a few teachers and parents and wandered off alone to search the halls. By now, the parents pulling their kids away was standard.

She was pretty sure most kids didn't trust her just because their parents didn't. She wasn't sure any of them understood why.

Interested, she walked the halls. The big main building had several floors, all linoleum hallways with marked wooden classroom doors. The other buildings all arced in a V around the training field central courtyard. All of the Academy building roofs were flat and able to stand on, all of the classrooms were never used at the same time, and there was also a front courtyard that led up to the big main building for kids to be in.

The classrooms differed. Some were just simple classrooms with rows of desks and chairs. Others were lecture hall style classrooms with long three-person tables set in tiers. Either way, each classroom had a blackboard, a teacher's desk, and a big space up at the front. And all of the classrooms had windows showing the usually sunny and green outside, which was nice.

Naruko eventually wandered out into the front courtyard. The buildings were mostly white and built in a huge dome shape, with wood additions and the red Fire Country symbol somewhere on each of them. Somehow they seemed very grand to her, huge and larger than life, like this was the end of the road and she'd never be finished and graduated into the forces from here.

She would be a teenager by the time she graduated anyway. Practically an adult. It seemed an awfully long time away.

Turning back from the big main building, she trudged across the snow-packed courtyard to a tree with a tree swing. The trees' skeletal blue branches raised dead fingers towards the smooth silvery skies above, pearly and mimicking the brighter white of the snow also ringing the branches down below. There was a single aiming board for throwing kunai knives and shuriken tacked to this tree, old and faded and beaten-looking already, but most of the aiming boards, sparring space, and tackling dummies to practice taijutsu on were in the central courtyard unseeable back behind her.

She brushed the snow off the wood and rope tree swing next to this aiming board, the swing hanging from a big, thick branch full of hole-like knobs. Then she sat down, kicked her legs out, and started swaying back and forth, looking happily and daydreamily at the skies, smiling a little, her honey-colored pigtails going back and forth with the movement. She actually had nice clothes for winter now. The shiny pink baubles were still in her pigtails, but now she was wearing thick dark pants and a deep blue jacket that matched her eyes, with white gloves for her hands.

"You're a Hyuuga, right?! Why don't you show us how powerful you are?!"

Naruko paused, stopping her swing, and frowned at the jeering boy's voice coming from behind her.

"Look at her eyes! She's got to be one of those stuck up Hyuuga clan girls!"

"Your eyes are really creepy! Are you some kind of nightmare monster?!"

"Byakugan monster! Byakugan monster!" all three boys' voices began chanting.

Naruko had had enough. She jumped up and whirled around, fists bunched instinctively, to look. She felt rather indignant. No one bullied her, because no one would talk to her at all, and anyway there was nothing obvious about her to pick on. But she felt a deep-seated certainty in her heart that bullying was one of the most awful things in the world and a true ninja defended all people from all bullies everywhere.

Three boys were gathered around one girl, all four obviously signing up for classes like Naruko. So right away it was uneven and unfair anyway. The boys were still young enough that they had teeth missing and they all looked super dumb. They were all laughing and jeering at the girl, who was curled in on herself, hunched there in the snow, silent tears welling unshed in her eyes.

She seemed quiet, shy, reserved, and timid. Not only were three boys picking on one girl - three boys were picking on one girl who gave off waves of not having any fight in her.

The girl's eyes were odd. They were white and pupil-less, almost indistinguishable from the more ordinary white part surrounding them. They were staring kinds of eyes, the kinds of eyes where you couldn't always tell if they were looking at you. According to the boys, the girl was a Hyuuga and the eyes were a clan thing.

But the girl didn't seem ugly or mean! She had short blue-black hair, a round pale face, and she was a cute little thing dressed in very refined clothes. She was one of those reserved, traditional girls that Naruko secretly envied because she was nothing like them.

And she was obviously trying hard not to cry. Well, Naruko would just have to fix that. Hot with anger, she sprinted right over.

"Hey! Why don't you try picking on someone who actually fights back, assholes?! Dattebayo!"

Hyuuga Hinata's head snapped around with shameful hope at the shout. She was embarrassed that another girl had to intervene for her, but at the same time she was grateful. Then she saw the girl and her eyes widened.

This girl was all brightness, like the sun peeking through a cloud. She shone in the dour, black and white, snowy courtyard. She wore bright yellow pigtails, bright pink pigtail baubles, a bright blue jacket, and bright blue eyes. Her whisker cheek markings gave a cute, foxy look to her features. She gave off waves of determination, her chin lifted right up and her eyes shining happily and proudly.

She was everything Hinata was not.

"Who are you?" one boy asked rudely as they all stared.

"My name is Uzumaki Naruko and I'm the future Hokage! Dattebayo!" she announced fiercely.

The boys began laughing. "You?! Hokage?! Are you kidding me?! You could never be the voted in as the best shinobi in the village -!"

The lead boy who'd been talking choked to a halt, mainly because he'd been punched in the throat. Before they'd even seen her move, Naruko was there, her eyes deadly with determination.

She smirked. "I was distracting you. Morons."

She followed the punch through and the kid started to fall. She set her hands on his shoulders, flipped herself right over like an acrobat, and flung the first kid at the other two, sending them all flying. They all landed with a thud at the base of the nearest tree as Naruko landed on her feet.

"And don't try that again!" Uzumaki Naruko added, shouting temperamentally in a high, indignant voice.

The only emotion she hadn't shown was fear.

Naruko walked over to Hinata, bent down, and stuck out her hand. Naruko was figuring she had to try to make a friend at some point. This girl seemed as good a place to begin as any.

"Hey, Hyuuga," she said. "My name's Uzumaki Naruko. Nice to meet ya!" She grinned. Then she frowned, looking close in Hinata's face. Hinata jumped, wide-eyed and startled. "You okay?" Naruko asked, squinting one eye consideringly, tilting her head in concern.

"Oh. Y-yes!" Hinata quickly jumped to her feet, hands scrunched up before herself, big-eyed. "M-my name is Hyuuga Hinata," she added shyly, smiling. Then she remembered the hand.

She reached out, and Hyuuga Hinata and Uzumaki Naruko shook hands, smiling.

Hinata decided secretly that she admired this girl. She admired this girl a lot.

"Well, looks like we'll be in the same class!" said Naruko sunnily. She stuck her hands in her pockets, cheerful. "I'll warn you, people don't like me - I think it has to do with my clan, not me, but I don't know for sure. No one likes to talk about it.

"But if you don't mind… and if you don't mind that I don't got no parents because they died… do you want to be friends?"

It was the weirdest and most honest and upfront friend request that Hinata, the great princess of the Hyuuga clan, would ever receive.

"... Okay," she decided, amused. "Let's be friends."

Naruko and Hinata began meeting up regularly all those months before the Academy started, always somewhere at a fenced-off training field in Konoha or somewhere in the village. They walked around, trained together, went to Ichiraku's, and talked. They immediately started calling each other "-chan," each girl eager for different reasons to have an Academy best friend and Hinata genuinely seeing past Naruko's reputation to the nice person who had saved her that was underneath. Hinata may have been shy and timid, but she had a sweet heart.

Yet the more they talked, the more they learned what opposites they were.

Hinata wanted a best friend because she'd grown up the heiress to the prestigious and wealthy Konoha Hyuuga clan. Her clan was so huge it had one of the biggest downtown compounds of all. Hinata had grown up in a cold, strict, and severe environment where she had never had a real friend and she had never seemed to live up to her clan head father's expectations. This had worsened after her mother had passed away and her younger sister Hanabi had begun to show great spirit and skills.

Hinata was clan heiress for the time being, but she was fearful of failing her father.

Naruko wanted a best friend for the opposite reason. Growing up poor, orphaned, and alone, everyone hated her for mysterious background reasons she did not entirely understand. She had never had a chance for a single friend at all. Everything she had, she'd bulldozed her way to herself through sheer willpower.

Naruko was also afraid of failure - much more secretly. Because if she failed, the stakes for her were even higher than they were for Hinata.

"It's a good idea, you know, becoming Hokage," Naruko told Hinata thoughtfully as they were walking around town one day. "If I got everyone to respect me that way… I mean, it's just a higher version of my goals as a ninja. Then I might have a shot, right? Of course, no woman has ever become a Hokage before… but then I'll just be the first, dattebayo!"

She sounded so pleased by her plan, happy instead of terrified. Hinata envied that level of self confidence and sunniness. For the first time in her life, she felt like the retainer, not the main character.

Oddly, this didn't bother her.

"You know," she said quietly, "my name, Hinata, means sunflower. Hyuuga means 'sunny place' and all the given names in my immediate family start with a 'H' sound. But I think you deserve the name sunflower more than me."

Naruko smiled thoughtfully, whimsical.

"My name has two meanings," Naruko said. "Literally, it means 'ringing child' - which always puts me in mind of bells. But then Naruko are also an actual thing - they're wooden clappers used in Yosakoi dance, a kind of modern cultural traditional dance. So bells and dance. I always think of my name meaning as dancing bells."

They smiled at one another. At her most natural and happy, Naruko had a very calm, cheerful smile. It made a person feel better to look at it. With Naruko, Hinata's smile was calmer and happier, too.

Naruko learned Hinata's clan abilities as they began training and sparring together in usually green, fenced-off Konoha training fields around the village. They had agreed they both wanted to get stronger, each having a goal in mind - Naruko of becoming a great respected ninja, Hinata of making her father proud. And so they sparred together even before the Academy, to make sure they'd have a leg up from the first. Even in the cold and the snow, they fought as hard as they could with red hands, their breath coming in puffs before them.

"If people can hike and do extreme sports in the winter," Naruko had pointed out, "we can sure as hell train in the winter, too."

Hinata's clan, the Hyuuga, had two main abilities. Their eyes were indeed called the Byakugan. When she made a hand seal and channeled chakra, the veins around Hinata's eyes bulged with chakra and those white eyes gained sudden, intense-looking, fearsome silver pupils. This eye technique was known as a doujutsu. A doujutsu was an all-seeing eye that could see through all basic ninja abilities and read their movements better, including genjutsu, a kind of chakra-based illusion technique.

The Byakugan was a specific kind of doujutsu. The Byakugan could see through anything - any body, any sort of cover, and for incredibly long distances in an almost 360 degree circle. Hinata could literally see out of the back of her head.

The Hyuuga could also emanate chakra from any and all of the release points along their body. These release points for chakra coils along the body were called tenketsu.

They used these two abilities together, usually, to see into a person's chakra coils and fight them in close combat taijutsu using a style called Gentle Fist. The style was gentle because they emanated chakra from their hands and even other places - and every time they touched their opponent in a taijutsu battle in any place where a tenketsu point was near, they emanated chakra and tapped that tenketsu point closed. This not only interfered with chakra flow, it caused massive internal organ damage if a tenketsu point was closed near an internal organ.

The style was graceful, soft, deceptive, and deadly. A single touch could kill.

Hinata didn't use actual tenketsu point closure, but every time she hit a place where a tenketsu would have closed, she announced, "Closed." She did that a lot at first. This not only improved Naruko's Water Weaving greatly, it taught her a lot about anatomy and where not to get hit. And as Naruko improved against Gentle Fist, Water Weaving proved the perfect counterattack against Hinata's style.

So Hinata was forced to get fiercer. She was forced to improve. And as she spent longer and longer around Naruko, her self confidence, determination, and fierceness improved too.

No one could help being sunnier when around Naruko for long periods of time - especially if they fought with her. She was competitive but never mean, she had fun but could be deceptively deadly.

Hinata changed remarkably fast, spending every afternoon with Naruko, having a best friend to spar with that she knew she couldn't really hurt. Not only was she a better Hyuuga, but a lot of her shyness and timidity faded away. She became a quiet, graceful, calmly smiling girl with a lot of self-confidence and increased playful fighting spirit.

It was one of the most critical and influential points in Hinata's life - and she had the right influence. She often became fondly exasperated with "Naruko-chan."

But she was always grateful to her - loyal to the end.

Hinata helped Naruko, too. Naruko calmed down a little bit, became a little more smiling and girlish, even politer under Hinata's gentle influence. She laughed off "Hinata-chan's" fond exasperation a lot.

And Hinata improved more than Naruko's Water Weaving and knowledge of anatomy. She could practice all of her abilities now against a fighting opponent - being careful, of course, not to actually get seriously deadly. And in response to Hinata being able to close tenketsu, and with her increased knowledge of anatomy, she learned a few useful sealing battle techniques of her own.

She tattooed chakra enhancement seals onto all the most vital areas of her body, carefully and methodically inking them on her skin by herself at night in her home. And they were correct - she was certain of it. She tattooed containment-release seals onto her palms in the same way, to hold out her hands, suck up, and redirect (if she so chose) long distance attacks. She also learned, with Hinata to spar with, how to slap chakra suppressing seals onto different parts of a person's body with a mere touch during taijutsu - neatly blocking off their own ability to use chakra in that area, and perhaps seriously injuring them, right in the midst of their own victory over having touched a Water Weaving user.

All very Hyuuga abilities, she thought to herself proudly. She had Hinata to thank. "Closed," she began saying with a teasing grin.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Naruko, Hinata was having her own things to thank Naruko for.

As expected, Hinata's father Hiashi called Hinata and Hanabi into the Hyuuga clan compound indoor sparring room one day. It was a big room in the compound covered in matting, fenced in by screens, decorated with prestigious past clan awards. The entire clan knelt around the sparring mat, including Hinata and Hanabi's branch retainer cousin Neji, as Hiashi stood straight and solemn at the edge of the sparring mat.

Hinata and Hanabi faced each other on the mat in stances in the tense silence.

"This battle will be to decide who is my clan heiress," said Hiashi, to no one's surprise. And Hinata just saw a shot of her older cousin Neji's face.

A genius of ninja techniques, bitter because he was forever doomed by birth to be a branch family retainer, Hyuuga Neji was a great proponent of fate and of Hinata being fated to be weak despite being a main family member. He said it often in contemptuous tones and was very vicious against her out on the sparring mats, as if determined to prove himself right, or to take out his frustrations on what he saw as the main family's kindest and therefore weakest member.

And Hinata saw Neji silently sneer. Channeling pure Naruko in that moment, she saw red.

One thing Hinata had inherited from Naruko? She despised being underestimated in battle.

"Begin!" Hiashi called, his eyes widening, after the five seconds that had passed. And Hinata flew forward. In a few simple, quick, graceful moves, she had knocked the younger Hanabi over with a knife hand poised over her heart. The entire clan gasped.

Hinata paused - and slowly came back to herself. She was standing there, her face twisted coldly, Hanabi stunned and wide-eyed, breathing hard, lying there below her.

Hinata took a deep breath, closed her eyes. Calmed her face, and stood back. "Death point," she said crisply. "I believe that counts as a win."

The shocked silence was so thick it could have been cut with a knife.

"... That was very good, Hinata," said Hiashi, "and I expect to see that person again in the future. You remain clan heiress."

And he swept off the mat. The clan broke and slowly left the sparring room after him, talking in low, stunned, excited voices.

Hanabi's face broke in a grin of relief. "Thank God," she said weakly. "I didn't want to be clan heiress. It sounds awful. That's always been your thing."

Hinata snorted. Her face broke and she smiled reluctantly. Then she went and stood right up to Neji, who had stood slowly and was glaring in cold disbelief, his nose wrinkled.

"Don't you ever sneer at me again," Hinata said in a quiet, deadly voice.

"... I will prove you wrong, Hinata-sama," Neji swore solemnly at last, his face falling back into its usual pale, stoical mask. "I will prove that you are weak at heart, as you have always been. That people cannot change, and you do not belong as clan heiress."

Neji, Hinata thought, was bitter because his position within the clan could not change. Therefore, she continued in her own head clinically, he inflicted that on everyone else. She stood stiffly as he brushed past her and left the mats.

Hinata and Hanabi stared after Neji.

"Neji-nii-san's a dick," Hanabi said firmly at last, and Hinata laughed, falling back into her gentler self again. She and Hanabi, both still main family members as they weren't twins, left the mats alone, chatting happily.

When Hinata told Naruko proudly what happened the next day at one of their training fields, Naruko was ecstatic for her. She squealed and hugged her friend, jumping up and down. "You did it, you did it, you did it!" she cheered as Hinata laughed and hugged her back.

Then it happened.

"I'm so happy for you! Your sister sounds awesome!" Naruko stood Hinata back, hands on her shoulders, face bright and eager. "Can I meet her?"

And Hinata froze.

Because she knew that Hanabi could talk - especially when she lost her rather fiery and childish temper. And she knew that her father wouldn't want her associating with a ruffian like Uzumaki Naruko.

She also knew that her father could actually, physically do something about that.

Naruko's face faded. "... You don't want me to meet your family, do you?" she asked dully.

Hinata winced and looked away, trying to be polite and not sure what to say.

There was an awkward silence.

"... Okay." Naruko nodded, looking down, sorrowful but pretending it was okay. "You're ashamed of me. I get it."

"Naruko-chan, that's not it -!" Hinata looked up, pained and earnest and alarmed.

"No, it's okay, Hinata-chan. Really, it is. I'm not… I'm not angry… or trying to be passive aggressive… or anything." Naruko swallowed and looked down, pretending to pick at her fingernails, obviously trying to fight back tears. "Anyone… anyone around here would be ashamed to be friends with me. So I get it."

"Naruko-chan -!"

But Naruko had rushed off the training field before she could openly seem too upset to someone. And Hinata realized too late that part of Naruko was a stoical act. That Naruko was a lot more self conscious about certain things than she appeared to be.

Anyone she had ever met would be ashamed to know her.

What a thing to even think.

Hinata sat crouched in that same fenced-off green training field the next day. She waited. And she waited.

And she waited.

At last, just as the sun was setting, sending brilliant colors all over the Konoha swirling rooftop horizon and the fading snow… just as Hinata was beginning to lose all hope… she began to see Naruko's tiny figure appear in the distance. Hinata stood, heart in her throat, as it slowly got closer and closer.

Finally, Naruko looked up, saw her, and froze.

"Please don't walk away!" Hinata pleaded immediately. "I'm sorry. Let me explain."

And Naruko didn't walk away. They looked at each other across the gaping, painful chasm of a distance.

"... I wasn't sure you'd come," Naruko admitted.

Hinata smiled uncertainly. "That's my line," she returned, becoming shy for a moment like her old self again. "Look, Naruko-chan, it's not that I'm ashamed of you. I'm actually trying to protect you, and our friendship. My father is…" She winced. "He cares, but he is very stern and traditional. And he wields a lot of power."

Naruko paused… and then relaxed. "I know," she admitted tiredly. "I guess a part of me always knew that. I was just… being upset, and spazzy and weird. I'm sorry, too."

They came across the distance and hugged one another tightly. They pulled back a little teary-eyed and chuckled at each other.

"I suppose I had to see it eventually, that you're not just this cardboard cutout of a perfectly confident, sunny person. You're a real human being with flaws and insecurities," Hinata admitted.

"Yeah. And just because you're rich and from a nice family, it doesn't mean you wield all the power," Naruko returned.

And thus had they learned a little bit more about each other.

"Well…" Naruko brightened, still a little uncertain but trying not to show it. (In a week or two, their fight would be forgotten.) "Since I can't go to your house… you wanna come over to mine?"

The first time Hinata came around that bend of trees and the whole clearing of Naruko's vast gardens and cute, warm little forest house suddenly came up before her, her eyes widened. "Wow…" she whispered, the grey in her eyes glittering. Even in wintertime, the beautiful teahouse garden was wonderful and the small wooden house looked inviting. The silence and stillness radiated peace and serenity, even the village itself falling away.

Hinata had to hand it to the Hokage - this place on the outskirts wasn't even near any dangerous village wall guard towers. It was the perfect protective escape, and totally gorgeous. It might have been why he'd chosen it.

Naruko beamed and chuckled, pleased. "I do all the gardening myself. I talk to the plants," she admitted. "It's kinda weird, I guess, but hey, whatever works! Come on, come in. I'll make tea. And I have like a hundred pre-ready made bowls of all the homemade comfort food you can think of in my fridge."

Hinata thought the inside of Naruko's house was wonderful. The colorful painted walls, the warm and cheerful yet humble surroundings, the well-stocked kitchen full of lovely tea and comfort foods, the endless scattered piles of Uzumaki training scrolls. Naruko even showed her the special scarf.

"It was my Mom's," she said, looking down at it and smiling gently.

Knowing full well what not having a mother felt like, Hinata carefully put her tea far aside from her seat at the island in the kitchen and held the blue wool scarf especially gently.

Naruko and Hinata began doing things together at Naruko's house, having fun together. They both liked azuki bean jam, and Naruko liked cooking while Hinata liked baking. So they made and ate red bean jam snacks together in Naruko's kitchen. And Naruko had a garden while Hinata loved flower pressing, so when springtime and the Academy came, they began flower pressing afternoons together, filling whole albums with all sorts of lovely blossoms at the island in Naruko's kitchen, carefully writing in ink dates and fun times beside each one.

And the Konoha Ninja Academy did come.

The first days were difficult. They sat in a lecture hall style classroom with a whole group of other first-year eight-year-olds, except for when they trained in one of the two outside courtyards. They learned diverse things from team tactics and codes and ciphers, to a ninja's Hidden Village layout and history, to trap-making and stealth and physical forms of battle. The physical forms of battle included genjutsu, ninjutsu, taijutsu, and kunai knife and shuriken throwing. They also worked out a lot - or, well, a lot for the average Academy student, which turned out to be not much by Naruko and Hinata's standards.

Almost no one could best either of them in almost any arena. They quickly became top kunoichi.

But here was where the weirdness for Naruko set in. First, despite the fact that she was very good in many areas, their teacher Umino Iruka-sensei didn't like her. He was a young man with a brown ponytail and a wide scar across his nose. From the beginning he was very hard on her. He yelled at her more than at the other students, called her a troublemaker, and harped on her a lot over the very few things she couldn't do well, between her own previous training and Hinata's help during private spars.

Iruka privately was torn. On the one hand, she was an orphan trying to prove herself like he had been as a student, and she was genuinely talented. On the other hand, she was an orphan trying to prove herself like he had been as a student, and she had that connection to the fox demon that had killed his parents.

So, full of mixed feelings, he was unusually hard on her, and most of the students followed his example. Naruko quickly grew to resent Iruka. Unsurprisingly, though he yelled a lot about what she couldn't do, on an unconscious level he was of very little help.

Thank goodness she had Hinata to try out techniques with instead.

Naruko had two areas she had trouble with: ninjutsu and genjutsu. This was because they both required very high levels of chakra control. Genjutsu illusions did by nature, while ninjutsu techniques at an Academy level required great chakra control from her because she had Uzumaki sized chakra coils that had already gone through training.

And most Academy ninjutsu were for people with a lot less chakra than her.

So this was the flip side to the Uzumaki bloodline. On the one hand, they had goddess levels of stamina and could survive almost anything. On the other hand, their chakra control sucked ass. They were great at big things… but couldn't do little things as a result.

Thus Naruko could make a Grand Whirlpool but could not do a basic Academy-level illusory clone technique, also known as a Bunshin.

Genjutsu was complicated for another reason. In order to break out of a genjutsu, one didn't need good chakra control - they just needed good chakra control to make one. So no problem, right? Wrong. Breaking out of a genjutsu required realizing you were in one, which required noticing the tiny wrong details that the other ninja had inevitably forgotten about when they'd made the facade.

Naruko was kind of oblivious to the tiny details, more focused on the big bang. ("That applies socially as well as to techniques," Hinata had once said inscrutably after Naruko had explained this.) So she wasn't even good at breaking out of genjutsu.

So she decided to work on that. She looked through all the scrolls, and to her disappointment the Uzumaki had never found a way to work high-level control things. They forever sucked at Academy-level basic ninjutsu. They forever sucked at making genjutsu illusions.

But they had found a way to sense and break out of genjutsu illusions from others. This technique was known as Mind's Eye of Kagura.

It was a sensory-type technique. And interestingly? It functioned exactly like a doujutsu itself.

In Mind's Eye of Kagura, which Naruko spent countless hours practicing in training fields with Hinata or out in her back garden, the Uzumaki spread their chakra in a wide net around them. They spread it as far as they possibly could. And then? They opened their mind's eye.

And in their mind, they got an immediate, chakra-based map of absolutely everything around them in every direction. Chakra levels, nearby weapons, anatomy points, and all. Of course, they could also sense when they were under a genjutsu.

And the entire thing did not require straining their actual eyes at all. It only required straining their chakra coils - which could handle the strain.

First Naruko practiced doing this technique consciously. Next she practiced always keeping a smaller form of it up unconsciously, in the back of her mind. She passed out a few times again, but she got it. And it was good endurance training, she decided!

Safe to say, things like traps, genjutsu sensing, and stealth from other ninja suddenly became less of a problem for her.

After that, actual genjutsu creation and Academy-level ninjutsu were her only two weak points. In other words, her weak point was chakra control - that included standard, non-Uzumaki-healing medical ninjutsu. Everything else, especially with Hinata's help, was no longer a problem for her. She became a genuinely strong kunoichi.

And a smart one. Nowhere did Hinata help during their Academy years as much as with this. But here, Hinata's burning loyalty to her best friend Naruko really shone.

Naruko wanted to be smart - academically and strategically. Her intellectual falling behind became increasingly obvious in the beginning, and it increasingly frustrated her as she became great at everything else. She had realized that no kunoichi in this world could afford to be stupid, and that there were already a lot of forces working against her as a woman who wanted to be Hokage, let alone on a more personal level.

"I don't want to be stupid," she complained to Hinata one day at the end of the class, they sitting in their seats on their upper tier beside each other as she explained all this, other students filing past them while chatting cheerfully. "I don't have to be a stereotypical genius, or a diplomat. I mean, I'm chatty, fiery at times, and cripplingly blunt. I'm okay with that.

"I just… don't want to be dumb," she admitted softly, looking down, pained. "And it bothers me that I always feel like I am - I'm always falling further behind mentally, and I don't know why."

"... Then we head it off at the pass," said Hinata calmly, surprising her. Naruko's head shot up. Hinata looked determined and calm. "We stop it now, in the beginning, while you can still catch up mentally. If Iruka-sensei won't help with that, I will."

She raised her chin icily.

"You know what to do?" Naruko asked disbelievingly.

Hinata smirked. "I know you, Naruko-chan. And you're a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them.

"I want you to take tests in strategic typing and learning style."

"A test?" said Naruko in instinctive dread.

"Not a pass-fail test, Naruko-chan," said Hinata. "A test that will tell you the kind of smart you are that isn't reflected in the Academy curriculum. Come on." And she stood determinedly. "We need to go to the headmaster's office."

Hinata took some tests from there, took Naruko home, sat her down at the island in front of the sheets, and forced her to finish both of them. Then she tallied up the results.

"As I thought," she said briskly and officially, tapping the papers neat in front of her. "You are an idea-type strategist. You are a visual and kinesthetic learner."

It was all babble to Naruko. "What does that mean?" she asked slowly, not exactly feeling smart at all.

But Hinata explained… and in a weird way, it did make sense. Naruko wasn't a "plan five steps ahead" strategist. She was a "wild, by-the-seat-of-the-pants, idea-generator" strategist. She was short on detailed information, fallbacks, and flaws, but great at coming up with wild and complex ideas and with thinking on the fly. And she wasn't an audio learner or a reading type learner. She was a visual and kinesthetic learner - she learned better when she could picture something, or when she could do it and interact with it for herself.

"Don't you see?!" said Hinata, her excitement finally shining through. "You're not stupid! You just learn differently! You don't learn the standard way, but you are smart!

"So whenever possible, try to learn and strategize the way that comes naturally to you! You're going to love this advice, Naruko-chan: Stop listening to the teacher. Without even meaning to, he's teaching you how to do it wrong."

Naruko was skeptical, disheartened with intelligence by this point, but she respected Hinata as a smart person so she decided to give it a shot. She bought books on all these different types and learning styles… read through them painstakingly, with great difficulty… and began thinking and studying the way they taught her…

And it worked.

It was amazing. All of a sudden she was ace-ing academic subjects and strategy puzzles! She started performing better in mock Academy missions on a mental level! It was incredible! She was smart, after all! That was why seals had come so naturally to her - they were both visual and kinesthetic!

Like with chakra control, it was an Uzumaki thing. Unlike with chakra control, this she knew how to do something about.

She started memorizing shit and getting A's on tests. It was weird, feeling smart.

Encouraged, she began getting into things like music and books, things she had never dared try before. Why not, right? And the more she read… the better she got at it, and the more she liked it. Of course, typical idealistic and artistic Naruko, she always went in the books section for the romances and the imaginative adventures. She sighed over the romances and cheered over the adventures.

It was pretty wonderful.

On the note of art, music, and books, she asked the Hokage for her third and fourth extra things: singing lessons and creative writing lessons. He brought in more snobbish and academic but enthusiastic and encouraging tutors from the capitol, indulging her again perhaps because he was encouraged by her new academic bent. Naruko learned she loved writing in a self-confessional, expressive, sometimes metaphorical but always relatable way, that she was naturally lyrical, and that she loved singing and even performing karaoke. An extrovert and a smiler by nature, constantly optimistic and with a love for happy endings and triumphs and friendships, she had innate stage presence and an innate ability to make others feel happier and more comforted with both her singing and her writing.

Naruko became a true artist, an artist everywhere, in some aspect of all three main spheres: painting, creative lyrical writing, and singing.

Another thing Naruko was surprisingly good at? Kunoichi lessons.

Kunoichi were required to learn certain arts in case they needed to seduce on a mission out in the field - most powerful people, after all, were still men, even if powerful women were becoming more common. None of what kunoichi were taught was weird or sexual. But they learned games and flirtation - Naruko was a powerhouse here, naturally playful and giggling and flirtatious, and also naturally blonde and cute and bubbly - and they also learned tea ceremony, flower arrangement, traditional dance, calligraphy, and music, as well as lovely kimono wearing.

Naruko was especially good at (and especially loved) traditional dance, which was true to her namesake but also simply true to her nature. Dancing was a must for Uzumaki Naruko.

But in most kunoichi subjects, as they were arts, she thrived and had fun. She got to be creative! It was great! And she was good at it. Good at making people feel better and warmer with her work.

Their kunoichi arts teacher was Suzume-sensei. She was a tall, handsome woman with frizzy black hair and glasses. She was serious, but a kind teacher - surprisingly, even to Naruko. She was helpful, calm, together, and a positive adult female role model when Naruko really needed one. "Naruko, how about you? I bet you know the answer," she would say with firm positivity, the way no other teacher treated Naruko in the entire school, but she would only say it when she knew Naruko actually did know the answer. Sometimes Naruko chatted and laughed with her after class was over.

Nobody else understood it. Uzumaki Naruko and serious, dignified, refined, feminine Suzume-sensei?

But Suzume-sensei saw through the bullshit when nobody else did. She was there for Naruko. When their class got The Talk, and again when Naruko had her first period and started growing body hair, Suzume-sensei and Ayame-nee-chan were the ones who were there the most to help her figure out basic female puberty, makeup, and self-pampering techniques.

But that was a while in the future.

Once Naruko had gotten settled in with her goal of being Hokage and her classes at the Academy… she found her own way of responding to Iruka and getting attention from her cold fellow classmates.

She started playing pranks.

She could still remember her first prank. She used her ninja skills to sneak into Iruka-sensei's Academy classroom one night. She covered his teacher's desk in crazy glue and painted in glitter on the back of the chair a stick right where his ass usually sat.

Then she set up a big sign at the top, rigged to flash down over the black-board the minute he moved the chair. The sign said in big letters with lots of exclamation points and liberal use of the color pink, "UZUMAKI NARUKO WAS HERE!"

Then she went to class the next morning, grinning like the cat who ate the canary. She sat down amidst the growing snickers, her heart pumping as thrillingly as it had when she was doing the prank last night. Hinata, the only one in on it at least in knowledge, was shaking her head in amused disbelief.

And then Iruka-sensei walked in for morning classes.

And it was wonderful.

"WHO THE HELL DID THIS?!" Iruka-sensei just exploded. "WHEN I FIND WHOEVER DID THIS, I'LL -!"

The best part. He went over, pushed the chair, and the huge sign flew down in his face, announcing who had done it. There was a stunned silence… and then everyone in class started laughing hysterically.

"UZUMAKI!" Iruka-sensei was red and irate. "To the front of the room!" He pointed in front of him.

Tough, calm, and matter of fact, Naruko went to stand with her arms crossed in front of Iruka. She didn't seem particularly worried by his unquenchable fury.

"DO YOU REALIZE WHAT YOU HAVE DONE?!"

"Yes."

"YOU HAVE BESMIRCHED THE HONOR OF YOUR CLASSMATES!"

"Yes."

"YOU HAVE DISRESPECTED ME!"

"Yes."

"STOP SAYING YES!"

"Yes." A single beat. "Sir."

There was further laughter. Iruka's head looked like it was about to swell and explode. Naruko finally leaned her head back and let out a high, shrieking, cackling giggle.

It was a prankster trademark that would eventually become known all over the halls of the Academy. Then, when that got boring, all over the streets of the village. People and institutions that had been cruel to Naruko were her favorite targets.

Did it do a damn thing? No. Did it feel good? Yes.

Naruko was also competitive. She formed the same tough, sharp-eyed, mischievous sense of humor against boys in Academy spars. She became famous for being a total smirking, teasing badass one moment, and then skipping and chattering cheerfully away the next after her win in a courtyard Academy spar, beaming girlishly all the while.

Once, Inuzuka Kiba dared say aloud while she was doing this, "Damn, that girl's powerful, but she's a total airhead."

And Naruko's head snapped around, fury forming from bubbly cheerfulness in a split second over her face. "WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST SAY?!"

The crowds of students surrounding the ended class spar in a circle went dead silent.

"Uh… nothing," said Kiba nervously.

"Oh. Okay!" Naruko said in a high voice, beaming, and she danced her way over to Hinata, cackling evilly on the inside.

"You are wrong, Kiba," Aburame Shino said in a deep, solemn, matter of fact voice from beside him. "She is simply insane."

During her later years in the Academy, Naruko trained further. She mastered seal trap tags, which when slapped onto hidden places sucked up anyone into their depths with a startled yelp when they accidentally stepped in the wrong place. Then she set herself, determined, to mastering two highly difficult, complex sealing jutsu:

Sealing Chains, pure blue chains made of her chakra that enchained any great beast within their depths - potentially deadly to her from chakra depletion if used for too long, but technically a kind of temporary sealing and very useful.

Seal Barrier, which was a kind of impenetrable shield or dome made of emanating golden energy. Of course, as a sealing jutsu it was meant to hold things behind or inside, but it was quite useful in keeping dangerous adversaries outside as well - even from all angles, though the dome took much more chakra than the shield, which already took a lot. Upholding it for long periods of time? That took nearly everything she had. So it was a good thing she had a lot of other tricks up her sleeve.

But it was not just in jutsu that she grew.

Naruko and Hinata usually sat next to the tree swing in the front courtyard, underneath the shade of the tree, for lunch. And one lunchtime they were sitting with their bento packed lunches, watching deadpan as Uchiha Sasuke stalked by and a bunch of fangirls chased after him, shrieking and giggling.

Here was the thing about Uchiha Sasuke. First - he was insanely attractive. Naruko didn't even mean it on a sexual level at that point in her life, because she didn't have to. He was also handsome on a purely aesthetic level. It was like watching a god molded out of marble move.

Second - he had the personality of a tree stump.

He'd watched his entire clan be brutally murdered as a child, by his older brother, who had then gone missing nin and illegally abandoned his village. Sasuke seemed to have reacted to this horrific turn of events by deciding never to act like a human being ever again.

He glared coldly at people, and he gave dark looks, and he said dark things, and he stalked and stormed everywhere, and that was about it.

Oh and also he was probably the wealthiest and most talented shinobi in their class. The last loyal member of one of Konoha's biggest native clans.

The girls loved him.

Two exceptions - two notable exceptions - were Hyuuga Hinata and Uzumaki Naruko.

"It's not even an 'I'm better than them' thing," Hinata admitted, watching the fangirls shriek and chase after Sasuke; at least half of them were already on diets and he clearly wanted nothing to do with any of them. As usual, Haruno Sakura and Yamanaka Ino were competing for who got lead on craziest fangirl. "It's just… the Uchiha are the only other Konoha clan with a doujutsu. We cancel each other out. He is my natural enemy and my father would never forgive me. Honestly, I don't even mean that in a romantic way.

"I prefer people who make me feel better about life. Not people who…"

"Look on their best day like they want to pitch themselves off a cliff?" Naruko guessed flatly.

"Well." Hinata winced. "I wasn't going to put it like that, but you always did have a way with words, Naruko-chan." They went back to their food. "Hey, can I ask? Why don't you like Sasuke?"

Naruko chewed on her food as she thought about it. "... Because I'm attracted to people I have a connection with," she admitted. "I'm definitely a 'what's on the inside' person. I don't really give a shit about physical attractiveness. I can't decide if that makes me totally a romantic or totally not."

"It makes you much more likely to find happiness in love," Hinata pointed out, and they smiled at each other.

"... I can't relate to that at all. The whole 'chasing fangirls' thing," Naruko admitted, thinking about it. "I mean… I try to imagine a guy I like, maybe a guy from a book I read, walking away from me. And this doesn't sound like me most of the time, but do you know what I'd probably do?

"I'd probably just let him go.

"Because I can't make someone stay who doesn't want to stay. And I don't want to. I don't even think I'd be angry. I'd just tell him to go do whatever he felt he had to do in order to be happy.

"For me, that's what love is. It's what's comfortable for people. And sometimes it's selflessness. The sacrifice of what you want… in favor of what the other person wants, or even needs. And Sasuke obviously wants to be left alone. I'm not saying I like him… I'm just saying that if I did like him, I still wouldn't understand his fangirls.

"And… I demand good treatment, damnit! I have standards, dattebayo! I'm not going to hope for it. I'm not going to ask nicely or politely. I'm going to demand any guy I date doesn't act like a jackass! And I'm calling him on it when he does, dattebayo! I'm not some lady who's just going to sit around and wait on him!" Naruko insisted, scowling, fiery and afraid of no one. "And he shouldn't expect me to! I mean… look at that guy! No matter what we think of those girls, they obviously like him. And they're not in the right for trying to force themselves on someone who clearly doesn't care… but he knows them in person. He should tell them he's not interested - not at all, in anyway. He owes them that. And he owes them that he tells them directly and politely, in person, while he does it.

"Really, that's all he has to do. And instead, he just… lets them suffer on in hope. It's kind of distasteful."

"As usual, you've pinned the nail on the head," said Hinata ruefully. "Honestly, some of our classmates are weird. Everyone calls Nara Shikamaru and Akimichi Chouji weird, but all they do is eat chips and watch cloud formations pass by."

Naruko snorted. "Yeah," she said, amused. "At least they're simple."

"Do you want marriage and a family?" asked Hinata. "I have to have one - major future clan head and all. I knew that when I decided to win the fight against my sister, and I accepted it.

"But I guess I never thought to ask you. Do you want to pass on your family line and abilities? I mean, obviously there's more to marriage than that, but -" Hinata added quickly.

"Yeah, I know what you mean," said Naruko. "Yes. I do. I want to have marriage and a family. I also want to become Hokage and prove the villagers wrong about me. I guess there's a lot of feminism tied up in that question… But I don't understand any of that complicated stuff, so I'll just do it all! I'll have a career and a family at the same time, dattebayo! I'll be a fighter and a Hokage and a mother and a wife and a healer! Everything!"

Naruko looked determined, arms spread wide.

Hinata considered pointing out in good-natured exasperation that for their culture this was feminist. But she decided that Naruko was just a child and she could let her live on with her delusion that she hadn't already picked a side for a while longer.

Unbeknownst to Hinata, there was another reason Naruko most decidedly did not like Sasuke. It was an embarrassing reason, so she hadn't exactly told anybody about it.

She'd actually approached him to be friends after she'd learned that his family had passed away and he now lived alone, the last of his clan, like her.

It hadn't gone well.

"Hey! Sasuke!" She jumped up beside him with a bright, nervous grin on the tiered steps of their classroom before class one morning. "I heard what happened to your family. I'm really sorry," she said sympathetically. "Maybe that's rude, but I don't know how to be anything but honest, so I'll just say that I am. I'm sorry."

Sasuke turned and gave her an odd look. He wasn't sure what to think of this approach, but he knew privately that it was at least better than all the fake, pretend niceness he was getting from everywhere else.

Then the big one:

"I'm an orphan living alone and the last of my clan, too."

His jet-black eyes widened infinitesimally. Sasuke was almost a stereotype: tall, pale, slim and lithe, dark, handsome, pretty-boy, and very reserved, so this was a big reveal for him.

Naruko smiled self deprecatingly. "I never had a family to begin with. I can't imagine what it must be like losing yours."

He stared at her for an unusually long time - so long it would have made any of his fangirls delighted, giggling, and embarrassed. Naruko could feel some sort of connection there, a bit more warmth, but it was hard to tell what he was thinking.

"It's lonely," he said at last. "Quiet."

"Yeah." She nodded her head, knowing exactly what he meant from her first apartment. "It is," she finished sadly, shrugging. Their eyes connected in mutual sorrow, mutual understanding.

Sasuke nodded and looked away.

"So… do you want to be friends?" She brightened hopefully.

It was the wrong thing to say. Because Sasuke had already decided anyone else would only hold him down in his suicidal honor goal of revenge against his brother. Because Sasuke couldn't pull anyone else into that. Because Sasuke was already wary of fangirls of all sorts.

"... I'm not interested," he said flatly. His eyes narrowed. "And not in a date, either," he finished cautiously, for good measure.

Naruko flushed and angered. "You arrogant asshole! I wasn't asking for best friendship or a date!" she snapped. His eyes widened, startled, but before he could say anything in stunned response, she'd stormed off.

Not knowing he'd been about to apologize, Naruko had already decided she didn't like Sasuke. Not at all. Naruko didn't like people who turned her down as friends when she did actually dare to open herself up for vulnerability.

Sasuke, the natural genius, had issues with accepting anyone closer than a rival.

Then Naruko's conversation with Hinata happened. And then the Academy taijutsu spar happened.

Usually Academy spars worked like this. They were in one specific arena, no other subject, and everyone in their class gathered in a crowd around the two main contestants in one of the courtyards, laughing and cheering and stamping their feet in great clouds of dust. On this day, the subject of sparring was basic level Academy style taijutsu.

Naruko took a glance around at her potential opponents from beside Hinata as the current spar happened in front of her.

"Um, Sensei?" Akimichi Chouji winced from the center of the circle where his spar was supposed to be happening. "I really don't want to beat up my best friend."

"That's not what we're doing. This is a traditional shinobi spar!" Iruka tried to smile at Chouji the way he never did at Naruko. Usually, he seemed to be a very warm, nice person. "Even the Hokage spar like this with their friends to help them improve -!"

Chouji didn't exactly look comforted. As always, he seemed nervous.

"Sensei, I don't feel like fighting today," Nara Shikamaru sighed. He stepped sideways out of the spar. "Wow, look, I'm out of the ring. Go call the next pair." As always, he sounded bored and casual.

This happened a lot.

Iruka-sensei sighed.

"That kid'll be a Genin for the rest of his life," said Inuzuka Kiba bluntly to Aburame Shino, watching Shikamaru from the crowds. "He's got no drive at all!"

"He may live a very long life," Shino intoned deeply, "and many surprising things can -"

"Ah, for the last time, will you stop nitpicking?" Kiba sighed, faintly disgusted.

"Stupid Shikamaru! He's the troublesome one!" said Yamanaka Ino waspishly, hands on her hips. "He's always saying things are troublesome, but in the end it's always him that's troublesome. And Chouji's so spineless." Her tone was scathing.

"Ino-chan, do you know them?" said Haruno Sakura curiously.

"Yeah. Our parents…" Ino began, sighing and rolling her eyes.

"Fine. Shikamaru, Chouji, make the symbol of harmony," said Iruka, exasperated. "Next."

Shikamaru and Chouji interlocked fingers in the friendship symbol. This was to show that despite their spar, and despite their combat, they were still in the end Konoha comrades and therefore teammates. It happened at the end of every Academy spar.

"Sorry, Shikamaru," said Chouji timidly.

"It's okay. I know you hate this stuff," said Shikamaru. "And I think it's troublesome, so…" He shrugged matter of factly to his best friend. They walked off together.

"Next up," Iruka read from his clipboard. "Uzumaki Naruko and Uchiha Sasuke!"

It was just a randomized pairing, one of countless Academy spars. But Naruko at least would always remember it.

"Good luck," said Hinata, smiling, to Naruko as all the Sasuke fangirls let out screams and cheers. Sasuke stalked darkly into the sparring circle the same way he stalked darkly into everything else.

Naruko mimicked him, pretend-stalking onto the battlefield. Sasuke's eyes narrowed.

Naruko grinned. "What's wrong, skunk-head?" she said, wrinkling her nose as she looked at his black hairdo, the way it was smooth but it stuck up in the back. "You can't stalk your way out of this one."

Sasuke gave a silent snarl that Naruko supposed matter of factly was probably supposed to be frightening. All the Sasuke fangirls, Sakura and Ino included, screamed in outrage.

"So stupid…" said Sasuke contemptuously, but she had his attention. "Fine, I'll take you down in one -"

"Move?" Naruko raised an eyebrow as she made the combat symbol with her fingers to begin the spar. Standard Konoha Academy protocol. "We'll see about that. I can promise you that you won't."

Sasuke made the combat symbol as well, eyes determined and deadly.

"Ready… Begin!" said Iruka, looking somewhat nervously and uncertainly between them.

Sasuke came at her, and he was fast. She'd give him that. Strong, probably, too.

She side-stepped smoothly out of the way and he punched thin air.

She giggled, put her hands on his shoulders, straightened upside down on top of them, and said teasingly, "Told you so!" Her tone was bright.

There was just enough time for his eyes to widen before she tried to twist his head sideways and snap his neck, she still beaming.

Everyone screamed.

Sasuke managed to move with the movement and he tumbled to the ground. At the last second, Naruko pushed off of his shoulders and landed smoothly on her feet. Sasuke got impressively quickly to his, covered in dust and looking a little pissed off, and neither of them had been knocked out so they faced each other again.

If one tumble decided every taijutsu spar, after all, no one would really learn anything.

That was when Naruko took a good look in Sasuke's black eyes for the first time. There were two things she noticed.

First, that he was actually enjoying this. His eyes had sharpened, warmed slightly, and he was paying attention, his eyes gleaming. Sasuke liked a challenge.

Second… and this was the disturbing part that she wouldn't forget… that every time Sasuke fought, his eyes looked a very certain way. He was glaring at whoever he fought, in the same way the villagers glared at Naruko. She recognized that look. It was hatred. But she didn't understand Sasuke's look anymore than she understood the villagers'.

Because Sasuke wasn't really glaring at her. He was glaring at the image of somebody else, imprinted over her. Every fight he had, he imagined someone else in front of him. A very particular person. His hateful eyes were oddly blank, distant.

Sasuke was always fighting someone else.

Naruko straightened, sobering. "I give," she said, and Sasuke stopped, frowning and puzzled. Silence suddenly fell over the ring. Naruko came very close to him and she murmured, "I'm not going to be a stand-in for someone else."

Sasuke's eyes widened and he froze - completely.

That was why he, too, would never forget that particular spar. No one had ever called him on that before.

Naruko was sending a message. If he was fighting her, it was her he was fighting - not someone else. Sasuke felt irrational fury rise up within him. He looked up and they glared at each other.

The silence and the moment broke. They looked away in mutual disgust as everyone began clapping and cheering for Sasuke, the vastly more popular one.

"Alright… make the friendship symbol," said Iruka uncertainly, bewildered and maybe a little bit nervous at the tension between the two. "Make the harmony symbol to show that you're still friends."

Naruko and Sasuke both half reached out, glaring uncertainly at each other… Then Naruko stuck out her tongue, Sasuke made a face, and they ended grabbing each other by the collars instead, glaring at each other.

"You're gross!" Naruko snapped, infuriated.

"You want to fight, dobe?!" Sasuke returned sharply.

It was the first time he ever used that very particular nickname and insult, but after that straight through graduation he would never call her anything else. And he would never call anyone else dobe. It was a more traditional language way of saying "dope" - dobe - and only Naruko, and Naruko alone, was "dobe" in the eyes of Sasuke.

Naruko finally broke away when Iruka began yelling at them. "You're icky and you have the personality of a tree stump!" Naruko snapped at Sasuke, hands in fists, even as his fangirls shrieked in outrage and their hatred of her was cemented for years to come. "I don't understand why anyone likes you!"

And from that day forward, she found this fact that everyone did like him personally, deeply, and irrationally offensive.

Sasuke glared at her, cold and hard-eyed. There was something in those eyes… they were empty again, like dark tunnels, that faint spark fading.

Naruko shivered, not understanding, and she hurried away from it. Her general stance on Sasuke years afterward, for anyone who asked, would be that he was "creepy."

Nobody else understood what she meant.

And then Naruko did hit puberty. And she did need help from Ayame-nee-chan and Suzume-sensei, and she did get their help on gross things like periods, makeup, body hair, and the art of self pampering. Ayame-nee-chan was more celebratory ("You're a woman!" she squealed, holding a bewildered Naruko's hands and bouncing up and down with her like a little girl) while Suzume-sensei was more bluntly informative on the ninja end of things.

But there was more to puberty than the gross stuff - especially for a kunoichi.

Kunoichi required not only tampons, non-antiperspirant deodorant, cotton underwear to ward off yeast infection, and sports bras, but they also required kunoichi outfits. And kunoichi outfits in turn had to be fit to body size.

See, here was how it worked. There was no official Konoha uniform. Aside from wearing a hitai-ate marker band somewhere on their bodies, ninja could do whatever the hell they wanted with their own appearance and it was their own damn fault if their choices got in their way. Not even the flak vests were necessarily required. But each shinobi picked one fighting outfit to wear on the job for a set period of time until they grew out of it.

So each kunoichi picked a hairstyle, and an outfit. For fighting. Naruko already knew she wanted to keep her by-now longer blonde pigtails. Cute, practical, and pretty. But what of body type, and what of the outfit?

Naruko grew in curves. She was not a thin girl; she was not a tall or a pale one either, her skin very tan. She supposed maybe some girls would have a self identity crisis over that sort of thing, but honestly, one day she just looked in mirror and thought, "Fuck it, one day somebody will want to tap that," and she put a damn bra on.

As if to advertise this, she asked for a tailor to hand-make her kunoichi outfit based on a design she made herself - the Hokage paid. The outfit was littered with Uzumaki swirl symbols, but essentially it was a very skintight jacket and pants set in orange and blue. The shades were sky blue and light apricot orange - Naruko had recently discovered she was a Spring in complexion, with peachy skin undertones, which explained her now pink lips. The blue lining in the orange outfit even brought out her eyes.

The skintight jacket flared out at the bottom, showing a black mesh armor shirt underneath that was just as skintight. The whole outfit showed off her body yet neatly covered her growing number of seal tattoos. She wasn't self conscious of them - but hiding them did provide a certain element of surprise, as she didn't even have Uzumaki red hair.

Also, she really liked orange. It was her favorite color. No ninja ever dressed for stealth, they compensated for that in other ways, so it didn't really matter what color her outfit was and she wanted orange, damnit.

After she'd gotten The Talk, she got curious about sex, too. She read lots of smut and was free to explore her sexuality with no parents around. Yes, that did mean she masturbated. It also meant she started looking at guys in a whole different way.

By one day in her final year, she was both embarrassing and fascinating some of her male classmates by showing them she knew how to fake an orgasm in front of them one day in the back of the classroom after class. Someone had dared her, saying no one could fake an orgasm, and she'd decided to prove them wrong.

And she did.

Then she laughed her long, loud, cackling laugh and said, "Good luck, guys, none of you are ever getting this ass, and I expect that betting money tomorrow because I win!" and she stood and shoved one staring guy's face into his desk for good measure, and then she sashayed right the fuck off.

Because no one could touch her without getting all the bones in their hand broken. Because Uzumaki Naruko had a deceptive temper that showed itself at the weirdest moments. Because her bright smiles and crass jokes could fool you.

And everybody in their class knew it.

She met up with Hinata. "Hi, Hinata-chan!" she said brightly, jumping, flushed and grinning, and they fell into step together.

"Are you done causing trouble for the day, Naruko-chan?" Hinata asked, amused. She was also very curvy but wore big, muted-colored sweaters and dark fighting pants, her dark hair chin length about her round face, the very picture of cute, sweet, and peacefully smiling dignity and reserve. She even had dimples when she smiled.

No one could believe they were still best friends by their final year, but Hinata and Naruko knew better. They understood they could beat the odds.

"Not quite." Naruko gave a wide, shit-eating, evil grin, her blue eyes narrowing in a fox-like way that was emphasized by her whisker cheek markings. "We gotta go get lunch at Ichiraku's, because I'm starving. Wait till you hear about my next prank…"

Hinata sighed and shook her head fondly, Naruko cackling as they left their Academy classroom together.

They were a few weeks away from graduating, and a few months shy of thirteen years old.