The air outside was cooling down as the sun set, and I became suddenly aware of how stifling that room had truly been. Maybe really old people needed it to be warmer? Was that a thing? It wasn't a thing I'd ever experienced personally, but I wasn't that old...

Or maybe all those fires had truly only been for that Authentic Uchiha Ambience. Either way, I was glad to be out in the cool evening air again.

The compound hadn't changed at all - it was still unfamiliar, still clean and neat, muted except for the large red and white emblems on what seemed like every single wall. Even if there had been someone from whom I was willing to request directions, I seemed to be... pretty much alone.

Hmm. Had we come from this direction? I thought we had. I turned left and began walking. It didn't look familiar, but then, nothing looked familiar. The compound couldn't be that big though. I'd recognise Akiko's house.

...Wouldn't I?

Surely.

"That could have gone worse," said Shisui cheerfully, from right behind me.

I jolted and squeaked. "Oh my god. Oh my god. Where did you come from?"

He gave me a long, blank look. "I was... waiting for you?"

It took me a second. Right. Ninja. Sneaky. I guessed after a while that must be, like, a lifestyle that was hard to switch off.

"I was right next to the door," he said, smiling. "You walked right past me."

No, I hadn't.

I definitely hadn't.

...Had I?

Christ. "Um, okay. Do you know where Ak- uh, my house, is?"

He pointed past me, right in the exact opposite direction to the one I'd been walking in. I frowned. "...Are you sure?"

"...Pretty sure," he said, pointedly, and okay, I guessed he did live here, "yes."

We went silently back toward Akiko's neat little house.

Shisui was nice enough not to say 'I told you so' when it turned out to be in exactly the spot he had said it would be. This really just further cemented for me that he was an uncommonly nice sort of person, because I could not for the life of me imagine having been kind enough to pass up the opportunity for pettiness at his age. I wasn't even that kind as an adult.

We headed inside and kicked off our shoes. "Are you just going to be writing that report?"

"Probably," Shisui agreed, wrinkling up his nose like he wasn't thrilled with the prospect. I couldn't blame him.

"And nobody's going to need me for anything before morning?" I pressed.

"I don't... think so?" Shisui said warily.

"Fine. Make yourself at home, etcetera," I headed into the kitchen and began hunting around through all the cupboards and cabinets. There must have been some wine in here somewhere.

There was no wine, rice or otherwise, but at length I did excavate a bottle of shochu from the dark bottom of a pantry, behind a dustpan. The bottle was dark glass and old and dusty, but it was still sealed and decorated with a ribbon around the neck - a gift, I guessed.

I cracked it open and took a gulp from the bottle, then waited for the taste to hit me. It tasted like it would have been better refrigerated but it was drinkable and I could taste the alcohol, so that was a win as far as I was concerned.

I resolved to go slow in case there was something wrong with it, but a bottle of shochu was a good find. More punch than rice wine, anyway.

I leaned back against wall and sighed. It had... been that kind of day.

"Akiko, what are you looking for?" Shisui called. I wasn't sure if he wanted to help or if he was just procrastinating against having to finish his report. "Maybe I'll know where it is."

"Wine," I called back, trying to sound like a casual person who said things casually, and not like someone who wanted to be drunk three hours ago, "and it's fine, I found it."

Something clicked in the other room, and then when I opened my eyes again, Shisui was right there, frowning at me. He had to have moved very fast indeed to cross that distance in so short a time. And now he was uncomfortably close.

Also, he had my bottle.

I blinked at my empty hand. "Hey!"

"Akiko, you are ten," he said, in a tone of burgeoning despair.

I scrambled after the bottle and he held it out of reach, effortlessly using both the cramped quarters and the kitchen and his height advantage against me. "I don't know what you're thinking about right now - I haven't known what you've been thinking about all day - but you're confused, and you're very sick, and also kids shouldn't drink alcohol anyway-"

A snarl built in my chest and emerged in a sudden lightning strike of temper - the sudden discharge of something that had undoubtedly been building for hours.

"I am thirty eight and my whole life is over, you tiny little shit," I raged, swiping for him futilely, "give me the fucking bottle!"

"Akiko!" he yelped, less distressed by my efforts to pry it out of his stupid ninja hands than he was by my language while trying it.

I snatched at him and came up holding an empty cup, blinking at the sudden teleportation of my 'cousin' into the other room. "Shisui!" I snarled.

By the time I made it out there the bottle had disappeared entirely and Shisui was standing over his discarded report, giving me an expression of mixed irritation and concern.

I took a deep breath. Goddamn ninja.

I could see that bottle was not going to re-emerge. "Look," I said, in as reasonable a tone as possible, given that I was teetering on a knife-edge between screaming seething frustration and... something that was also, admittedly, frustration, but with a lot more crying, "I have had a very long, very weird day, and a lot of new things to adjust to. If I want to get a little drunk and go to bed, I don't think that's a lot to ask."

Shisui's face did something complicated. "Akiko," he began.

"Stop calling me that!" I snapped. I was already thinking of ways to get him to leave, but I doubted any of them would actually be successful.

"It's your name," he said levelly.

I breathed out, hard, from between my teeth.

"Perhaps that wouldn't be too much to ask, or at least it would be more normal, if you were forty -"

"Thirty eight!" Christ, forty would happen on its own. There was no call to exaggerate.

"-whatever," Shisui shrugged, like it made no difference (a point on which he was wrong). "The point is that you're not supposed to recreationally poison yourself before you graduate or while you're sick."

I stared at him. Neither of those categories applied to me - I had long since graduated (from a real damn school, thank you), and I was definitely an adult.

There were several things I wanted to say in response to him, most of them quite rude. I chose, with great effort, not to say any of them. There was no way I could win this one. He was stronger and sneakier. And, frankly, there came a point when you were arguing about whether or not you should be allowed to be drunk at which you started to look a bit desperate, and the appearance of desperation had to be avoided at all costs.

"I see," I said. Then, mildly, I added: "Fine. That's fine. That makes sense."

Shuisui looked like he did not trust my easy capitulation. I wouldn't have, either.

But I could live sober if I had to. True, I wasn't sure if I could live sober like this, in some wild fictional ninja land, but... all things passed eventually. Including this. Somehow.

I took a deep breath and went to make another pot of tea instead. I didn't even lose my temper with Shisui when he trailed along behind me suspiciously.

Look. It wasn't that sobriety was inherently terrible or anything - just that I'd have preferred to spend the night after a day like the one I'd just had pleasantly, you know, insulated from reality. It was evidently not going to happen though, and I felt my mood turn sour and sulky almost like a physical sensation, washed down into my chest and belly with the warm rush of my tea.

I wandered around the house feeling restless and out of sorts, picking things up and putting them down again. Nothing triggered any kind of memory. I didn't even know what to think about the tiny shrine in one corner of the central room and I avoided it conspicuously. I was pretty sure that was a shrine to the dead, none of whom I knew or remembered.

Shisui watched me. It might have been because my restless wandering was distracting him, but I uncharitably thought he was also just keeping an eye on me. I probably wasn't making a great showing of seeming well adjusted to him right then.

At length I flopped down to the floor near him again.

"So what I am I supposed to do now?"

It was pretty pathetic that I was asking for guidance from a strange child instead of using my brain like a damn adult. I heaved a sigh.

"Uh," said Shisui, pausing with the tip of his pen hovering just above the page. "Well. Go to school? Finally graduate the academy?" He frowned at me.

I realised, quite suddenly, all at once, what he meant.

I blinked. I sat up fast - maybe too fast. The room was still weaving a little. "You want me to be a ninja?" I squawked.

"What... else did you..." He frowned even harder, and then took a deep breath, "Akiko," he said slowly, and I ground my teeth, "You've been in the academy for years. You've never wanted to be anything but a ninja. What else are you going to do? Go be a fish-monger?"

I stared back at him. His eyes were dark now, no scary sharingan whirling in them, but they felt no less sharp.

"No," I said slowly, "I don't want to be a fish-monger." And I really didn't. I did not enjoy the smell of fish markets, and I seemed to remember seeing the people working in them wearing really huge, uncomfortable-looking rubber boots. I felt tired just thinking about it.

But I was definitely not ready to become a ninja, that was for sure. There had to be professions between 'fish-monger' and 'state-sanctioned mercenary'. Surely. Surely?

"I do, like, administrative work," I said to Shisui, feeling out his responses. I clearly recalled that one elder who'd said my boring clerical job seemed like 'the delusions of a child'. Nobody had argued with her.

"Is that all?" he said, sounding relieved. "Well, the police and the tower are always looking for ninja to do paperwork. They need the clearance of ninja, but nobody ever wants to do it - mostly they reel in ninja who are old or injured. It's not, uh," he paused, "prestigious," he said carefully, "but if you want that kind of work there's plenty of ways a ninja can do that."

"...Right," I said slowly. But, of course, it wasn't 'right', because all of those jobs sounded like they required one to be a ninja first.

"You had me worried there!" Shisui admitted with a soft laugh. And then he went right back to his report, evidently in the belief that my concerns had been addressed.

They had... not.

Shisui and I seemed to be approaching this topic from such opposed cultural positions that we weren't even having the same conversation.

I did not have a secret love of filing and processing. But I knew how to do those things, and people always needed them done, and I did have a not-very-secret unwillingness to be a ninja. And I sure did not want to go through what I was pretty sure was the normal ninja career progression - a three-genin team and a lot of dangerous and physically demanding work.

"Is that something I could ask the teachers at the academy about?" Maybe they'd be less hostile to the idea of alternatives - Shisui, after all, was from a big clan with some very fixed ideas (and very fixed elders, who considered admin work a quaint delusion).

He looked bemused. "Sure. I mean, they're teachers. Most of them would have done that kind of work too, probably."

I nodded and decided not to bring it up with members of the clan again until I knew more.

This was how I found myself attending classes at the academy the following morning. It went like this: I was herded, through all my complaints, in the early morning air by a very patient Shisui. He demanded that I memorise the way, since nobody would accept 'I got lost' as an excuse for truancy. On our way we passed through the market again, and although most stalls and shops were not yet open for business we could see people sweeping and setting up, and after that we crossed the river and passed a temple that looked, in the dawn light, thoroughly abandoned.

The campus had a lot of grounds, sprawling and largely clear of trees around the huddle of little buildings that formed the classrooms and offices. The boundaries were poorly defined.

There were kids everywhere - not even teenagers like Shisui, but actual children - running and yelling and exhibiting that singular talent of children everywhere to be as damp and sticky as possible. I baulked as soon as we came within truly ear-piercing range of the shrieking.

"They're so loud," I said, giving Shisui wide and panicked eyes.

He flashed me a benevolent smile, planted one hand between my shoulder blades and propelled me gently forward.

"You'll be fine," he said, proving that, despite his sweet face, he was absolutely heartless. "Go find Suzume-sensei."

My teacher turned out to be a voluptuously curvy lady with a tumbling fall of chestnut hair and an eyebrow that, when raised, communicated the vast degree to which she was preemptively done with my shit.

"I've been notified of your 'circumstances'," she told me once I'd wandered to her classroom through the surreal backdrop screaming prepubescent mania outside.

It wasn't as though sensei actually gestured out her scare quotes, but I could certainly hear them. She tapped her pen on the top of her desk - the only full sized one in a room full of undersize furniture and worn posters and dust motes -and peered at me with her sleepy, heavy-lidded eye. "I expect it won't impact your performance."

Um, what?

"That expectation," I said slowly, "sounds a little..."

Her tapping stopped abruptly, and I felt as though a cloud had drifted between me and the sun. Outside the children were still howling like a cyclone wind, but inside the classroom it was very, very quiet.

I shifted uneasily beneath the weight of the teacher's suddenly-hostile attention and allowed myself to trail off. It didn't matter enough to get into an argument about it. My 'performance' would be poor. There was nothing I could do about it.

And, really, it wasn't something I had to care about because I was going to drop out and shame every single member of the Uchiha clan at the earliest opportunity. Even the dead clan members would be shamed. Even Madara all wrinkled up in his mountain hidey hole was going to feel it, probably. I just had to figure out if a ten year old had that right, and if so how to exercise it. If not... well, I could take the long way and fail, I guessed.

"There," murmured my teacher, curving her painted lips into an insincere little smile. "You're learning already."

Right. Well.

I chose not to answer.

The Academy turned out not to be an institution that had much interest in pastoral care.

I did not recognise a single face in the classroom, which... seemed odd. I felt as though I should know at least some of the other students by sight - I should have some recognition, looking at them. I recognised that one of them was from the Aburame clan because of her oversized clothes and dark glasses, but otherwise this classroom was just a bunch of nine to eleven year olds looking small, sticky, loud and unrealistically leggy. I did not feel good about this.

Two of the kids said hello and I gave them fixed smiles and waved awkwardly. And then I dove for a seat across the other side of the classroom, as far from them as I could get.

Class stopped being loud about zero-point-two seconds after sensei stood up, which convinced me better than anything else could have that she was a figure of terror to these kids. She smiled benevolently with her painted mouth. "Let's see who did their homework, shall we? Akiko," she went on, turning her smile on me, "what are the seals we use for the replacement technique?"

I had... not the foggiest clue. "I don't know, sensei," I said. I didn't feel bad about admitting it, since as far as I was concerned there was no way I could have known this given the circumstances. Perhaps if I'd checked Akiko's work before class? But my schedule had been kind of full yesterday - mostly of confusion and panicking - and it hadn't even occurred to me this morning.

It seemed like this was a funny or audacious answer, however, because a minority of the class broke out into low snickers, and sensei's mouth compressed. The girl sitting next to me coughed quietly.

"Not even going to try?" sensei asked sweetly. "Not even going to guess?"

I did not even know which signs were possible. I shook my head. "No?"

Her eyes narrowed. "Chorin," she said instead, without taking her eyes off me, "what are the seals, in sequence?"

A girl, who must have been 'Chorin', rattled off a list of signs - all zodiac animals - while showing us the motions with her fingers.

I was not sure I could even replicate all of them, let alone in sequence.

I shifted uncomfortably in my small, preteen-sized seat. Not an auspicious start.

During that first class I answered 'I don't know, sorry,' to four questions, caused a great deal of laughter among the other (sticky) children, and grew to appreciate the peace and quiet offered by the grand tradition of punishment laps.

Punishment laps worked like this: every time I got something wrong or acted 'rude' by saying I didn't know the answer instead of making something up, sensei would purse her lips, explain the answer, and assign me five laps around the premises to 'discourage poor study habits in the future'.

Since class was in session, there was almost nobody out there. My body was fit for the exercise, and running was meditative. I wasn't learning a damned thing, but I was away from all the other children and my supervision consisted of whatever teacher happened to be taking a smoke break on the roof.

I didn't know how I'd feel about it if the weather turned, but as it stood: it wasn't that much of a punishment.

Even though he'd been adamant about my memorising the route, Shisui still showed up to walk me home as well at the end of the school day.

"Hi," I said, surprised. "What're you doing here?"

"Ah..." He rubbed the back of his head and smiled. "Well, I figured you might want a friendly face by now."

His hair was a disaster and he slouched with one hand in his pocket. He looked less like a ninja and more like a bored teenager, about three minutes from whipping out a can of spray paint and defacing something. I guessed this look might come naturally to him... and also that it might be the whole point. I had not forgotten how quick he'd been with the shoucho the night previous.

I fell into step beside him, stretching my short legs to keep pace.

"How was it?" he asked.

"I ran a lot of laps," I said serenely. I ignored the way this news made him twitch his shoulder.

"Aa... Akiko, that's not good," he said, looking up at the sky and pointedly not at me. I ignored this, too.

"Did anything interesting happen to you today?" I asked.

Having perfunctorily registered his disapproval of my getting into trouble in school, Shisui accepted my change of subject with grace. "Umm..." he tapped his bottom lip. "Well, I gave my self-assessment to Fugaku-sama, and I ran a courier mission to Tanzaku-Gai? I ate some takoyaki there and saw some friendly dogs."

Riveting. And also, I was pretty certain, a giant lie of omission. If what I remembered was right - it might not be, since I was increasingly confused about reality - Shisui wasn't exactly an errand boy. But it wasn't my business, and there might even have been some kind of security issue with telling me too much.

"I do like friendly dogs," I admitted, which at least gave us something to talk about on the walk home. There were a great many friendly dogs in Tanzaku-Gai - apparently.

We went back the same way we'd come that morning, passing through the same packed-dirt streets. The shops were more lively than they had been then, open and colourful. Occasionally, I heard someone hawking their products as we went through.

Over the noisy river and set back from the path, the temple was the same as it had been - it looked pretty much abandoned still, except for a lone monk with a shaven head, peacefully sweeping its steps.

I wondered if the building was used for festivals or something, or if it was just always that empty. You'd think there'd be signs of life in there - more than just one slow-sweeping monk, anyway.

The monk spotted me looking. He blinked slowly, then clasped his hands and bowed his head, so I gave a tentative wave back - probably not as formal as you were meant to be with priests? I didn't know the etiquette. Surely it would have been worse not to respond.

Shisui must have noticed, but he said nothing about it and we continued on the way home without interruption. Come to think of it, I had very little idea about how religion even worked here in the elemental nations. For all I knew, that could have been the local chapter of the Jashinist church.

That would definitely explain why it was abandoned, at least.

"So," I said at Akiko's yet unfamiliar door, "If I wanted to find out more about laws and customs and stuff, where would I do that?"

"Um," said Shisui. "There are a couple of places. But that sounds really boring," he added, making a face. "Don't you have real homework? It can't be worse that that."

"Not today," I said. It may or may not have been a lie. I was surely running laps when any such work had been assigned to the class, and I certainly had not cared enough to find out about it through my own initiative after. Besides, I'd have had to have another conversation with sensei. That wasn't happening if I could help it.

Shisui did not look like he believed me, but he showed me the dusty building where extremely mundane clan records were kept, as well as a short pile of general reference books and scrolls. If anybody had organised the collection they weren't doing a very good job of it.

"Cool," I said, looking around, and then went looking.

The Laws and Customs of Konoha's Founding, 3rd Ed, told me that no, ten year olds were not allowed to drop out of the school into which they'd been enrolled. If you didn't graduate on your own, you got to make that choice for yourself at fourteen and no earlier - any earlier and your parents, adult relatives, clan elders or the state (in that order) got to decide for you. On the surface of it, that seemed pretty reasonable, but it meant that I, in the unfortunate position of being Akiko, was not able to drop out of the Academy for another four years. Four years.

I rubbed my face and swore.

So it was going to be either failure, or expulsion.

I licked my teeth. Failure at or expulsion from ninja school both seemed like they might end up being, er, kind of... punitive. I didn't think I liked the idea of what solutions my sensei and loving family might try out on me before giving up.

But I also really did not want to be stuck in ninja school for another four years.

I wondered, looking uncertainly around the dusty and poorly organised archives, if anyone else had ever convinced the clan to let them off the ninja hook. If there was a precedent, here would be the place to find out about it.