Summer

We were in the training grounds when Chiyome-sensei came in, followed by a new girl not yet in uniform. We'd been chucking knives half-heartedly at the target posts; but the moment she came in, we paused, our lazy shoulders drooping even lower. In every face, there was a pair of eyes. And in every pair of eyes was a miniature figurine of the new girl. There she was with her arms tucked behind her back, rosy cheeks marked with vibrant purple.

"Hi, I'm Rin," she greeted cheerfully before blushing and ducking her head. Chiyome-sensei came forward to scold us, but our eyes were remained on her. She peeked another glance at us and smiled.

She smiled often.

Chiyome-sensei had told us stories of how the Shodaime had wooed Mito Uzumaki by growing her a green garden filled with fragrant flowers and luscious fruits. At the center of this garden stood the first Hashirama tree, tall and sturdy to provide relief from the sun. Legend had it that the Moon Goddess herself was so moved by the Shodaime's love that she had shed a single tear upon the tree, granting it an eternal harvest. And so it was known that the Village Hidden in the Leaves was grown by the love shared between Mito and Hashirama.

These were only stories told by an elderly teacher with a fondness for romantic poetry. We knew that. Perhaps the moon watching over us at night wasn't a compassionate goddess, but only a distant rock floating in space. Perhaps the eternal tree had withered and died a long time ago. But maybe there was some kernel of truth to be unearthed from the legend. For all the Shodaime's power, there must have been some possibility that he'd created a garden hidden from the battlegrounds and the villages, from violence and greed.

Some even claimed to have discovered the Shodaime's garden. They claimed that it appeared only on the night of the full moon, that it would vanish at the mere spectre of conflict, that it would melt into the ground if someone were to approach with the intent to steal.

Whatever the case, stories had taught us that love was announced with a thunderclap and a jolt of lightning to the heart. These stories had taught us that love was passionate and as fiery as Mito Uzumaki's hair. These stories had taught us that love was enduring and greater than life.

But for many of us, it was a seed that fell through the slightest crack and took root, nurtured by smiles and shy glances, eventually growing into something simple but sturdy: a common weed.

Perpetually tardy, Obito was a late bloomer. Perpetually forgetful, Obito lost his goggles near the river. She was there on a hot summer day, gathering cattails to grind into poultices.

"Hello," she greeted cheerfully as he approached. She was wearing a thin camisole and kneeling among the rushes. Her hair clung to her nape. On her bare shoulders were little drops of perspiration.

"Hi," Obito managed to choke, rubbing his neck. He didn't really need his goggles, he decided. In a marvelous display of grace and coordination, he stumbled backwards and quite rudely introduced his rear to the ground. He winced belatedly, blushing in anticipation of laughter. But she came closer, hovering over him and offering a hand.

"Are you okay?" she asked. Behind her, the vibrant strokes of sunset reflected off the glimmering water. The sweet scent of lavender emanated from the sachet tucked in her apron.

After a moment, he decided, "No."

She smiled and knelt by his side. "You're Obito, aren't you?"

He nodded distractedly; her knees were burning two holes into his side.

"I'm Rin," she said as her hands came alive with the same gentle, green light he had seen many times before in the classroom, the training grounds, in little pockets of space around the village as she attended to anyone and anything without prejudice. He knew exactly who she was.

"Yeah. I-we were in the same class."

She hummed as her calloused hands skimmed over his bare calf, leaving behind a trail of goosebumps. "I'm not an Inuzuka," she remarked at length. "Nohara. That's my family name, wherever they are." He nodded. He knew that too.

They were so close together, their proximity illuminated by her chakra under the curtain of her hair. It was almost like they were underwater. She touched her cheeks lightly with the pads of her glowing fingers. "An accident."

"What happened?" he asked, pushing himself up on his elbows. He'd never been this close to a girl. From his position, he could see the fine cracks in her dry lips. He wanted to move closer; he wanted to escape. In the end, he was paralyzed by indecision.

She smiled, eyes downcast. Silence stretched between them. For every passing moment, Obito grew redder and more anxious. Why, he hadn't he just kept his mouth shut? It was all going so terribly. His favorite hobby was daydreaming about their meeting, making her laugh, making her fall for him. But now that they were together in reality, he didn't know what to do. He didn't know what to say.

He was just about to apologize when she finally replied, "Do you remember those chipmunks near the Academy?"

"I'm-I-yes. I remember," he managed.

"I used to feed them nuts," she continued. "But instead of eating them, they would just stuff them in their cheeks and run away Like this," she said, blowing out her cheeks.

"Anyway," she went on, "I got the idea of storing chakra in my cheeks, but my plan backfired." It was an absurd story, but Obito's attention was wholly focused on her puckered lips.

"So that's how I got these marks," she said. "They're ugly."

"No!" he exclaimed. "Um… I like… no," he couldn't say, helpless. He clamped his lips shut before he could do further damage. The red splotches on his cheeks spread at an alarming rate down his face, ears, neck.

"Thank you." She smiled. "Anyway, your ankle is fine… you're fine."

"Oh. Okay." Obito sat up too quickly, almost colliding with her nose. He stared at it, cross-eyed.

"Careful," she chided softly. "What were you doing here anyway?"

"I was practicing my Fireball jutsu and my eyes hurt because of all the smoke," he started saying as she brought up a hand to shield his eyes from the glaring sun. A cooling sensation. His eyelids fluttered back open and he felt as though he had just woken up from a good night's sleep. Their eyes met through the gaps between her fingers. "Um…" was the extent of his ability to conjugate. "So, my goggles," he ended lamely.

She clapped her hands together, making him jump. "I think I saw something over there."

They headed to the place where she had been harvesting cattails. She noticed his goggles first, bending over the tall grass. Obito gallantly sprang into action and as he reached down over her, he felt his chest brush against the warm back of the girl bent beneath him. She straightened and gazed at him over her shoulder. "Here," she murmured, holding out her hand.

He took her small, white hand in his. Without his knowing, his thumb wandered along the curve of her palm.

She tilted her head at him. "Your goggles," she said, smiling.

He dropped her hand as if burned, and mumbled something vaguely under his breath as his hand returned to its usual place on the back of his neck.

Silence.

Obito fished for the right words, but everything he drafted in his head sounded so artificial, so bookish. He wanted so desperately to say the right thing, but his tongue was unwilling to cooperate. "See you around?" he asked hopelessly. He could already see the reluctance cooling in her eyes; he could already hear the fake, perfunctory promises forming in her lips.

But her smile remained. Her entire bearing—the cheerful fold of her eyes, the gentle slope of her brow, the endearing way she angled her neck to look up at him though she was taller—exuded warmth and affection. He saw himself reflected in the pools of her eyes. "Okay," she agreed. "Let's go to the festival. It'll be fun."

He was already nodding his head emphatically.

"I'm sorry, I don't have anything nicer to wear," Rin greeted, fingering the hem of her skirt. She was wearing the same wrinkled clothes from the afternoon. Her black skirt, her grass-stained apron stood out in the crowd of colorful festival garb.

Obito ran his hands self-consciously down the fresh, new shirt he'd changed into. "You look fine," he said, willing the heat away from his cheeks.

"Thank you."

"I-" He bit his tongue. "I think you look nice," he reiterated shakily.

"Thank you."

They walked in silence for a while as Obito wracked his brain for something witty to say. A few times, he opened his mouth, sucked in a breath, and exhaled nothing but air. He'd spent hours rehearsing a script and all he had to show was hot air. With envy, he eyed the many couples chatting and laughing and holding hands. His own hands were clammy; they would probably disgust her. Speech choked to death in his throat. And laughter came easy only to fools according to the proverbs.

"Obito," she called, pulling him away from the crowded street. "Obito," she repeated as she guided him somewhere quiet.

They had fallen behind the main procession and watched from the top of the hill as the throng of colorful lanterns bobbed away and twinkled back into sight as a distant constellation. "Don't you want to join them?"

She shook her head.

Somehow, they made their way to the memorial stone. "My mother left me in a field when I was three. A farmer found me and gave me the name Nohara."

"Do you remember anything, you know… from before?"

"Not much. I remember that I was flying a kite that day. That the grass was taller than me. That it was sunny. She was singing," Rin said, her voice light and breezy. "And then I realized that she wasn't singing anymore. When I turned around, she was gone," Rin said, shrugging.

He wouldn't let himself be deceived. He inspected her face carefully, expecting to see some sign of sadness. But she simply responded to his gaze with a sunny smile; he turned his head hastily, committing her face to memory. There were no tears, but permanent traces of a harsh life written in the lines etched around her mouth, on her sun-kissed skin, in the shadows under her eyes. He remembered her scarred hands, the feel of her calluses running down his sensitive skin.

But still she smiled. And all these things that should have diminished her beauty made it more poignant, more enduring, more real and closer to life.

He looked down at his own hands—scarred like hers, calloused like hers. His own parents had abandoned him in their own way. Like her, he'd been taken into a home that wasn't truly his own. They were the same.

"I must have flown my kite for days, hoping she would see it and come find me," she continued. "But she didn't and I never saw her again."

"And your father? Surely someone must have looked for you?"

"Maybe. Who knows?" she said, tracing the name at the very top of the stone-Senju Tobirama. "Would it have made a difference?"

"I think so," Obito ventured to say. "You would have had a family. You wouldn't be alone."

"Maybe." She shrugged again. "Maybe not. I like to think that she left me there as an act of mercy. Maybe she thought leaving me there would give me a chance she couldn't provide. We were poor—I remember that much."

Obito glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, unable to look at her directly. One by one she was slowly working her way down the names on the stone as if she were a blind woman learning how to read. When she got to the long line of his dead, heroic clansmen (for there was no other kind of Uchiha), when her fingers ran along the grooves of the name Morito, Obito said, "That's my grandfather."

Her fingers paused. "My parents aren't there," Obito remarked. After a moment, he shrugged casually. "My mom died having me. My dad died when I was five. Some disease. Something about tubes and roses."

"Tuberculosis?"

"Yeah, that's the one."

Her hands resumed their journey down the stone. "You must miss them," she said.

Obito shrugged again and traced the name of his grandfather, trying to feel something other than cool granite. "What's there to miss? All Uchiha are the same anyway. I'll probably end up here too. We Uchiha are rather good at that."

"Do you want to?" she asked. "Don't you want to do anything else?"

"But who doesn't want to be remembered?" He paused to gauge her reaction, but she remained where she was, pensive gaze directed towards the stone. "I can't be Hokage," he continued slowly. "Too bad. But I can make some kind of mark. All I have to do is die in the right place."

It was true. His dream of becoming Hokage had toppled with the realization that popularity was a requirement, not a consequence. He was no prodigy like Kakashi. He wasn't disciplined like Gai. He wasn't even a proper Uchiha since he'd run crying from all the clan trials designed to activate the Sharingan.

"Can I tell you a secret?" she asked quietly.

He nodded, silently thrilled by the way she leaned towards him.

"This memorial…" she started to say. Obito followed her eyes from the top down to the bottom where the name Sarutobi Hiruzen was inscribed. "This stone is a replica."

"Really?" He reached again for his grandfather's name. Nothing had really changed, of course, but he couldn't help but feel disappointed nonetheless. "Who copied it?"

She responded with a wry smile. "The Uchiha, of course. They're rather good at that."

He huffed, unable to resist her smile. "What happened to the original?"

"The war. Danzo-sama had them reconstruct it afterwards."

"Oh, that's nice."

"I guess so," she mused, turning her head to face him. "But that's not my point. My point is that even this memorial stone can't last forever. After time, these names will just be letters on stone. Maybe someone will remember you. Maybe not. In the end, what do you owe to the future? What do you owe to yourself?"

She said all this in one burst and abruptly fell into silence, nibbling on her chapped lips. When he failed to respond, she pitched forward to peek anxiously at him around the curtain of hair that had fallen between them.

He was so charmed by her concern that he reached forward and gently tucked her hair back into place behind her ear. She tilted her face and smiled up at him. His hand slid to the back of her head as his thumb brushed the curve of her ear. It would be so easy to lean forward and close the short distance between them.

The moment he noticed, he blushed painfully to his own horror. But before he could pull away and burrow underground, she cupped his burning cheeks with cool fingertips and drew him in.

His entire perception narrowed to the warm, chapped lips on his own—touching, coaxing, moving, wanting. Her smile was warm and inviting when they parted. She murmured something he couldn't hear over the deafening noise of his own heartbeat. His only thought was that she had reached for him, that she had wanted him; he wasn't alone.

Her lips were red, drawing him in again like a magnet. Her hair was heavy in his hands as he brushed it over her bare shoulder. He couldn't stop. Everything he'd failed to say before escaped in the little prayers he pressed into her skin.

The next day, Leaf declared war on Rock. By the end of the month, all Leaf genin were out on the field.