The sun blistered the stone-paved streets, the wind whipped up dust from the dirt roads, and Ami burst through the doors of the Konoha shinobi academy for the last time. She strutted proudly in her Konoha forehead protector - the proof that she was finally a ninja. Long hair, the colour of poison tried to whip at her face with every slight turn of her head, now restrained by the blue fabric of her hitai-ate, and a tight, cruel smile blazed out at the other graduates.
Ami's eyes met those of a pink-haired girl as she made her way to her desk. At any time in the past those gazes would be filled with animosity, but now neither could look at the other without seeing the glint of steel, and the spiral leaf of Konoha - the proof of their unity, and shared reason to celebrate. Ami nodded at the pink-haired girl, and to her surprise, the gesture was returned.
The pink haired girl was called Sakura. The daughter of a wealthy family, the best friend of a clan heir, and the subject of half a dozen student crushes, despite her enormous forehead. Sakura's red dress, emblazoned with her clan symbol and always pristine, contrasted sharply with Ami's own frayed, drab clothes. Sakura was commonly -often secretly- admired, while Ami had a tendency to frown, and a figure she charitably allowed herself to describe as 'stout'. But if Ami lost out in the contest of looks, she consoled herself that she at least had the muscle to win through in the contests that mattered.
As Ami watched, Sakura pulled the forehead protector from her forehead, and looped it over the top of her hair instead. Ami saw an opportunity to exert her dominance, and yelled at the girl as she moved to her own seat. "Hey, that's meant to go on your forehead, Giant Brow. You know you can get an extra-large version if you ask."
The girl's eye twitched, but she didn't rise to the bait, and Ami slid her legs beneath her desk. She was preparing another lightning-witted barb when the classroom's screen door slid open, and a man with a scar across his nose limped in.
"Hey, Iruka-sensei!" a blonde boy yelled from the other side of the room.
The instructor gave the class a brief smile, but didn't reply, instead turning to address them all.
"Beginning today, all of you are real ninjas!" he said. Suddenly the class hushed. "But... you are merely rookie genin. The hard part has just started."
Iruka gazed across the room of increasingly excited children, perhaps hoping to see a sign that they were approaching their futures with the serious composure warranted by the situation, but not finding it. "Now, soon you will be assigned duties by the village, so today we will be creating the three-person teams, and each will have a jonin- uh, a sensei. You will follow that sensei's instructions as you complete the assigned duties."
Iruka pulled a scroll from a pocket of his flak-jacket and unfurled it. "To start, Team Seven: Haruno Sakura, Uzumaki Naruto, and Uchiha Sasuke."
Ami watched their reactions with amusement at first, as Sakura quailed at realising she'd be sharing a team with the annoying Blondie. Her amusement vanished when she realised that the Forehead had managed to snap up Sasuke. Ami lifted her nose into the air and sniffed, turning back to face the front of the class.
Whatever crush she may once have had on the dark haired Uchiha, the annoying antics of his fan club had made the prospect of being lumped in with them unappealing. Ami cast furtive glances around the room as Blondie mouthed off about being placed on a team with the Uchiha, and Iruka explained about how team placements were worked out according to performance. The explanation seemed superficially plausible, but something about Iruka's delivery left Ami unconvinced.
"Next, Team Eight," Iruka said once the blonde had settled down. "The following will be part of Team Eight: Inuzuka Kiba, Hyuga Hinata, Aburame Shino."
Ami noticed the clan girl Hinata jabbing her fingers together nervously, but the dog-brat was grinning. They certainly seemed happier with their placement than the last three. Realising that there weren't that many people left to be sorted, Ami began glancing around the class, trying to work out her own placement by counting who was left.
"Finally, Team Ten. You will be: Akimichi Choji, Nara Shikamaru, and Yamanaka Ino," Iruka said, letting the arm holding the list fall to his side.
Ami felt her stomach slowly sinking into her gut. Forgotten, out of place. She'd always been the odd one out, the ugly one, the ignored one. Even the Blondie got attention sometimes, when he acted up, but she hadn't even been remembered when it came to hand out team assignments.
Already dreading the answer, Ami began to raise her hand. "Hey Sensei, you forgot me, what's my team?"
"Ah, you'll have a special arrangement, Ami-chan. You'll be assigned to a team of just yourself, under a chunin-sensei," Iruka said, forcing a smile.
The rest of the class spent several moments looking between each other, and Ami heard several mutters.
"She's on Team Leftover," the other annoying blonde, Ino, shouted gleefully.
Ami felt her cheeks grow hot, and lowered her eyes to her hands clasped over the desk.
"No! It's a good opportunity," Iruka insisted. "Ami will have the benefit of one-on-one instruction from her sensei."
Instantly, The Uchiha's hand shot up in the air. "Sensei, I wish to be placed into this arrangement."
Iruka laughed awkwardly. "Ha-ah, I'm afraid not. The assignments have all been made, and carry the approval of the Hokage. Well, that's all. I have to go now. You're all dismissed, but come back tomorrow to meet your jonin- uh, your sensei." Iruka quickly left the room, sliding the door closed behind him.
Ami squeezed her hands so tightly together they began to hurt. She risked a glance up at the rest of the class, and saw several derisive stares directed at her. Sasuke's glare was fierce, backed by an emotion she could tell was intense but couldn't place. Whatever he was thinking, his glare couldn't make the situation any worse. Team Leftover. That name would haunt her for the rest of her life. She stood shakily, knocking her chair over in her haste to get out of the room.
"Bye Leftover!" Ino shouted through giggles.
"I wonder what loser sensei they gave her," Sakura pondered aloud.
Ami slid open the door and ran from the room, her red face in a furious grimace. She began to run home at first, until she remembered that her mother would be there, sitting at home on a rare day off from her job in the service district, waiting with a celebratory lunch for news of her daughter's assignment. Ami couldn't face her like that, she had to find somewhere to calm down.
She found herself wandering through the outskirts of the village, beyond the Ninja Academy, passing through empty training grounds and small copses of trees. Eventually she arrived at a small pond beneath a hanging tree, and she sat, staring into the clear water. At some point between leaving the classroom and finding the pond, Ami realised she'd started crying, and she leaned forward to scoop handfuls of water onto her cheeks. Her reflection was alarming, with red eyes, hot red cheeks, and a mess of dark purple hair, and she spent a minute trying to rake her hair back into shape.
Back at her home, Ami tried to make the best of the situation to her mother. It was an opportunity, She'd get one-on-one training. There'd be no team mates to annoy her or get in her way. Her mother was not convinced, and concerned that there'd be no one to watch out for her daughter. She couldn't imagine what the Hokage was thinking, and Ami silently agreed.
The newly minted kunoichi got little sleep that night, and every step towards the Academy the following morning only increased the clenching pain around her heart. As she took her seat among laughing and chattering genin, she was forced to consider the question she'd heard the previous day - what loser sensei had they saddled her with.
The first person to appear in the doorway to the classroom was a black haired woman wearing a mesh shirt. Ami sat up straight as she saw the woman's piercing red eyes, and waited eagerly for her to speak.
"Team Eight!" She shouted, and three of the new genin stumbled down past the desks to leave with her.
Ami lay her head down on her folded arms to wait. The second sensei to arrive was a sturdy looking man with a cigarette stuck between his lips. He had called out for team ten, and they had all left together.
The third visitor to the room was a smiling brown haired man with small black eyes, wearing a green flak jacket over a blue jumpsuit. Ami only gave him the briefest glance, before lowering her head back down to rest.
"Nigai Ami?" the man asked, and the rest of the class stilled.
"Leftover Sensei!" someone whispered loudly from the back of the class.
"Yeah," Ami said, standing reluctantly. She marched down through the desks towards the door as if she were heading to her execution.
"It's nice to meet you, Ami-chan," the man said, turning back to grin kindly at her as they left the classroom. "I'm Sarugaku Tsuzumi, please address me as Tsuzumi-sensei while we're working together."
"Sure, sensei," Ami said, unimpressed.
Tsuzumi's smile faded for a moment, and he resumed leading her away in silence. After they'd made some distance from the academy building, he slowed to walk beside her, and began speaking again. "Say, Ami. I know you think you've passed the academy exams already, but I should tell you, before they're made fully active shinobi, every genin must pass a special test set by their sensei."
Ami stopped in her tracks. "What!" She shouted, turning to the man. "After I went through all of that - I still might not get to be a shinobi?"
"Hm, I'm afraid not," Tsuzumi said, his infuriating smile returning. "The other jonin leaders will be doing their tests tomorrow, but I want to get a head start, so we're heading to the training ground now."
Ami began stomping after the chunin to catch up, and silently fumed the rest of the way. After several minutes of walking, Ami was growing increasingly nervous, and she was at first relieved when Tsuzumi led her into a wide open field, bordered by trees on all sides, and featuring a tall wooden pole planted in the exact centre of the clearing.
"Welcome to the Twenty-Eighth Training Ground," Tsuzumi said, holding up his arms expansively.
Ami glanced left and right at the dense trees. "It's great." She sniffed.
"Tell me, Ami-chan, have you ever practised the tree-walking exercise?" Tsuzumi asked, turning to the girl.
"N-no! They never taught us that in the academy. I can climb a tree, you want me to climb a tree? I'm on it!" She said eagerly, the ghost of hope playing across her features.
"Not a tree," Tsuzumi said, pulling a kunai from his pouch. From the ring of the kunai dangled a paper tag, the word 'Victory' written across it in black ink. He threw the kunai directly up into the air, and several seconds later it fell back down, burying itself neatly into the top of the wooden pole.
"I have to climb that?" Ami asked sceptically, eyeing the pole. It had to be thirty feet tall, with no hand-holds or notches to make things easy.
"Yes! Your test is to recover the kunai," Tsuzumi said with a smile.
"But... how!" Ami yelled.
"Hm, you have to work it out, it's part of the test. Try... using chakra!" Tsuzumi called unhelpfully over his shoulder, already heading back towards the tree line. "Oh, and don't leave the training ground, I'll be hiding out here, and I'll know if you try and cheat. If you try to leave, it's an instant fail."
Ami scowled at the retreating chunin.
"You've got three hours, Ami-chan, good luck," Tsuzumi shouted as he passed out of sight, following the path back to the village centre.
"Okay, Pole-san. You're not so tough," Ami muttered, turning to the pole.
She approached the post and thought about Tsuzumi's parting advice, then placed the palm of one hand against the wood, gathered up a mass of chakra, and pushed it into her hands. Or rather, she tried. Ami's chakra control had always been poor. She could manage the Academy three with some finesse, but only after countless hours of practice, and when it came to picking up control techniques on-the-fly she'd always lost out to her classmates. It had taken her weeks just to get a leaf to stick to her forehead during the Academy's earliest chakra shaping exercises, and as she tried and failed to adhere her hand to the pole she began to think that this one would take no less time to work out.
For two or three attempts out of her dozens of tries, Ami thought she felt some mild resistance as she tried to pull her hand away, but it wasn't something she could repeat reliably, and as her arms began to tire she moved to sit on the ground, staring at the problem that towered over her.
"You're stronger than you look, Pole-san. It looks like I underestimated you," Ami muttered, before standing and moving up to hook her arms around the pole. She'd seen woodsmen climbing trees like this in the forests at the perimeter of the village, making a hoop of their arms around the trunk then inching incrementally upwards, but the bark of the trees must have been important to that technique, since against the smooth wood of the pole Ami couldn't get nearly enough traction to making the climbing technique work. She barely made it a foot off the ground, then hopped, frustrated, back onto the grass before she could fall.
She changed postures, and gripped the pole more tightly, trying to inch up it like a caterpillar. This technique showed more promise, with her full body in contact with the pole, she finally had the grip to gain some height, but the effort depended entirely on the muscles of her arms and legs to stick, and after gaining several feet her strength gave out, and she slid slowly back down to the ground.
"There's gotta be a trick to it," Ami mused. "Sensei wouldn't tell me to if I couldn't do it."
Taking a moment to center herself, Ami took several steps back from the pole and examined the problem from a distance. Iruka had always emphasised the importance of ninja tools, and Ami always carried at least a pair of kunai and stack of shuriken.
She dug the kunai from her pouch and spent a moment thinking of applications. Her first idea was to hack at the dry earth beneath the pole to uproot it. She began to dig using the sharp point of a kunai, but very quickly found that the soil surrounding the pole was only an inch deep. Below that it was set into a large block of concrete, which Ami could only chip at ineffectually.
Ami's second attempt using the kunai was to treat them as climbing picks, jabbing them at the wood and trying to haul herself up. She struggled with this from the start, as from only a few inches away she couldn't hit the pole hard enough to penetrate the tight grain of the wood deeply enough to get a good grip. She found that she could get the kunai to stick firmly if she threw them from a distance, or hammered them in with a stone, but that wasn't something she could do once she'd cleared the ground. Ami allowed her frustration to bleed away, and stepped back from the problem again.
The two kunai embedded into the pole made the start of a very respectable ladder, it was just annoying that Ami didn't have more of them, and there were none to be found elsewhere in the training ground. Reluctantly, Ami turned to the stack of shuriken in her pouch.
With slightly more difficulty than the kunai, Ami began throwing the shuriken at the post, aiming to embed them at even distances up its length. For every one that hit on target, three went wide, and Ami wasted frantic minutes searching the training ground for the missed ammunition. Eventually she reached a point where the shuriken were scattered more or less evenly all the way to the top, in a pattern she prayed she'd be able to climb - supposing that they even bore her weight.
Ami stepped up onto the handle of the first kunai, and then the second, holding the sides of the pole for balance. There was an ominous cracking sound, but the blade seemed to be holding in the wood. She grimaced down at the next step - the first shuriken she'd thrown, sticking out of the post at a thirty degree angle.
Ami placed the tip of her sandal onto the shuriken, and gently let it take her weight. For a moment the shuriken seemed to hold, before it snapped in half, sending Ami to tumble to the ground with a yelp. She sat up and growled. The steel of the throwing stars was almost strong enough to take her weight, but she'd have to hold onto the ones above as she climbed if she wanted to make it to the top.
Ami began again, stretching her leg to skip the broken shuriken. As she began to apply her weight to the next step, she reached up and gingerly grasped the shuriken above. The first cut came quickly and predictably, slicing the palm of her hand where she gripped the sharp weapon.
Ami grunted at the stinging pain, and blanched at the sight of a drop of blood running down her forearm, but persisted. She'd suffered worse scrapes climbing trees as a child, and the consequences for failure here were far worse than a little cut. Ami didn't want to imagine what her life would become if she failed the test, but she knew her mother couldn't afford to support her for another year of the Academy, and without a ninja income, she'd be forced to take up other work.
Ami managed to pull herself up to the second shuriken without further injuring her hands, but with her full weight spread between them it was impossible to climb them without injury, and the cuts accumulated.
Her breathing was heavy as she neared the top, and she alternately grunted with effort and yelped with pain as she caught herself on the sharp edges of metal, tearing increasingly messy cuts into her palms and fingers.
Her arms were slick with blood when she finally reached the top of the pole, folding her forearms onto the edge to hoist herself up, holding her palms clear to avoid putting pressure on the torn skin. There was little space on top of the pole to sit and rest, but Ami batted the hilt of the 'Victory' kunai with the palm of her hand until it dislodged and fell to the ground below, then sat, breathing heavily, staring down at her crimson skin.
After a few seconds, she raised her red hands to the sky, and shouted, "Victory!"
Ami couldn't remember enough of the Academy's first aid course to know whether she was losing a dangerous amount of blood, but she knew that with Tsuzumi-sensei watching from the woods, she'd never be allowed to place herself in real danger.
After regaining her breath, Ami turned, and began awkwardly backing down the pole on the opposite side to her shuriken steps. She gripped the side of the pole with her thighs and forearms, and started to slide down using her caterpillar method. After a couple of feet she began sliding far more quickly than she intended, and when she hit the ground, she was sure that she'd twisted her ankle.
"Ow ow ow," Ami rolled on her back, then slouched up to a sitting position. She dragged the Victory kunai into her lap with the tip of an undamaged pinky finger, then sat with her back to the post, pressing her hands against her thighs as hard as she could bear to stem the bleeding.
She briefly wondered what Tsuzumi-sensei was waiting for, why stay in hiding if she'd already passed the test, but the sun was warm, and weariness, along with a strange light-headedness, was pushing her towards sleep. Her eyes eventually closed, and she drifted away.
