Published: 6/30/2014

Age 5: Part 2

"Hey, this is the part where we meet, isn't it?"

"Yeah, it is. I'd never leave it out."

"...It'd be nice if he were still around to see it."

"...Yeah. It would."

I'd had a lot of expectations when I first met Minato. He'd been my favorite character in all of Naruto, hands-down; not only was he an uber cool badass and a great ninja, he was a prodigy genius who was really friendly and polite to boot. He was responsible, too, and clever, and overall just a super awesome person.

Thing is, though, expectations don't always equate to reality. People are what they are, not what you think they should be. And Minato? Sure, he was a badass genius ninja… sometimes. But no one is a totally flat character, and that means that the rest of the time he was a major, major dork.

"So I asked her, 'Why is Super Ultimate Soaring Dual Dragons of Divine Water and Heavenly Lightning Strike of Power no good?' But she just laughed at me!" Minato exclaimed, emotively thrusting his soapy washrag into his bucket. The subsequent splash achieved an impressive distance; I observed with careful detachment that the area around him was looking worse than it had when we'd started.

"I dunno," I replied, resisting the urge to bang my head on the floor as I began picking at a particularly stubborn spot of dirt.

Minato, who had been made to watch over me the whole day after my fainting spell, had asked only one thing of me in return for his kindness: that I help him with his chores. I had agreed immediately, feeling horrendously guilty that he had spent the entirety of the 25th—his birthday—sitting in a small room next to a knocked-out toddler. With that said, though, he wasn't angry or anything; in fact, he was actually rather pleased that I'd known it was his birthday at all. At the House, apparently, birthdays are almost always celebrated at least a week late.

"And I was so looking forward to showing it off at the Academy's ninjutsu exhibition, too," the future Yondaime sighed ruefully, half-heartedly swishing water around the floorboards. It was astonishing how much of a lazy teenager he looked like just then.

"Why don't you just change it a bit?" I asked, picking up my own bucket and nudging him over, knowing that a speedy intervention was going to be needed if I wanted to save the sitting room floor from drowning. "Like… I don't know, make it Divine Dual Dragons or something like that."

"Alliterative," Minato noted appreciatively as he scooted to the side. "But you don't think Kushina will laugh at that?"

"I think it'll be okay," I replied, just a smidge dryly. It suddenly occurred to me that I was technically older than Minato, who had just turned sixteen. "Besides, it's the effectiveness of the jutsu that counts, not the name, right?"

"Yeah," my cousin laughed a bit sheepishly, rubbing his neck, "I guess it is. Huh…" He paused a moment before turning to look at me. "Have you always been this clever, Suzu-chan?"

There was suddenly an alarming amount of sharpness in his gaze.

"Uh," I gulped, taken aback at his unexpectedly intense scrutiny; I decided now was a good time to give the floor a nice, vigorous scrub. "I-I guess..."

"Hmm," Minato murmured pensively, sitting back on his haunches and examining me at me with a scarily analytical eye.

I held back a cringe. Oh, I see how it is. He's only crazy smart when circumstances are against you. It figured.

"Hey, you two! Are you done yet?" came Auntie Reiko's distant call, interrupting my exasperation. "You've been in there the whole afternoon! If you're not finished by the time everyone else gets back…"

"Eek," I said, deciding that a cringe wasn't so inappropriate now.

"Let's get going," Minato shuddered, getting back on his knees and beginning to clean in fevered earnest. "I want to live to see dinner."

"Ditto," I agreed.

So that was how I made friends with my cousin, Minato Namikaze. Minato, like everyone else at the House, was an orphan: his parents had died on a mission when he had been two. At age sixteen, he was not only the beloved big brother of the many House children, but the pride of the clan—he was the youngest Jounin in the history of the Namikaze.

The Namikaze, as I gathered, were a very minor ninja clan that put out competent but mostly average shinobi. Unlike the noble clans like the Hyuga or the Aburame, or even regular clans like the Nara, we had no particular specialization; our people just did whatever they were best at. We weren't particularly inclined to ninjutsu or genjutsu, either, so our hereditary chakra reserves were only slightly larger than normal.

Oh, but we did have our own taijutsu style: Hurricane Gale. The first clan head had devised it because Namikazes tended to be skinny like toothpicks and were naturally disadvantaged in hand-to-hand combat; its main focus was drawing power from the lower body, redirecting and using opponents' energy against them, and moving in circles. If properly executed, it was, apparently, very effective against multiple opponents, and could be used for extended periods of time due to its lack of need for brute strength.

At least, that's what I was told. Information like this was constantly being dumped on me nowadays because it seemed that I was due to start at the Academy this April. The week of my arrival had actually been the first week of my lessons with Auntie Reiko, who was in charge of educating the House's children in the clan arts.

(My God, was there nothing that woman could do? She was the ultimate supermom.)

For the most part, though, my days were rather peaceful, full of games and family and regular five-year-old stuff. Kids here had a shocking amount of freedom; as long as our daily chores were completed, House rules allowed us to go out into the village on our own whenever we wanted, so long as we returned home before dinner.

Was that an effect of being from a ninja clan, or was that just the tone of Konoha in general? I couldn't tell. It had been just two days after I'd gotten here and it felt like I'd been a citizen of the village all my life… not that that was a bad thing. In fact, I rather enjoyed myself. A second childhood was something I knew people would kill to have, and it was easy to see why. That sort of carefree life where your only concerns were to eat, sleep, and play… you couldn't appreciate it until it was over.

In that vein, three months passed in a flash. Before I knew it I was in an Academy classroom, being assigned a seat. First-year students, it seemed, weren't allowed to pick their own seats, and were placed in alphabetical order.

The Academy didn't look like it had changed much between now and Naruto's time. The classrooms were large and lecture hall-styled, with a podium for the teacher to speak at at the bottom. The floors were hardwood and the doors slid; the windows were the latched kind that rotated outwards. For a ninja school, things were surprisingly colorful: there were several posters and pictures on the walls displaying different rules and ninja platitudes.

I suppose here is where I should go into all the different people I met and how special they were, but I won't. There weren't any particularly inspiring teachers or cool senpai for me to talk about, anyway. As far as I was concerned, only two people I met in the Academy really mattered: Akihiko Namikaze and Yoshiya Miyazawa.

I'd met the former of the two by virtue of being seated next to him. Nothing fostered friendship like consistent casual contact, after all, and honestly? It would have been harder to not be his friend. Akihiko was incredibly amiable and had no trouble inviting me to do things like play games or eat lunch with him; by time the first week was over, we were bonafide buddies. Yoshiya, being Akihiko's best friend, quickly became mine by extension.

Akihiko was—obviously—a clansman of mine. He dressed in blindingly bright red and was quite loud, which made me wonder how I'd ever missed him, considering the fact that we lived in the same few acres of village space. He had the standard Namikaze coloring and stature—that is, blond-haired, blue-eyed, and twig-like—and his hair, which was gravity-defying, spike-forming, and somewhat left-leaning, marked him as a member of the wind branch.

(The Namikaze clan didn't have a hierarchy or anything, but there were two branches: the wave and wind branches. People from the wave branch—my branch—were typically water-natured and straight-haired. The wind branch—the one that both Akihiko and Minato were from—usually produced spikey-headed wind users. Of course, with that said, there were exceptions to each of those generalizations; chakra natures and hair types bled over all the time.)

Yoshiya was not from a clan, but his father was a second generation ninja, so he had some training. He was positively plain by comparison to his best friend; his dress sense was already low-key—he usually wore earthen colors—and that, in combination with his dark brown hair and murky green eyes, made his appearance utterly unremarkable. He was horribly shy and quiet, too, and hated drawing attention to himself.

I guess opposites really do attract. Even their talents were in sharp contrast: where Akihiko had already begun training in the fourth (!) level of Hurricane Gale, it was apparent Yoshiya was a blooming ninjutsu prodigy—he had already been spitting out mud balls for fun by the time I'd met him.

Honestly, they both had me outclassed from the very start. Yoshiya was ten times smarter than I had been at this age, and Akihiko was insanely athletic. I mean, after all, he was on the fourth level of Hurricane Gale—he was essentially a toddler with an orange belt.

What was with the Narutoverse and incredibly precocious children? Back home kids like these were so rare you could hardly believe they existed at all, but here it was like everyone and his mom was a prodigy. Something about ninja society must encourage a drastically early maturation, I mused as the teacher got up and dismissed us for lunch.

"Let's play ninja!" Akihiko all but screamed as soon as our Chuunin sensei left; there was an immediate—and chaotic—mass exodus out to the playground, where a crowd of children promptly gathered around, clapping and cheering.

Well. Maybe not too mature, though.

We were split into two teams to play nukenin and oinin, the ninja equivalent of cops and robbers. Each player produced his own set of cardstock shuriken, and those of us from ninja clans had a wooden kunai or two to arm ourselves with. Bendy-straws were taken from juice boxes to be assembled into headset mics for hunter-nin usage; a packet of post-its were liberated from the teacher's desk and rationed out as explosive tags, two per person. The area under monkey bars was designated as village T&I.

The rules were as follows: three jailbreaks per person. Only three uses of ninjutsu were allowed in a game. If you took any injuries to the legs, you had to walk until you healed. You could only take five hits from the shuriken before you were dead; if you were stabbed in the neck, chest, or stomach with a kunai, you were dead; if you used a fourth ninjutsu, you were dead; if you were stuck in T&I for longer than two minutes, you were also dead.

Predictably, the game ended when all members of a single team were dead.

(Here I make a clever comment about being dead and the games of ninja children.)

Akihiko and I ended up being comrades in defection, but Yoshiya was on the other team, which honestly did not bode well for any of the nukenin. The hunter-nin knew this and immediately designated him as mission control, well aware of his strategic brilliance.

"Missing-nin have one minute to hide!" the jailer announced.

The other kids dutifully covered their eyes. Akihiko took off, clutching his kunai in one hand, dragging me behind him with the other. We ran past a couple of kids who were ducking behind the slides, heading straight for the tree with the swing.

"Hold that!" Akihiko ordered once we reached it, releasing my hand and pointing at the wooden board swaying gently in the breeze.

I went over and kept it from flopping around; he wasted no time in jumping on it and scrambling up the rope like a monkey. After that, with a ridiculous amount of upper body strength that no young child should have, he hauled the seat up while I was still on it so I could reach the lowest branch. When I made it onto the same bough as him, he tossed it back down before motioning for me to climb higher. I followed him easily into the tree's obscuring heights.

Playground safety? Pshaw. This was the Hidden Leaf Village—kids were born climbing trees.

"Ready or not, here we come!" came the collective shout of our opponents.

Yoshiya immediately sprung into gear, green eyes bright, head whirring with plans and possibilities.

"Watanabe and Kamizuki, you guys go check the playground!" our friend began, thrusting a finger to his left. "Ota, go with them! Everyone else, come here, I have a plan…"

As some secret course of action was whispered into our classmates' ears, Akihiko tensed.

"If they find us, you go to that branch over there," he told me quietly, pointing over his shoulder at a particularly long limb. "You can cross over to the Academy roof and then jump from the awning."

"What are you gonna do?" I asked, maintaining the hushed tone, going one branch up so I could climb over him.

"I'll drop down and fight them," he declared, flashing his kunai with a brawny grin. "You can be a surprise attack if I need it."

I almost protested the idea of turning to a fight first thing—running was much more in my nature—but then I stopped and considered it. It was just a game, after all. What could he possibly do?

But the answer, disturbingly enough, was quite a bit. Akihiko was trained in martial arts, after all, and hadn't he just shown me he was strong enough to lift me ease? He could beat the crap out of our classmates if he wanted to. I felt a sudden shudder crawl over my skin, and the thought came to me unbidden: child soldiers, even on the playground.

I froze. For a moment, my gaze was taken over by a horrible vision of my classmates savagely brawling to the death, stabbing each other as bloody red mist settled in the background…

"Suzu?" Akihiko asked, peering up at me curiously.

"Huh?" I snapped out of my daze, coming back to the feel of the warm Fire Country sun dancing across my cheeks. A pleasant breeze blew through my bangs, rustling my clothes as the leaves around us fluttered.

...That had been vivid. Way too vivid. And… way too easily imagined.

"You okay?" my friend queried, pulling himself out of his crouch so we were face-to-face. His round cheeks were flushed a pleasant pink, blue eyes round and inquisitive. I suddenly felt sick.

"Yeah," I muttered, reaching up for another branch and pulling myself away.

Playing ninja wasn't as fun as usual that day.

That afternoon, instead of heading straight home to play with my cousins at the House as I usually did, I went walking in Konoha.

As I looked around, taking in my surroundings, I noticed one thing: everyone was smiling and happy, cheerfully going about their daily business. There were women in pretty yukatas with baskets on their arms, shopping and hunting for bargains... men in sweaty white shirts, laughing at some crude joke while hauling a cart of lumber behind them… ninjas in flak jackets sipping tea at the teahouses, chatting idly as they shared stories and caught up one another. Everything was superbly peaceful.

These people had built their entire lives on the innocence of thousands. They required children to go out and sully themselves, forcing them into the military and making them become soldiers, hiding reality with pretty tales of honor and glory. And no one was bothered.

What was wrong with this place?

"Ouch!" I exclaimed as my forehead smashed into something hard, thoroughly derailing my troubled train of thought and sending me flying back onto my butt. Well, I thought dizzily, that's what you get for not paying attention...

"Whoa!" a voice exclaimed. I looked up reflexively and found myself staring up into a pair of hazel eyes, framed by dark brown lashes. I stared; they were old eyes, hinting faintly of a repressed sorrow, piercing and bold but fragile at the same time...

"You okay, kid?" a pair of fingers snapped in front of my face, snapping me out of my fascinated stupor. A young man was squatting in front of me, dressed in a commoner's garb, a straw hat sitting slightly askew atop his brown hair. A short ponytail flopped over his shoulder when he offered his hand.

"You need watch where you're going," he told me with a slight frown, pulling me to my feet and setting down his burden, a brown crate full of fruit.

I looked at him dumbly.

"Kid," he peered down at me, looking faintly concerned at my lack of response, "you're bleeding…"

I blinked and touched my forehead; sure enough, my hand came away sticky and red. The man clicked his tongue with grimace.

"Eech, I hope that looks worse than it actually is," he told me, bending down to get a closer look at the wound before straightening up and turning toward the store he'd just exited. "Stay there, I'll go grab some gauze…"

A minute passed before he was back with a white square and a roll of medical tape; he gently wiped the blood off my head with a wet cloth before carefully fixing the dressing on it.

"All better," he grinned, clapping my shoulder after he had placed the tape and cloth behind the fold of his shirt. "You should be good to go, though make sure you tell your parents what happened. They might want to take you to a doctor."

Wow, this person... was really nice. Going to all the trouble of cleaning and dressing the wound of some random kid? Not many people would do that. I broke into a smile and opened my mouth to thank him.

"Mister, nobody cares we're training to be child soldiers," I informed.

He stared.

...Okay, maybe I did need a doctor, because that was not what I meant to tell him. Ugh, I mentally smacked myself, you moron! All you needed to do was give him a simple "thank you," and what do you do?

"Uh," the man said, looking at me like I'd grown another head.

I felt my face flush bright red. Oh, Lord, why was I such a weirdo? Maybe I'll just run…

"...You wanna come in?" he asked just as I'd lifted my feet to start sprinting. He pointed to the shop. "I'll make some tea."

And that was how I ended up sharing tea and dango in a fruit store with a stranger I met at the shopping district.

"My name's Itsuki Mikawaya," he told me, pulling his hat off and settling behind the counter with a stick of dumplings. "What's yours?"

"Suzu Namikaze," I replied, swinging my feet. He'd given me a stool to sit on.

"Well then, Suzu-chan," Itsuki began, eyebrows rising, "what was that about child soldiers?"

I blushed, feeling my shoulders hunch in embarrassment.

"Er, well…" I mumbled. "It's just, um, you know… I'm a little kid training to kill people and no one thinks it's weird."

Itsuki stared at me again, taking a long sip of tea to hide his expression. I fidgeted, resisting the urge to find something to hide behind.

"...That's a surprisingly civilian thing for a clan kid to say," the brunet finally replied, setting his drink down and giving me a scrutinizing look. "You're pretty observant for a kid."

"Uh… Konohagakure, get your prodigies a dime a dozen?" I offered as humorously as I could, smiling nervously.

He just looked confused again.

"What's a dime?" he asked.

I resisted the urge to slap myself. There had to be a limit to one's own idiocy, but it seemed mine was still way up there...

"Never mind," I mumbled, just about ready to die of mortification. "I… have a weird sense of humor."

"...Right," Itsuki said slowly, eyebrows nearly at his hairline.

I buried my face in my hands. There was a moment of silence. Then...

"Does it bother you?" Itsuki asked.

I looked up.

"Eh?" was my eloquent response.

"Does it bother you that no one cares?" he clarified, making a circular motion with his free hand, as though he was encompassing the village and all of the people in it with a gesture.

"Of course it does," I replied, incredulous. Why else would I have been distracted enough to ram my face into a wooden crate? "Kids go out and kill for the village all the time, and everyone's just happy to leave things the way they are. How could I not be bothered?"

Itsuki looked thoughtful now. Sympathetic, even.

"Do you know what things were like before the Hidden Villages?" he asked me, crossing his arms and settling his chin on them.

"Um..." I paused. Madara and Hashirama came to mind, but I had a feeling that their story wasn't common knowledge.

"Things were pretty much the same as they are today," Itsuki informed, taking my hesitation for an admittance of ignorance. "Fighting, conflict… kids right in the middle of it, killing and getting killed. For no good reason, too—half of the fights were just clans feuding."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" I wondered, not sure what to make of his impromptu history lesson.

Itsuki let out a short laugh.

"In a way," he said, smiling with black humor. "Because you know, Suzu-chan, they died without a purpose. Their deaths did nothing but add fuel to the fire, provoking more conflict, leading to more death…" His gaze unfocused a bit before he shook his head. "But today, when our children fight, they do more than just defeat enemies."

I put my elbow on my thigh and propped my chin up, frowning.

"I don't follow," I confessed.

"When you were looking around the village, what did you see?" he asked. I opened my mouth to ask how he'd known what I'd been doing, but he rolled his eyes and cut me off, saying, "Yes, it was that obvious you were people-watching, you don't need to ask."

I huffed. How rude. Still, he was hearing me out, so I answered.

"They were all just doing regular stuff," I told him. "Shopping, working, eating… happily, too."

"Exactly," Itsuki nodded sharply at that. "Happily. When the village children fight, they fight for the happiness of others—it's not over a grudge or anything. They're fighting for the sake of thousands of lives, so that other people can continue to be happy."

I stared.

"Maybe that doesn't justify it," Itsuki shrugged uncomfortably, looking a bit put off at my silence but willing to argue his point all the same. "But the village doesn't train children to be ninja for greed or for gain."

"Just for the happiness of others," I said, feeling strange.

"It's what they have to do," he confirmed solemnly. "As long as people are alive, they'll have to defend themselves. Age doesn't matter. If they don't do it now, it'll be worse when they're older… we all fight eventually."

I'm having culture shock, I realized. Here, "child soldier" held no connotation of kidnapping or forced labor or slavery. Children are people and people fight to defend what they cared about. That was the way of the Naruto world. That's how things had always been. They wouldn't be disturbed about this, not the way that I was. For them, things had never been different.

"How did you know all of that, mister?" I asked softly, wondering where in the world a simple shopkeeper had divined such wisdom.

"I used to be a ninja," Itsuki shrugged once more, waving a hand dismissively. "I'm retired, though. Nasty business."

"Retired?" I repeated, incredulous. He didn't look a day over twenty-five. "How old are you?"

"Nineteen," he replied, matter-of-factly.

...

I… what? I looked at him, horrified. The was no way a nineteen-year-old should have eyes like his.

"Geez, kid, it's not that old," Itsuki frowned, completely misplacing the source of my shock. "Trust me, you'll be nineteen someday too."

"I… what happened?" I asked numbly, not entirely sure I even wanted to know. What in the world could force someone in the prime of their life into retirement? It didn't matter much, though, because Itsuki didn't want to share.

"Wow, it's getting dark out," he exclaimed, ignoring my query completely and going to stand by the storefront. "You'd better get home. Your parents will worry."

"I…" torn between finding out what happened and the very real concern of getting home on time, I looked helplessly at him.

There was a beat of silence.

"Oh, fine," Itsuki slouched, rubbing his neck with a sigh. "Come by again and we'll talk some more. I'll tell you about how I was a ninja, so run along before you get in trouble."

"Really?" I asked, jumping to my feet and shooting over to him. Itsuki ruffled my hair, looking a mix between irritated and resigned.

"Yeah, really," he affirmed. "I'll see you later. Go on." He pushed me forward, till I was standing in the street.

"Thank you, Itsuki-san!" I exclaimed as he went back inside, bending at the waist in a deep bow. The brunet just waved a hand, giving me a look that clearly said go on, git.

I raced home in the wake of the setting sun, mind buzzing.

A/N: EDIT: I said Hurricane Gale was based off of aikido, but I suppose in actuality it's closer to aiki-jujustu... aikido is probably too defensive to base a proper ninja fighting style off of. Ninjas are all about killing each other, after all. But then again, Hurricane Gale is fictional. I suppose instead of saying "based off of" I'll say "inspired."

I had fun with the props the kids made for playing ninja. Bendy-straw headsets just shot into my head out of nowhere, and then I just had to include it.

On another note, for those of you who watch the show subbed and can speak Japanese—can someone tell me what pronoun Minato actually uses? I mean, I understand he'll be switching between watashi and whatever it is he uses depending on the formality of the situation, but I noticed that when he's just talking to his friends and his team, he flip flops between ore and boku.

Do you think ore is his default and that he just switches to boku when he wants to be more friendly? Like, he used ore in Kakashi gaiden, but during Team Minato's bell test, he used boku… so was he using boku with his new students so not as to scare them, and once they got to know him better, switched back to ore? I know that some people consider the use of ore kind of arrogant, so I think it could be intimidating. But by no means am I fluent in Japanese, and the nuances of the language are quite mysterious at times.

(I know he also used boku as a kid, but many young boys do, and there's plenty of time for that to have changed.)

What do you guys think?

Cheers,

Eiruiel