Tonight, Yashamaru decided, scrubbing his finger against the sheets of stolen paper, he was going to rewrite a story he already knew. It took a few minutes to gather his thoughts.
"Once," he began, the charcoal squeaking painfully against the paper, "There was a boy named Naruto."
He stared at the blunt words for a moment. It was close, but...it wasn't quite right. He had to scratch it out, but it was a shame that his false start had wasted paper.
"Once," Yashamaru tried again, "There was a girl named Penelope. When she turned twelve, she started to read an epic about a small boy. His name was Naruto."
Better. But what did Yashamaru know about them?
The child took a moment collect her/his/their thoughts, Penelope stringing along pieces of the story while Yashamaru juggled the words required to put it to paper. The boy blackly rubbed his charcoal hand against his cheek.
"This small boy held a great evil in his stomach. It sat still, kind of like an ulcer that could eat him back, but more like radioactive toxins that could seep into the water and eat the town," Yashamaru continued. It didn't make much sense, but she was trying to describe something that fell frustratingly between a self-aware deity and a supremely naturalistic force.
Yashamaru scratched again at his face. "People hated him for being the toxin, even though he was the concrete bunker containing it. The boy named Naruto grew up abandoned and spat on, which was sad and wasteful, because he had a godfather and step-grandfather who could have totally raised him but didn't."
Penelope cupped that thought close to her chest and tried not to spill tears all over it. Here was a baby who needed someone to love him, whose parents had bounties of coworkers and friends who had loved them, but who had no substantial kindness to offer to a penniless, lonesome orphan. Penelope was pushed to tears and left Yashamaru unsettled and startled.
"This boy made a friend of his enemies, spreading love and peace by beating the shit out of them. Or changing their mind, but usually by punching the shit out of them." Yashamaru thought that the punching sounded a lot like Karura when she was trying to make friends with the other kids.
Yashamaru stilled in the darkness of the room he shared with Karura, holding his breath until he could match his breathing with his sleeping sister's. After a minute of shared breaths, Yashamaru put his hunk of charcoal back to the paper.
"And then," Penelope continued, Yashamaru's heart breaking as he scribbles, "He enters a trial by combat and meets a child like him. It's Karura's baby, and he's just as alone but twice as heartbroken as the sunshine boy. Instead of holding nuclear fallout inside his gut, this boy holds something that's both an incarnate of violence and a sham of a foster mother. Karura's too dead to cry," Yashamaru painstakingly scratched out on the paper.
The desert outside the window was unsilent and always moving, sand grains grinding against each other as night creatures skittered across the dunes. Yashamaru stilled his hands. Penelope had no more to remember tonight.
The twins were five when it became time to join the ninja academy. Their mother bundled them up in coarse outside robes, handed them each a bento for their lunches, and shuffled them out of the house.
Karura spotted the other children before Yashamaru made the connection; children from every house all streamed towards the center of town, presumably making their way to the academy. They followed after in haste.
"Aren't you excited to start school? We're gonna be ninja!" Karura announced gleefully, dragging Yashamaru along by the hand. Yashamaru nodded hesitantly.
To be honest, Penelope hadn't had much experience in fighting. Yashamaru was reluctant to engage in physical violence if he could help it…
…but he knew that he needed to keep Karura safe. She was the most important thing in the whole universe, and he couldn't help her defend herself on missions if he stayed behind as a civilian. That's why he hadn't raised a fuss when Mother had brought the idea up one evening.
They waded through the sea of students, riding the tide through the sandstone doors and into the main hall.
Yashamaru squeezed Karura's hand when an irritable jonin began to announce classes. His sister hopped up on her toes, excited to begin her new life and become something great. Yashamaru listened quietly. He would do his best to protect his sister from her ninja lifestyle.
Life wasn't kind to shinobi…maybe elsewhere, like in Konoha, shinobi came home at night with strong enough conviction to believe that they had done right, or at least, done no harm that day. In Suna, you obeyed every order no matter how it killed you inside.
And if life wasn't kind to Shinobi, Penelope worried in the back of Yashamaru's head, life would be straight up cruel to Kunoichi, the women warriors who practiced their duties in the beds of their targets and received neither respect nor recognition for their missions. Yashamaru, and so Penelope, would be safe from a village cashing in on sharpening children into weapons before puberty.
Karura, Penelope whispered in Yashamaru's ear, spinning shivers down the child's thin spine, would be sold to the village in body parts and blood. Horrified, and unsure why, the child snagged his sister's hand and pulled it close.
His sister scoffed. "Are you already scared of the academy? We haven't even walked into the classroom yet!" Karura mocked him childishly. She wasn't quite aware of how her twin flinched at her voice, but toned the ribbing down nevertheless. "Come on," she urged, pulling Yashamaru along by the hand he had taken hers in, "Assignments are by name, so we're in the same class."
The classroom may have been new to Karura, but it was sharply nostalgic to Penelope. She ran her purple-gray eyes over the walls coated in Suna doctrine and first-aid instructions. It was like looking into a warped mirror of her childhood; instead of bright plastic tables scattered about the room, the desks were splintered wood arranged auditorium style. The colors from wall to floor were muted and unfriendly, dull and uninteresting.
And, of course, Yashamaru observed, scuffing his sandals against the dirt floor, sand was everywhere. In every corner, under all their fingernails, and probably in Karura's hair. He scratched her scalp with his alternate hand to check if he was right. It was a testament to her relationship that she barely even noticed, but sure enough, his hand came away sandier than before.
Damn it. Now Penelope wanted to braid her sister's hair.
"Shut up! Brats to your seats!" someone barked. Yashamaru flinched as a textbook was slammed against the table with superhuman strength. A violet-haired woman glared at the assembled crowd with a bite as sharp as Suna's finest venom, her hands wrapped in ribbons of scar tissue all the way up to her elbows and her face half splashed in acid burns. They looked pinkly fresh.
Startled and shocked, the children quickly fled to an open chair. Yashamaru and Karura ended up sharing a chair when the seats began to run thin, unable to negotiate two chairs when Yashamaru insisted on keeping his sister's hand in her grasp. The woman threw the textbook to the side, seeming to hardly care where it loudly landed. "You may refer to me as Masumi-sensei. From this moment on I will be teaching you stupid brats how to survive the most pathetic of deaths as a shinobi of Sunagakure. Your lessons will include paper tests, physical examinations, and object lessons," the woman listed slowly.
Penelope coaxed Karura's hand into her lap in order to worry at her twin's fingers, careful to avoid actually pissing off her sister. Karura's increased lenience with Penelope's fussing probably meant that her twin was as nervous as she was in the face of this new, hostile situation.
"Any stupid questions?" Masumi-sensei demanded of her rapt audience, who begrudgingly denied her in an off-rhythm chorus. "Good," she muttered. "Tonight, go purchase yourself some live weapons- that means metal kunai and shuriken sharpened for the field, for all the idiot civilian kids. We start to practice with wooden replicas this week, but you brats are going to have to get used to taking care of your weapons a month before you start actually throwing the live ones. Grab a tub of weapons' polish on your way out of the blacksmith. You'll need it."
Oh damn, Penelope thought to herself. This is going to end poorly for a lot of the five-year-olds here. And maybe also Karura, who was impulsive when excited, and Yashamaru was well aware that nothing could make her twin more excited than sharp objects and a clear goal.
"First thing's first," Masumi-sensei declared, eyeing down the clot of new blood Suna had to offer, "You obey every order when given immediately, unless told otherwise. Your superiors are I, the other teachers in the building, any Suna shinobi Chunnin level and above, and the Kazekage. If I tell you to chug poison, you do it. If a Jonin tells you to lick their sandals, you bet your little asses you will lick that sandal clean. If the Kazekage tells you to run yourself on his kunai, you better sprint."
The woman squeezed her eyes low, the tension pulling at her scar tissue where her crows' feet would be. Penelope barely breathed, too cautious to draw any attention to either herself or her more vulnerable sister. She almost let her burning eyeballs weep when Karura began to squeeze the hand that had once kept hers captive.
"Any stupid questions?" their teacher asked after a period of silence, clearly testing to see who would crack under the pressure first, who would be the most vulnerable child out of a whole room of not-even-six-year-olds.
Penelope bit down on Yashamaru's tongue. Hard.
"Good. Don't even consider questioning your captains or other superiors in the field," the teacher snapped. "You would be worse than dead weight. Open the textbook under your desk to page eight. That's the first page with a picture on it for all you damned brats who can't read."
The lessons began. Yashamaru began to wade through the memorization of kanji, too used to Penelope's phonetic alphabet to simply forget the associations. Karura wasn't doing much better, and Penelope worried slightly: Yashamaru was handicapped by her memories, but Karura had no such excuse.
Oh well, Yashamaru decided, nudging his twin when she got another crooked line on a symbol, he would just have to work twice as hard for her sake. It was not as if their mother would be able to afford a tutor for them anyway. Being the first day, the class was dismissed immediately after the language lesson for an extra-long discussion between the teachers about the new classes.
"But before you go!" Masumi-sensei shouted, her scar-veined fist slamming onto the desk so hard that Yashamaru could hear the table snap, "Each of you will take one vial of the diluted solution on your way out. All girls will remain behind for info about the required kunoichi classes that will be taking place after school. All the rest of you, dismissed!" she yelled hoarsely. It seemed that her need to dig her words into her students was not quite up to par with her actual health yet.
Knowing that he would be kicked out, but scared to leave his twin alone for an instant, Yashamaru clenched onto Karura's hands with all his might. "Stop pinching me!" his sister hissed, taking one hand and sliding his white-knuckle grip off of her at last, but her voice was shaking and Penelope was scared of how her nervous sister might act out in front of their new teacher.
Penelope disagreed with calling that woman a teacher, though. Penelope remembered what to call someone who controlled an entire state and demanded perfect obedience: a dictator. A tyrant. A…uh…
Yashamaru only realized he had left the classroom when he came to realize that he had stubbed his toe, lost in thought while kicking the corner of the building. He bit the inside of his bottom lip to distract himself from the pain momentarily. When would Karura come out? He was worried for her, Penelope's mind filling with all sorts of anxieties and fears that a six-year-old boy didn't know how to combat.
Tired, and anxious, and stressed, Yashamaru leaned his whole body onto the mud-brick building and groaned loudly, allowing gravity to take hold of him and scrape his skin and clothes on the brick. He couldn't exactly leave for the house without his sister. He was bigger than her, kind of, and needed to take care of her. Some day she would have to go into combat without him, but for now Penelope still needed to look after her and make sure she was okay. She was still so little!
The sensation of a sandal being pushed into his ribs was familiar enough. When Yashamaru opened his eyes, Karura was standing over him with eyelashes darkened by moisture. "Why're you lying on the ground?" she asked, her red-rimmed eyes roving over his body. "Did you go sun-crazy again?"
Yashamaru blinked languidly in relief. Penelope resisted telling her about dehydration causing hallucinations, and that Yashamaru's lying in the shade was nothing compared to crying out precious water; there were times for ribbing her sister, but none of them included shaming her for her tears.
"What happened?" Yashamaru asked, pushing himself up with the palms of his hands. Karura's mouth twisted.
"Later," she demanded, her eyes flicking briefly to the school before she turned on her heel and ran for home.
Stunned, and confused, Yashamaru hesitated for the slightest second before sprinting after her. "What?!" he yelled over the sound of the rushing village, dodging vendor and pedestrian alike as he chased after his sister.
"Later!" Karura repeated again at the top of her lungs.
The author doesn't own any character, setting, or concept mentioned in this piece of writing save for Penelope. The only reason I finished this new chapter was because of the reviewer who asked for more: here's looking at you. The fastest way to get me to update is to review, comment, whatever; I thrive on validation. (It also reminds me that this fic is here.)
*edit 11/18/17: I know the line breaks are destroyed. If this doesn't fix it I don't know what will.