"Are you coming back?"
"I do believe so. Hokage-sama is still in discussion with your otou-san about the Wave's Ninja Employment Agreement between Wave country and Konohagakure. Since I am the Chuunin in charge of negotiations, I should be sent back to bring your otou-san the final draft."
"That's good" The woman simpered. "Maybe the next time her otou-san will allow me to come to Konoha with you."
"Well, should you wish to visit Konoha, the village will certainly welcome you as befitting a woman of your rank." was the civil but flat reply.
Not missing the implication that he would not personally welcome her in the village, the woman's eyes betrayed her frustration for a short moment but it was quickly and expertly hid as though it had never been there. But not before her companion could notice it. It was such a shame that the woman was so unlikable because she sure was a beauty.
Clad in a soft-looking red kimono which contrasted nicely with her powder white skin, she looked very elegant and demure. The fabric sprinkled with white and very small dark blue flowers and her obi was burgundy-colored. Her long dark-red, nearly purple, hair framed her heart-shaped face in a complicated hairdo involving small pink pearls and a pink rose which accentuated the delicate color of her lips and brought out her pale green eyes. Of average size, she had a figure many women would kill for. Yes, there was no doubt about it, she was beautiful. But, he thought, he wouldn't enter a relationship with her unless he was ordered to.
The couple was seated on a bench in the of the Wave's Daimyō's residence. It was a rather small palace. It looked more like the type of home a minor feudal lord in Hi no Kuni would own than a Daimyō's residence but, then again, Nami no Kuni was a small and rather poor country.
And the woman knew it. Which probably explained why she was currently trying to gain his favor. While he was only the leader of a minor clan and even though he was only a fifteen years old boy, tall, gangly and barely attractive at all, he must seem like the best match the fifth daughter of the leader of one of the less powerful countries on the continent could make.
Especially considering that so few ninjas ever came or stopped in her country. A town like Konoha must have seemed like the height of sophistication. And a clan leader was a good catch.
The garden they were in was a thing of beauty. A subtle mix of mineral, plants and water created an atmosphere fit for meditation he thought temporarily lulled by the sound of running water. The huge Sakura tree in bloom and the weeping willow leaning over a rocky river created an enchanting vision.
He was far, very far, from being a poet but it certainly made him wish he was. Which truly wasn't something he thought very often. Him, a poet, right, the guys would surely laugh.
Maybe he shouldn't have slept with her, the man thought. she hadn't exactly advertised her royal origin or her ambitions at first but still, he could have kicked himself. He was usually better at reading people than that. He had wanted to have sex and she had been rather willing and pleasing to the eye. So when she had thrown herself at him in the inn he had stayed at, well, he hadn't said no.
At least, he had thought to use a ninshin han seal or anti-pregnancy seal before leaving his village. It was one of the most widely used seal that Konoha's hospital provided to shinobi and kunoichi who went on missions. Konoha didn't exactly want to have children of ninja popping all over the nations. Especially for the clan with their jealously guarded over kekkei genkai.
Having a bastard with one of the Daimyō's children would have been a source of complications he would rather do without, thank you very much!
Feeling uncomfortable with the closeness the woman was pushing him into he neatly stood up and bade her his goodbyes before returning to his inn. He had on only accepted this meeting because she had made the request in front of her otou-san and it would have been rude on his part to refuse.
Then again, maybe he should have refused anyways. It would have been poor form but he would have avoided this awkward conversation. And it had been rather poor form to sleep with the daughter of the man he was in negotiations with anyway. The man certainly didn't seem to be too pleased by his daughter's infatuation.
He was so damn lucky that time had loosened morals and traditions so much that nowadays a woman was usually considered in control of her sexuality and contraception was commonly used. Civilians used herbs to prevent conception which wasn't as affective as seal but still worked quite well. But, despite this modern view or maybe even because of it, children born outside of marriage bond were still badly judged.
Still, only a mere fifty years ago, he would have been beheaded for sleeping with the unmarried daughter of a Daimyō. Konoha wouldn't have lifted a finger to help him to prevent the cessation of talks, minor as they were. And since Nami no Kuni didn't have any ninjas to stop him, he would have become a nukenin and ended his life being purchased by hunter-nins.
Even if the girl had tricked him. Or he would have had to marry the girl if the Daimyō was particularly lenient. Neither solutions particularly appealed to him so he was really lucky, he thought glancing at his companion.
Especially since not all countries or places were as advanced. Just look at the Uchiha. There was not a more backward clan. Well, at least in Konoha. Well, the Hyūga weren't exactly much better now that he thought about it...but, at least, they didn't scorn bastards the way Uchiha did. After some consideration, he was damn lucky it happened were it did he thought finally leaving the palace.
"He didn't come back! That ugly asshole, dim-witted, disfigured, shithole, baby ninja didn't come back" raged Kokuyi-hime.
She was in a state of furor. Flapping her hands around, she was grabbing stuff from the shelves and tossing it to the ground in a near methodical manner with no regards to the servants still in the room with her.
"Kokuyi-hime, maybe you should calm down a bit, you are alarming the whole household with your screams."
An old servant tried to reason with the twenty years old woman. she was trembling slightly. she knew very well her mistresses wrath having cared for her since she was a newborn. Thus, she was also probably the only one in the room who could even attempt to try to reason with her without risking getting fired.
"Get out Hanasaki." the woman said in a deceptively calm voice. "I said get out! All of you get out! Get out!"
All the servants in the room scrambled out of the room without a backward glance. The mistress was not nice even on a good day. They had not forgotten that she had slapped a young maid so hard that the girl had fainted just a few hours before, merely for dropping one of her books to the ground. And that was when she had been in a relatively good mood. None of them wanted to stay next to her when she was in such a state. If jobs weren't so rare, especially such well-paid one's, none of them would be working for the princess.
Just as the servants were leaving, the Daimyō, followed by one of his most trustworthy adviser, came running to see what the commotion was all about. The royal guards were not far behind.
"Kokuyi, what is the meaning of this?" The leader asked seeing the ravages his daughter had caused.
A cursory glance over the room told him that it was all pretty much destroyed. What the hell could have provoked such rage? The room was in shambles. His priceless goban was broken in two with the stones scattered all over the room. His collection of crystal sculptures laid in billions of pieces on the ground. His antique desk dating to the clan wars had been overturned. One of its feet had been ripped of. And how the hell did she manage that? The desk was made of the strongest kind of wood there is!
Looking at the ugly picture his daughter made when she was angry, he sighed. He didn't know what to do with the girl. she was beautiful, graceful and learned. Any man should have wanted to marry her. But everyone had heard of her temper and no one wanted to come at her even with a ten-foot pole. All her sisters were married or had a career. Sometimes both like Matsuari. But Kokuyi dreamed only of big cities, power and riches.
He had worried slightly when she had shown such a strong interest in the ninja from Konoha who had come to broker an agreement for their Yondaime. It wasn't a treaty Konoha really cared about since Nami no Kuni was so small. But his country often needed to employ ninjas and Konoha were their only solution since Kiri was on the brink of civil war.
The agreement being so important, he had requested that the ninja in charge be changed. He had wished to avoid conflict with the Hokage's representative who had clearly not been interested in marriage despite his daughter all but throwing herself at him. Thinking about it, that was surely the reason for this bout of anger. The new ninja had arrived today.
"Kokuyi, answer me." he requested in his most stern voice. "Does it have to do with the arrival of the ninja from konoha?"
Visibly startled, his daughter looked at him. She wasn't nearly as good an actress as she thought. It hadn't been hard to see how she had fawned at the idea of a ninja clan heir coming for the negotiations and he was reasonably sure that she had seduced him. And wasn't that a thought no father wanted to have.
But the man hadn't seemed very taken by her and it had enraged her even though she had managed to keep her cool far longer than he ever thought she could. He had to give her that.
His daughter took her time to answer. He could almost see the cogs turning in her brain wondering which approach would give her the desired effect. As she glanced around the room, taking in the carnage she had created, she must have thought that the only way to get out of the situation relatively unscathed was to play the victim because tears began to form in her eyes, her shoulders dropping and her head tilting to the side slowly while inching toward the ground at the same time.
"Otou-san, he got me pregnant. He was supposed to come back and marry me. He promised. But the coward apparently wasn't man enough to own up to his actions. I need to go to Konoha and tell him that we are going to have a child."
She started sobbing quietly, the perfect picture of misery. But the image did not soften his heart at all. He knew his daughter all too well. And she underestimated him. He prepared himself to use his coldest voice to announce the decision he had been reluctant to take for the longest time. Such behavior could not be left unpunished.
"He was a ninja, my dear, and you know very well that ninja have means to protect themselves from fathering children. From what I have seen of the man, he is not the kind of person who would simply forget to take such basic measures of protection. The child is not his. I thought you were smarter than this.
Your attitude can go on no longer. You are lazy and eternally waiting for prince charming while refusing all the men around you by deeming them beneath you. You have not found a job despite my urgings and yet you continue to lap in luxury without a care in the world. This stop now. If you cannot grow up, I will force you.
Tomorrow you will be taken to a house in a nearby village where you will take up the job of secretary to a doctor. You will be given a small allowance to get you settled in for a year. Afterward you will have to provide for yourself. And your child, if there is indeed one."
He could have laughed, despite his breaking heart, at the stunned expression his daughter was making. She probably couldn't believe he was serious since he had always been rather tolerant of her.
"But...otou-san..." she mumbled. "...you can't do that. I am really pregnant with his baby. He will take care of me once he is told."
"I have stopped believing your lies a long time ago Kokuyi-chan. Ninja are really well known for putting anti-pregnancy seals on their body before missions. There is no way a ninja, especially from a clan, would leave Konoha without such basic protection."
He could see her sweet countenance breaking and the anger coming back with full force.
"I am not an idiot, otou-san, far from it. I took precautions. Even in this kami-forsaken place you can find some interesting things on the black market. Like fertility seals to negate the anti-pregnancy seals and insure conception. It cost me a dime but I found one. So yes, he is the otou-san. Of that I have no doubt."
She was sneering at him now while he looked at her aghast. Hadn't she thought of the consequences this would have on Nami no Kuni? The country depended on Konoha's ninja. They needed the protection that they could buy from Konoha.
Especially now that their neighboring country, Mizu no Kuni, was in such civil unrest. Such a thing could damage their relationship with the village hidden in the leaves if it was found out. Looking at her, he could feel no remorse for what he was going to do. He was only going to force her to earn an honest living after all.
"This changes nothing. You will go to Shirakawa tomorrow. You will be forbidden to contact anyone outside the town except through the village leader who will be instructed to pass any message you have to me first. You will raise your child yourself."
"But..."
"Enough!"
And that was it.
The next morning Kokuyi went sent to Shirakawa in a carriage with a paltry amount of belongings despite her raging protests to her otou-san, okaa-san and sisters. When she arrived to the house she had been given, she nearly strangled herself with anger at the sight of the meager abode that was to be her home.
The house was tiny. Especially compared to the palace she was used to. It was a small one story-house built in stones with clean straw on the ground and simple wood furniture. There was only a table, a large counter, two chairs, a bench in the kitchen slash living room and two rock-hard bed in the single bedroom. The windows brought enough light that it didn't look as dreary as it could have, but, all in all, it looked rather sparse.
It is in this house that she was born again seven month later, in December. She would never understand why her okaa-san did not abort her. Maybe she hoped to gain from her birth. Maybe she still thought she could manage to tell the father of her existence. Whatever the reason, she was thankful.
She left her old life at her own hand simply by jumping off a bridge. She remember the awesome rush, the immense feeling of freedom and relief but also and mostly the near-all-encompassing fear that gripped at her from her stomach to her throat, tearing a heart-wrenching scream from it.
Was she depressed? Certainly yes. But she did not end her life in a fit of despair shouting against the world that hurt her. Instead, she made the decision with a clear head, well, as clear as it can be when you are clinically diagnosed with depression.
Her depression expressed itself as longing for something more and the nearly total inability to feel emotions. And, when she did feel them, they overwhelmed. They made her cry or laugh hysterically leaving her with no control over herself and making a fool out of her. But most of the time she only felt bland. Completely, utterly bland.
Nothing had any flavor, nothing excited her, nothing interested her but reading and reading. This was the only place where she could feel in a controlled manner, without feeling overwhelmed by people and real feelings. This is where she learned to know about Naruto. Not that she was a big hard fan. Not at all. In fact, she only saw the anime pre-shippuden. The rest of the story she pieced partly together through fanfictions.
When she ended her life, she was as clear-headed as she could be these days. She made the decision as a logical conclusion to the fact that she did not belong, that she would probably spend her life longing for the easy normality most of the people felt and that she would look on as friends took jobs, gained independence while she was almost stuck to her bed feeling it immensely hard just to get out of it.
She did not wish to waste away, always letting everybody down. So she took the other way out hoping against hope that she would be reincarnated in another life where depression would not bring her down. And boy did she get lucky.
When she came out of her new okaa-san's womb was the first time she felt a difference. While hearing the shouts and insults of the woman who gave birth to her and while being slapped by the midwife to make her cry, she noticed it. And it was not the harshness of a hand against her face that made her scream but rather the warm alien feeling coursing through her veins.
She didn't know if it was the feeling of what she would later learn to be chakra that shocked her so or if it was that, for the first time since she could remember, she felt alive. Maybe it was both. she would later wonder whether depression was more connected to the body than scientists in her previous life had thought or if reincarnation somehow cleansed the soul.
But at the time she was happily screaming her heart out hoping that in this life she would be able to live life to the fullest. It is probably thank to this feeling of life that she survived her early childhood and stayed a rather happy child even if no one was around to share it with.
"Yousei like the fairies who trick you instead of bringing you what you wish for." Her okaa-san exclaimed when the midwife and the village leader asked her for her name to fill in the civil registry and make her papers. Luckily, she was next to her when she said that for it wasn't sure that she would have ever learned her name otherwise. Her okaa-san never did use it again in front of her.
The years she spent in Shirakawa were some of the wost in her life. Like you could imagine, her okaa-san was not exactly the type to dote on her. Yousei most likely wouldn't have survived were it not for her grandfather. Not that he ever came to visit or that he even wrote to her. But he undoubtedly knew his daughter, her okaa-san, well enough to know that she would not properly care for her.
So he hired a nurse who made sure her okaa-san ate enough during her pregnancy and who nursed her when she was a toddler. As soon she was born, she stopped doing anything for Kokuyi and only took care of Yousei.
She clothed and fed her. All the things her okaa-san would not do for her, the useless child. But she was only a job for the nurse. All the care she showed her was perfunctory at best. She was probably influenced by the dislike she felt for Kokuyi. It didn't change the fact that from early on in this new life, Yousei didn't know love.
Being a baby was fun in a way she would no have expected. But, she was most likely influenced by baby-body. Yousei spend most of her time sleeping and dreaming, cooing at the shadows, that the twilight brought into their home, or at the flames in the chimney.
She also smiled at the men coming into their home to see her okaa-san until she figured out that she was not taking them into her bedroom and leaving her child in the kitchen for her comfort. She had been inexperienced in her previous life but not completely clueless.
Yousei managed to walk at six months. Her first few tries were rather pitiful but fun. Dropping from such a height didn't hurt and falling on her butt became one of her silly games until she learned to walk properly. Discovering her environment and the town was much more fun.
She also found out that her body's limitations were vastly different to the ones of her previous body. With little effort she was able to bend and squirm in all directions. And, soon, she was able to master moves that she had only dreamed about in her previous life despite training as a gymnast for six years.
She had craved badly to be a real gymnast but genetics had not favored her and despite grueling exercise she had stayed stiff as a board until she finally gave up. So being able to stretch in all directions was one of her guilty little pleasures. And she spent many mornings and many afternoons of her new life doing cartwheels and other acrobatics in a clearing next to her house.
Since her okaa-san barely bothered to talk to her and her nanny wasn't there very often, she decided to stalk people around in the streets on her short legs until they broke down and talked to her to learn Japanese. When she did that to a school teacher, the women took her back home to talk to her okaa-san. After a few angry shouts mostly from her okaa-san but also from the otherwise seemingly sweet-tempered schoolteacher, she took her hand and guided her to her school.
The teacher told Yousei that she was always welcome in her classroom. Hana-sensei was probably the only adult who really cared for her even if it was only for a short time. But life went on and over the following weeks the woman was swamped with so much work that her interest in the girl waned until she only greeted her like she was just another one of her students.
For the first time in two life, Yousei was rather happy that she took so long to get close to people. Otherwise, she would probably have been devastated. As it is, it did hurt a bit not to have become one of Hana-sensei's precious people but she choose not to dwell on that. And, despite all, school kept her occupied and made her learn the oral and the written language in use here until she had a real mastery over Japanese.
She loved the school. Classes were held in a single room in a two-stories building. Hana-sensei lived in the upper level and held the village's single class on the ground floor. The building fascinated Yousei. Other houses in the village had also attracted her attention but this was the only one she could enter and thus the one she loved the best.
Strangely, she had not been allowed in the village's single bar even after she cheekily informed the bartender that she wouldn't drink anything. The man had laughed but still refused to let her enter. Too bad. Yousei would still, sometimes, sit next to the entrance of the bar and stare as some of the wildest-looking people she had ever seen entered the building.
So the school soon became her favorite building. It was a traditional Japanese wooden structure with a wooden front door. You had to take your shoes off in the little lobby at the entrance, and, in order to enter the main room, you had to go through a really nicely painted sliding door made out of paper and wood. The also wooden floor was well cared for and the children had to kneel on the floor in front of really low desks during class.
In the front of the room were several blackboards where Hana-sensei wrote the words she made her students learn, a mix of kanji, hiragana and katakana, or the calculation they had to resolve.
Since several levels were mixed up in the class, she always had varying exercises to make the children do according to their ages. Being too young (younger than six), she was not officially enrolled in the school yet. Thus, Hana-sensei did not pay as much attention to what she was doing as she did for the other students.
Yousei was off the streets, that was all Hana-sensei really cared about. It suited the girl just fine as she could learn at her rhythm by following this or that age-group. A few month after joining the school, she felt bored from following Hana-sensei's teaching and headed to the right rear corner of the room where she found some books she could now attempt to read.
This is were she discovered that the world she had been born into was Naruto's world and that the ninja games the other children were playing during recess were not like playing Indians and cowboys and more like cops and robbers. Playing ninja was not the result traditional stories told around a fire by elders about times long past. No, it was the result of a very recent and very actual fascination with real, living, ninjas. Holy shit! Breathing fire!
Yousei was four when she made the connection with Naruto. She had known about ninjas for a few months but she had not made the link with the TV-show she had seen in her previous life yet.
To her, tales of ninjas seemed grossly exaggerated and ninjas were simply normal people with battle experience that civilians gushed about while embellishing the tales to unbelievable proportions. But then she learned about the Kyuubi almost destroying Konohagakure nearly four years ago and it finally clicked. She was in a TV-show!
After a few hours pondering the meaning of life and the value of living in a TV-show, she realized it didn't matter if it was real because it certainly felt like it was. And, since she hadn't been talked about in the series, nothing was predestined for her.
Or at least, she didn't know if Kami-sama had a plan for her or not and as long as she had even the illusion of free will like she had had in her previous life that was enough for her.
The day she found out about being in Naruto's world, she was reading one the most recent history textbooks the little library her school had. Astonished she began to wonder which of the amazing feats described in Naruto were real life events and which were simply a stylistic rendering of his story where the author gave him a huge amount of power. A thousand clones at the same time? Ridiculous much?
But hearing about a hundred feet tall fox with nine tails in an otherwise seemingly serious history book convinced her to shed her doubts and reluctantly agree that the rules of her previous world meant nothing in here.
Shaken to the core, she left the building and went in one of her explorations. She walked and then ran as much and as fast as she could (which was rather impressive for a four year old girl). Her surroundings were lush with trees and various plants she knew nothing about but breathing the fresh air and feeling energized from the cool air, felt good.
After some time and after having cooled of, Yousei decided that knowing this didn't change much in the end. Except that she knew what she wanted to do now. She wasn't really enthusiastic about the idea of becoming a ninja, if she was even able to become one being born in another country and all that, but the idea of chakra made her salivate. It was almost like magic after all.
She had always dreamed of being magic. At eleven she had waited for her Hogwarts letter. At twelve she had hoped the letter was just late. At fourteen she had wished to be a charmed one and to be able to freeze people at will. Slowly she had accepted the simple truth that her old life seemed to be nothing else but mundane. So now with chakra at her fingertips, she was over the moon.
But Naruto, the anime, was not exactly a guide in how to use chakra and those, if they existed at all, weren't in her school's library. So that day, she found a small clearing in the forest around the village with a large stream running through it and sat down pondering on how to use chakra. Now that she knew about it, she could hazard a guess about the strange energy she could sometimes feel coursing through her.
Knowing it was there didn't help at all in controlling it. Meditating seemed the way to go in understanding this energy to her. But the more she tried to grasp it the more it seemed to flow away from her mental exertions. How do you move heat? You can feel heat but you can move it with the power of your mind? For that you would need a fan.
And using the power of her mind gave her no result and she had no chakra fan so she was reduced to looking at it without controlling it. Despite this, she didn't give up and everyday she spent almost an hour meditating in the forest hoping to learn control.
She wondered if being unable to learn to use chakra without guidance was the reason there were not more ninjas cropping up outside of the hidden village and outside of clans. she knew it was likely possible to learn to use it without help since Haku's okaa-san in the Naruto wave arc would certainly not have shown him how to use his kekkei genkai and he was still able to mold chakra as a child. But she didn't know how to do it.
Despite her inability to mold chakra, her meditations were not fruitless. Spending so much time feeling her own chakra she started to know it really well and after a few months she also started to become attuned to the fact that all living people had chakra. She started feeling the same energy surrounding other people and then even animals.
Yousei could not be sneaked upon by anything in the forest or anyone from the village for that matter. She could even find out the location of a bird's nest from a few feet away. She felt like she was amazing. But she still couldn't control her chakra.
Meditating also seemed to increase the amount of chakra she owned. Of course part of the increase must have come from her growing up but she didn't think that was all. Yousei had a surprisingly large reserve of chakra compared to the people she came in contact with. It was the first time she really wondered about her otou-san and whether she had inherited that from him.
Her okaa-san had only told Yousei of her otou-san in the most derogatory terms she could find. Or rather, she could be found ranting about him when she had had a bit too much to drink and unsurprisingly that was quite often. So one night, when she was in a mellow mood thanks to the few cup of sake she had already knocked back, the girl questioned her about him. She was told he was a bastard, a heartless, ugly shit and yadda, yadda, yadda.
But she also gave her daughter his name. She told her that he was a ninja from Konohagakure and that she had tricked him by using an uncommon seal to impregnate herself. The tiny girl was elated.
Despite everything, Yousei had dreamed about this second otou-san. She hadn't wanted to think that someone else had rejected her so early in her new life. The truth was that he simply didn't know of her and not that he he hadn't wanted her. And he was a ninja. Sugoi!
After this discussion, her okaa-san started noticing her more. But the fact that she was so advanced for her age did not endear Yousei to her. On the contrary, every time she noticed that her daughter was a really advanced child, she ranted at her. Sometimes she walloped her for no reason. Just because she was there. Her okaa-san also decided she was fit for cheap labor, like cooking her meals or cleaning the house.
Since the nanny only made food for the girl and stayed to watch her eat it everyday, Yousei had never worried for food. And that was really lucky since she' wasn't quite sure her okaa-san would have bothered to feed her properly otherwise.
Three months after having questioned her okaa-san, everything changed. With the latter's growing notice of her existence and with the slaps and the hurtful words also came the strange calculating stares she sometimes bestowed upon her.
Yousei didn't understand what her okaa-san was looking for but instincts and experience told her it couldn't be anything good. So she tried her best to stay clear of her as much as possible, only coming back to the house to sleep and eat, and when she couldn't avoid it.
One evening she was trying to fall asleep on her cot in the kitchen when her okaa-san went to the front door and let a man enter. It was nothing unusual since the same thing happened every once in a while especially when merchants caravans stayed in the village's outskirts on their way to the capital.
But this time, while she was faking being asleep like usual, her okaa-san did not bring him in her room but towards her cot. Tensing ever so slightly, she partially opened her eyes to look at them.
The man was a tall obese man clad in rich brown furs and green robes with several expensive-looking rings on his hands. He was bald with small squinting eyes and large bags under them. His huge cheeks were dangling from his face. And he was leering at her six years old self.
Instantly on guard, she opened her eyes further to glance at her okaa-san who was telling him to go on with an ugly twisted smile. The man came closer to her and crouched on the floor. He gathered enough courage to extend his arm. As soon as he started slowly caressing her face, she jumped on her feet as fast as she could and threw a kick at his face. She was quick and he was taken by surprise. He didn't react at all, overbalanced and fell over on his butt.
Her okaa-san was furious. She tried to grab and to slap her but Yousei was too light on her feet. Jumping on the man, she evaded the older woman and was across the room in a few seconds. She opened the door, turned back slightly to stare at her okaa-san and wonder how she could have fallen so far as to pimp her own daughter and then she was gone, running as fast as she could towards the school which had been her haven for the last two years.
Banging on the school door, she woke Hana-sensei. Her frightened face must have softened the teacher and the young woman tried to take the girl in her arms. Gently Yousei pushed them away. She had never particularly liked being touched in either of her lives and the Incident certainly wasn't going to help that.
The adrenaline wearing off and the shock kicking in, she started sobbing her heart out. A really ugly feeling rose inside her making it hard to breathe for a moment before Hana-sensei shuffled her inside the classroom asking her what was wrong. She explained to her that her okaa-san had brought a man, who had tried to touch her inappropriately, home.
Hana-sensei was incensed. Looking the girl over, she decided to bring her upstairs in her apartment and tucked her in her own bed while she went out to rise the village's leader up.
Yousei would later find out that both of them had immediately gone to see her okaa-san with a few other men from the village as manpower. They had brought her into the town hall to put her in Shirakawa's one and only holding cell. The merchant had predictably vanished before the men arrived and his carriage had disappeared with him in the middle of the night.
But in the morning, tempers had cooled down. While Hana-sensei was feeding her breakfast and starting class to make the girl feel as normal as possible, Yousei's okaa-san was explaining to the village leader that it was all a misunderstanding, that the child was too young to understand what had happened and that she was so worried for her.
Her okaa-san had a reputation in town so Yousei was pretty sure no one quite believed her. But since nothing had really happened, they also had no proof other than the words of a six year old girl who, as bright as she was, was not a reliable witness.
This is why they forced Hana-sensei to release the girl into the ever loving care of her okaa-san. Child protective services were not quite as developed in the small town as one could have hope hoped. They did keep a really close eye on her and her okaa-san over the next few days but otherwise, they did nothing.
After this incident Yousei decided that she wouldn't stay in Shirakawa a moment longer than she absolutely had to.