Teacher
Chapter 7: Thought is action in rehearsal
A few days of training passed quickly, with Harry drilling his new student in the first series of Hanran katas and seeing Naruto's determination in every wrongly preformed move that tripped the blond up and just made him try harder the next time around. Naruto wasn't a particularly quick study, mostly because he lacked the patience needed to repeatedly complete the careful movements correctly, but in Harry's opinion the blond wasn't really slow, either. Naruto just had a child's restlessness, coupled with what Harry assumed was the blond's own naturally energetic disposition. He had a feeling that giving his new student some exercises to improve concentration had the potential to work wonders.
"That's enough for now," Harry said when the blond completed a four-series movement, beginning in a crouch and then spinning up into a powerful kick. Naruto's responding look was a bit baleful, but he stopped and spent a moment with his hands on his knees, just breathing. Sweat dripped down his forehead, and he panted something vaguely thankful when Harry handed him a small towel he'd moistened with cold water.
"Neh, Harry-sensei," Naruto spoke up after a minute wherein his breathing had completely stabilized. The boy had nothing if not stamina, and for anyone wanting to fight with the Hanran, that was a very good trait to have. "How come we haven't done any missions yet?"
Harry wasn't surprised at the question. Yesterday they had at a distance seen a genin team mending a fence, and Naruto had looked a little fidgety ever since. "Do you want a mission?"
The ANBU member who had dropped off his hitai-ate had also given Harry a volume on the rules for governing genin teams, but he hadn't gotten around to reading it until he was done with the initial testing that had decided Naruto's chances to become his student. There wasn't much point in reading something that would never be useful – though Hermione would lecture him terribly if she ever heard him say that, an advocate for 'knowledge for knowledge sake' as she was. Reading the book he'd discovered that as a jounin-sensei he was pretty much allowed to freely choose how to train and educate his genin, though there were a few basic skills he was supposed to impart before the year was up.
"They look completely boring, all weeding and fixing roofs and stuff, but isn't it, I dunno, part of being a genin?" Naruto had taken to actually fully vocalizing his questions, and not always at an eardrum-shattering volume, something Harry was quite happy about. Though there was something very strange about how little it took for the blond to listen to him. Oh, he was far from being a completely obedient student, but when he didn't agree with something he argued his case (though not always with the best of arguments) instead of just refusing to do what Harry told him without an explanation.
"I suppose it is," Harry mused, going over his own half-formed thoughts on the matter. He didn't know much about new genin missions besides them supposedly being relatively simple, but actually starting to inculcate the routine in Naruto might not be such a bad idea. The boy had a tendency to overestimate himself when it came to how long it would take him to do one thing or other, making declarations that he'd 'do this kata perfectly', no matter how long he'd taken to learn the previous one. Perhaps setting a routine would help teach the boy time management, since whatever schedule he'd had in the Academy apparently hadn't succeeded in that. "Alright. We'll request a mission tomorrow."
Naruto looked at him, narrowing his eyes. Harry though it might be what the blond thought of as a 'suspicious look', but with the way it bunched up his cheeks, the expression was hard to take seriously. He could easily imagine Naruto practicing the look in a mirror, copied from some character he'd seen on TV or some such. "It won't mean we won't do the katas, right?"
Harry shook his head, smiling a little. Naruto immediately dropped the look and grinned back, bouncing on his toes. The boy was tenacious as few people Harry had ever met, at times complaining but never refusing to repeat the same movements over and over at Harry's say-so. Despite his occasional grumbling the blond always seemed eager, and he'd had proclaimed several times that completing the katas meant he was one step closer to 'taking the hat' from 'the old man', a thought that apparently never failed to motivate him. "We'll do a mission first, and depending on how long it takes, we'll then do the katas."
Naruto crossed his arms, nodding. "Hmm, hmm. But if it takes too long, maybe we shouldn't do too many missions? I don't wanna miss out on training to do weeding..." He tilted his head to the side, brow furrowed in thought.
"You have a way around that, Naruto," Harry said, half-amused, half-exasperated that the blond hadn't thought of it himself yet. Harry had considered pointing it out to his student himself, but since he'd already decided he wanted to teach the boy how to think for himself rather than rely on Harry to tell him what to do, he hadn't done so yet.
"Eh? What? I do?" Naruto's serious look disappeared like it hadn't even been there, and suddenly he was a big blond puppy jumping up and down as he waited for a treat. Harry had to smother a chuckle.
"You do. But I won't tell you what it is."
Naruto's face fell and there was a moment where the blue of his eyes darkened with what Harry thought were bad memories, before Naruto stared up at him. And here was the reason Harry couldn't take the suspicious looks Naruto worked at applying seriously. Because of the occasional moment like this, where the blond's expression shifted into something else, something with an edge. Harry suspected that as Naruto aged, that look would make people sit up and take notice. Currently though, it was more jarring than respectable, and Harry met it with his own calm gaze.
"...Because I'm supposed to figure it out for myself?" Naruto asked finally, and Harry let an approving smile spread on his face. Since he was trying to instill in Naruto the desire to work things out for himself, he had over the past few days repeatedly told the blond to 'try figuring it out yourself before asking'. Apparently him saying that had caught on.
"Okay! I'll definitely have figured it out before the mission tomorrow!" He pumped his fist in the air as if for emphasis, and Harry blinked, wondering if he would ever be able to keep up with his new student's mood-swings.
"I'm sure you will," he said dryly, and then continued, "But for now, I want you to repeat that four-step and add the two-step katas you learned to combine yesterday..."
Naruto rolled out of bed with an annoyed sigh. He wasn't going to be able to fall asleep tonight, not with the way he'd promised Harry-sensei that he'd figure out how to complete missions really quickly so he could still train as much as he had been these past few days.
He wandered into the kitchen, frowning at the way his thoughts only revisited the same ideas over and over again. Harry had said he 'had a way around it', so the solution wasn't just to do the missions really quickly, like he'd first thought to say to his teacher. Because that wasn't really a solution – of course he'd try to do the missions really quickly. He'd do that whether he was supposed to train afterwards or not.
Grabbing a carton of milk from the fridge and a glass from a cupboard, Naruto sat down in the chair by the table and frowned some more. He doubted Harry meant that he was supposed to ask Harry himself for help to complete the mission, because it was Naruto's mission. Though maybe he could ask his teacher if genin completing missions on their own was actually a rule or not.
Naruto wasn't sure why keeping his word when he made promises to Harry felt so important. Maybe it was because his teacher sometimes made him feel a bit like Iruka-sensei had when he'd first become one of Naruto's precious people? Like something warm was curled in his chest, snoozing somewhere in there.
Either way, Naruto didn't want to meet up with Harry tomorrow without an answer to give. His teacher expected him to be able to figure this out for himself. Iruka sometimes said things like that too, but most of the other teachers in the academy were stupid, and if Naruto had to choose between trying to come up with answers they'd just ignore, what was the point of trying to come up with the right answer in the first place? Besides, the lectures were boring, always about long-dead people who had done something important way back when and how the class should learn from their examples and blah blah blah.
Harry didn't really talk about old ninjas at all, though he'd explained some melee strategies where the katas Naruto had learned so far had been used, and that was actually pretty interesting. Knowing how to put the movements together would make him a better fighter, definitely, and Harry explained stuff not only with words but by showing him the tactics in action. He'd had Naruto summon a Kage Bunshin yesterday to spar against – well, it wasn't much of a spar, since Harry was so much faster and more graceful than he was, but the way his teacher moved when he did the katas was like a shot of pure motivation.
Naruto wanted to be able to do that, use his body like that. The powerful twist of a leg into a kick and the sharp snap of a wrist and into an open-palm slap that would probably have broken his neck if Harry had done that against the real him. Seeing it from the clone's eyes was scary enough.
Naruto blinked at that, sat up straight and snorted out his mouthful of milk over the table. His thoughts slowed down and then sped up until they were racing and tripping over themselves. There it was - that was the solution! His Kage Bunshin! Naruto stared blankly at the tabletop as his mind whirled around the possibilities. Why had it taken him so long to realize that of course having more copies of himself working on the mission would help him complete it faster?
Naruto sniggered into the glass, gulped the rest of the milk down and then went back to bed, whistling. He was going to show Harry-sensei tomorrow that he could keep up with his teacher's expectations.
-.-.-.-
The annoying beeping of his alarm woke Naruto up, but after his habitual stretch and a quick glare at his clock, he fairly bounced out of bed. The sunlight copied his mood, shining bright and warm on everything in sight, and Naruto barely gave himself time to eat breakfast before he was out of the door.
He knew the way to Harry's house by heart already, and ran the whole way there before speeding around it to the backyard where they did most of the training. How awesome was it, having a teacher who had his own little training ground? The small grassy field was open - perfect for sparring or doing katas, though it lacked any of the typical accessories other training grounds had. Naruto had seen grounds with built-in traps and obstacle courses, though most training grounds had only poles to kick or hit, or trees to climb.
Naruto stopped in the middle of the field, wondering if perhaps this wasn't a training ground after all. Maybe it was just Harry-sensei's backyard that the teacher decided to use for training him? Naruto wasn't sure if that thought made him very happy or guilty, and since he might just be guessing something that wasn't true anyway, he shrugged it off as well as he could.
"Harry-sensei?" he called out after a moment of searching for Harry with his eyes, wondering if his teacher was still inside.
"Here." A dark head of hair poked out of the window to the yard, and Naruto blinked when Harry covered a yawn behind his hand, pushing a fingers through his hair. His teacher rarely looked this disheveled, even if his hair usually did flop about his head a bit.
Harry waved a hand towards him and Naruto was at the window in a second, grinning. There was something about seeing his teacher looking less like some stuffy courtly person and more like a normal person that made him want to giggle a little.
He was about to open his mouth and declare that he'd solved the problem Harry had set him, when he noticed the small red rock in his teacher's hand. It looked kind of like the ruby he'd seen around the neck of the Daimyo's wife on this one picture in the Academy.
He leaned closer. "What's that?"
Harry smiled. "This is a bezoar." He held it up between his index finger and thumb, and Naruto narrowed his eyes as he leaned even closer. It didn't look much like a stone this close. There seemed to be fibers nestled inside of it, like fine hairs... Naruto raised a finger and put the tip to the surface. Warm and rough, but it didn't feel as hard as a stone did.
"What's a be-so-aru?" Naruto said, trying to pronounce the strange word like Harry-sensei did and failing pretty miserably. "Be-so-aru," he tried again and frowned. Harry repeated the word and they went back and forth like that a few times until Naruto could pronounce it properly. And not once did his teacher look like he thought Naruto was being stupid for taking several times to get it right.
"It's a poison antidote," Harry explained. "Found naturally in the stomach of goats -" Naruto screwed his face into a grimace at that, "- and then boiled in a potion. That's what gives it its red color and it's transparency."
Naruto blinked and carefully repeated the information several times, since Harry might want him to remember it. "Oh, okay. But, eh, what were you doing with it?"
Harry gave him a dry look. "Boiling it." He ducked back in before Naruto could do much more than flush a little, and a second later climbed out the window. He arched his back like a cat in a stretch and Naruto frowned when he heard a small series of pops from his teacher's spine. Harry looked at him from the corner of his eye and smiled a little. "It takes hours to boil the damn things, and they have to be watched constantly. Sitting bent over a table for hours on end doesn't do much good for my back."
Naruto frowned harder. Harry-sensei looked tired, even though he was moving with the same easy grace Naruto was used to seeing. "And you were doing that all night?" Why was a shinobi making antidotes in the first place? Naruto hadn't gotten the impression that Harry was a medic, but... maybe he worked extra for the hospital?
"That, and drinking coffee." He leaned back on the house wall, turning his face up towards the sun. "Did you find a solution for how to manage your time more effectively?" he asked casually, opening one eye to look at Naruto.
Naruto forgot all about bezoars and Harry being possibly slightly medic-y in that second and bounced on the balls of his feet. "Yeah! I stayed up a long time yesterday thinking about it, and I figured it out!" He grinned widely and Harry waved for him to go on, looking kind of amused. "I can use Kage Bunshin to do it! They can work on easy missions as much as I can, 'cause it's not like weeding would pop them, and they can help out and make it go a lot faster! And then there'll still be time for training!"
Harry smiled and Naruto felt like an especially warm ray of sun fell on him. His teacher looked like Iruka did when Naruto got things right on a test, like he was proud, and Naruto's grin widened until his cheeks hurt. "Told you I'd get it!"
Harry's lips twitched, like he wanted to smile even more. "So you did. I guess this means you're ready for your first mission?" He pushed away from the wall.
Naruto puffed out his chest. "Yes!"
Harry looked down at his student as they walked towards the Hokage's tower, holding back the chuckle tickling his throat at the way Naruto walked – no, strutted down the street. He wasn't going to encourage arrogance in his student, but after the debacle with Unsui and the clinic receptionist, and considering how hard Naruto had worked the past few days, Harry rather thought his student deserved to feel proud.
That the occasional hard stare from some of the people they passed went unnoticed, or were sincerely ignored, by Naruto in his good mood was just a plus. There was something admirable in how the boy choose happiness over being affected by all the negativity thrown his way, and Harry wished he'd had that ability himself when he was Naruto's age and the whole Parseltongue incident had gone down as it did.
They entered the tower, with Harry nodding to the two stone-faced guards at the door, and Naruto led the way to Sarutobi's office. Harry looked at the blond thoughtfully as he navigated the corridors with ease, wondering just how often the boy had been here. How close were Naruto and the Hokage?
There were two more guards outside the Hokage's office, and Naruto blithely ignored them as he knocked energetically on the door.
"Naruto, he's not deaf," Harry murmured softly and Naruto swung back to look at him in confusion, before the meaning of the words registered. The blond put a hand on the back of his head and smiled sheepishly, and Harry was glad to see the gentle admonishment didn't bring Naruto's mood down.
"Come in," Sarutobi's voice called, and Naruto promptly turned back to face the door, opening it with a cheery greeting and bouncing over the threshold. Harry followed his student with a small sigh, nodding to the guards (who, if Harry wasn't reading them completely wrong, were a little amused) and then shut the door behind himself. Naruto was already at Sarutobi's desk, chatting a mile a minute about everything that had happened so far this morning – not that there was really all that much to tell.
Harry met the Hokage's eyes with a long-suffering look over Naruto's head that made Sarutobi's lips twitch around his pipe.
"- and I don't get why the hospital can't boil their own stones anyway, 'cause Harry is my teacher and he shouldn't have to do all that extra stuff. What if he gets so tired he faints?" Naruto took a moment to look horrified at the thought and Harry rubbed his forehead. Right. Concentration exercises and mediation, definitely.
"I do believe your teacher could stand to lose a few hours of sleep without fainting, Naruto-kun," Sarutobi said, his slow, deep voice as amused as his eyes, though Harry doubted that Naruto actually caught the expression, subtle as it was.
"Maybe. Yeah. He's a super awesome shinobi, so I guess he can take it..." The blond nodded to himself and Harry let out another quiet sigh. As much progress as Naruto had made in this short period of time, it wasn't like a few days of work was going to turn him into a quiet, thoughtful and mature person. The boy was, after all, only twelve.
"So, to what do I owe the pleasure?" Sarutobi asked and Harry stepped forward. Naruto, who'd apparently been about to explain what they were here for himself, quieted when Harry placed a hand on his blond mop of hair. It felt as dry as it looked, and Harry made a mental note to check his inventory lists to see if he had any magical supplements Naruto could safely take.
"We would like a mission," Harry said, back straight. Under his hand he felt Naruto straighten with him, and ruffled the boy's hair a little.
Sarutobi nodded, taking another drag of his pipe. "You are early enough that I have several missions available for you to choose from." He picked up a scroll marked with several 'D's' and then read, "Planting potatoes, baby-sitting, running an errand to one of our outposts, painting a house in one of the the civilian sectors, moving furniture for a couple relocating to the other side of the village..." He continued listing about a dozen other missions and then nodded for them to make their choice.
"Which one do we get?" Naruto asked, bending his neck to stare up at Harry.
"Which one do you want?" Harry asked calmly, surprised but pleased that the boy hadn't just shouted what he was most interested in.
Naruto's face scrunched up in thoughtfulness. "I like planting stuff, but I've never been out of the village before..." Harry said nothing, waiting for the blond to take his pick. Finally Naruto nodded. "The outpost one."
"Alright." Sarutobi pulled a scroll up from somewhere – Harry guessed there were drawers underneath the tabletops – and held it out. Naruto twitched like he was about to jump forward, but then stopped and looked up at Harry again, like he was asking for permission. Harry smiled, nodding and the blond immediately leaped forward, all but snatching the scroll from the Hokage in his haste to get his hand on it.
He unrolled it eagerly. "My first mission!" Harry heard him murmur under his breath, and then louder, "We're supposed to deliver this -" and here he held up a smaller scroll that had apparently been inside the larger one, "To the Kanzaki outpost." He frowned in thought. "I think that's the one to the west of Konoha," he said and while Harry had no idea if that was the case or not, the Hokage nodded. Harry made another mental note to memorize a map, since knowing less than his own student about the terrain and the locations they would be traveling over, to and from was more than just a little embarrassing.
"Indeed. Very good, Naruto." Naruto grinned. Sarutobi looked at the blond for a long moment, and to Harry the old Hokage's expression seemed wistful. Then he straightened and nodded at them both seriously, though Harry suspected that was more for Naruto's benefit than his, since the blond puffed out his chest in response and nodded back just as seriously.
"I expect you back tomorrow at the latest. Good luck on your first mission, Team Potter."
A/N: Still busy. Geh. Thank you for your reviews, they're pure spicy awesomesauce and keep me going.
...In case you haven't noticed this yet, I love character progression stuff.
Oh, and – SPOILERS FOR THE LATER CHAPTERS OF THE MANGA COMING UP – I am not fond of a lot of the development we've seen recently or semi-recently in the manga. I know Naruto is a children's series, but this whole blah where pretty much every villain is just misunderstood/misguided and actually Nice All Along (with an occasional: Just Add Naruto Instant Therapy!)... I don't much like it. (I'm looking at you, Gaara's father/uncle/mother and you, Kyuubi/Kurama and you Pein and you Itachi and... *sigh*) CONCLUSION: I'M PROBABLY GOING TO BE IGNORING SOME/A LOT OF THIS STUFF. I hope you don't mind terribly (but honestly, even if you do, I'm going to ignore it anyway. Sorry.)
(On another note: Changeling isn't dead, it's just that that fic takes more research for stuff I'm planning, and when I'm already doing research for school... *shrugs* NOT DEAD, THOUGH.)
(And on yet another note: I crossposted a Supernatural fic from my LJ to my profile, for any interested Supernatural fan.)
