Improbability

8

Learning Fuinjutsu


Days became blurs. As soon as the damage to the base was repaired, and the bodies hastily removed from the premises, Keika's life became scheduled again. Hitomi-sensei would work her to the bone during the day, the training she went through becoming even more rigorous and more testing than before. She had thought that without the looming threat of battle over their heads that her training would relax, but it was not so. Late in the evening, she would stumble into bed, exhausted; only to be plagued by nightmares of blood and bodies and fire that consumed her mind until she was woken by the wake-up call only to go to training even more tired than the previous day.

And she waited desperately for Wednesday. Then, she would be able to leave the Root base. She could leave the stuffy underground fortress where she couldn't tell day from night. Could leave the place where she was constantly watched. Just for one day, just once a week. Just for a very short amount of time. But she would be learning fuinjutsu, and that, surely, would fix everything. That was what she told herself. That was what kept her going.

She would learn fuinjutsu. She would master the subject. And then, she would release the seal on Fushidara-nii-san's mouth and let him be free from Danzo forever. And then she would live happily ever after with her big brother.

At least, that was how she used to think things would work. Ever since the battle, her views had changed. She had never seen the world through an idyllic mirror. She always knew that the world was a harsh and cruel place. But she had always hoped that there was a place, somewhere far off where everyone was happy, where she could be happy, and where no one would bother her. A place where someone would fix her eyes and where she would live with people who loved her.

Now, she didn't think that there was such a place. She had seen the death and the despair, and she knew that she never wanted the terror of death to come to her. It was ridiculous really. She was only four, death would not be coming to her for a very long time. But maybe there was something about the bodies, or how the darkness of her room always changed into faces full of fear, something that made her go body go cold and her eyes wide as the images re-surfaced. But there were always those words to chase away the nightmares. I'll make sure that this never happens again. She had made a promise. She didn't lie. She would not break her promise.

Three months passed. They passed slowly, heavy bags of sand dragging across Keika's mind that refused to speed up. Keika realized that she didn't know when the next Wednesday was anymore. That was horrible. She had to know when she might get to leave, had to count the days because the days were precious and they were the only way she knew that time passed inside the Root base and that it hadn't simply stopped.

Then one day, Hitomi-sensei had woken her early in the morning, before the wakeup bell. Keika had not been allowed to get breakfast, instead munching thoughtlessly on an energy bar that her teacher had shoved into her hand. As Keika rubbed the sleep from her eyes, Hitomi-sensei had already pulled her to one of the exits and explained in a terse and quiet voice how she had managed to obtain permission for Keika to train outside one day a week. She had told Danzo-sama that Keika had found a local teacher that could instruct her in ways that Hitomi-sensei was unable to and that this teacher would not ask unnecessary questions.

Her teacher had led her out of the base and through what must have been the long way to get to what looked like a cross between a dojo and a library and a house that sat nearer the edge of Konoha. The place had this all-natural look to it, wooden and not stone, paper screens instead of heavy metal doors. It was strange to see such a pretty place in the world when all Keika could remember of outside of the base was either abuse and hatred, or corpses and hell. Yes, it certainly was good to get out more. Keika had asked her teacher where they were, but all the silently furious woman replied with was 'The Uzumaki estate. Don't ask questions.'

Lovely.

Her teacher marched up to the door, standing there impatiently. Before Keika could ask why on earth her teacher wasn't knocking, there was a slight spike of chakra at the door, and then the paper screen slid open. It was Namikaze-sama, only he wasn't wearing the green jacket or the Konoha headband. His eyes showed a little bit of tiredness, like he had been hassled and bothered for a long time. There was sadness too, oh yes, lots of that. But in front of everything was simple and grateful content, 'yes, bad things had happened and people had died, but we're all still alive.' It was rather refreshing to Keika. He wasn't hiding anything either, and unlike the members of Root, none of his emotions seemed bleached or suppressed in any way. That was nice as well.

He smiled down at Keika, "Ah, Kamiko-chan! So glad that you could make it! Come in, come in," he stood to the side, allowing her space to enter.

Keika turned and waved to Hitomi-sensei, who gave a gruff nod before vanishing in the way all ninja did. So Keika ignored her teacher's rude departure and stepped inside the house with her new sensei. She bowed, "Good morning Namikaze-sama," she said as politely as she could manage.

He rubbed the back of his head sheepishly and said, "Just call me Minato-sensei."

"Okay Minato-sensei," Keika hurriedly amended. He wasn't the sort of person to get annoyed about such things, she knew that, but she also knew that he disliked the title. Why be rude?

He stepped to the side and entered the house, setting a pace that started slow as if trying to compensate for her shorter legs, but then got faster like he was bored of walking slowly. Keika followed him inside and hurried to keep pace with him. They were walking down a hall, the kind floored with tatami mats and had paper screen walls. She glanced up at him, "So I thought you were a Namikaze?" she asked.

He blinked, confused, "That I am. I said that."

"So then why are we at the Uzumaki estate?" Keika countered, feeling wonderfully sly and intelligent. Everyone was happy when they felt like they knew a secret, and she was only four and no exception.

Minato-sensei glanced down at her, puzzled and at the same time intrigued. Intrigue was excellent. "My… girlfriend is an Uzumaki," he was clearly nervous at calling her a girlfriend, "Do you know about the Uzumaki clan?" Keika shook her head so he continued, "They specialized in fuinjutsu. Kushina's library and materials are far superior to what I use, and will probably be of much more help in our lessons," he didn't pause at all or make any change in tone that would suggest something different. But Keika saw the accusation and slight suspicion in his eyes when he said, "Odd that you know about this estate but not the Uzumaki's."

Keika smiled, "I asked my sensei," she replied as politely as possible, "This place is really beautiful,"

"That it is," he agreed happily, "That it is Kamiko-chan."


Hitomi-sensei was frowning when she came to pick up Keika. Keika saw the dislike and the annoyance and the frustration and just how damn tired her teacher was. And for the first time in her life she ignored what she was seeing.

She was too busy thinking to see.

Her mind was full of knowledge, swirling inside her brain like a sea, moving and changing and then combining to form new ideas that explode and create something else that forms and crystallizes and becomes another fabulous idea! When she had first arrived, Minato-sensei had let her do all her work in the library, a dust and ancient place filled to the brim with heavy bound books and scrolls. After introducing her to his girlfriend (whom he called a friend when in her presence), who was a high-spirited woman with long red hair called Kushina, he had pulled out a stack of books and then began pacing the room. Apparently Minato-sensei had never taught fuinjutsu before, and was rather at a loss for how to begin. But things gained momentum once Kushina really took over.

Keika had begun her lessons with an explanation about the bare basics of what fuinjutsu was. Apparently, it was the flow of energy in objects and how this energy could interact with chakra. And that chakra was not always chakra from the user. Chakra was apparently found everywhere, in objects and in the air itself, something called natural chakra. Seals were what allowed a fuinjutsu master to utilize this natural chakra as well as change the chakra of the object that they were dealing with.

Since that was a flow of energy, and the energy is being harnessed from somewhere, not spontaneously created, many people claim that circles were the basics of sealing. In other words, everything in fuinjutsu was in a cycle, moving shape and form around but never destroying either. Even explosive tags, while at first glance would appear contradictory, were a part of the cycle. The energy for explosive tags was created by mixing chakra into the writing agent, usually blood or ink, applying that onto the paper it was written on, and then proceeded to break the chakra bonds it just created. The energy was released in the form of heat and light, thus the explosion. Theoretically, that meant a user could create an explosion at anytime, anywhere, using anything.

While circles were widely used, many used other branches. Triangles were favored as being very stable, seals that one wanted to last a long amount of time or hold large objects. A subset of that was hexagram sealing, forming eight triangles. Spirals were known for being very powerful and unstable. Kushina-sensei had said that her village specialized in spiral sealing. But there were more than just that. Minato-sensei's Hiraishin for example, was part of one of the most complex branches, using kanji alone to form a seal. But there were as many branches of sealing as there were stars in the sky, or as Minato-sensei had said, as many as people came up with. There were pictorial seals and rune based ones and geometric seals. People also came up with different tenants for sealing, the five elements, the eight trigrams, yin yang, astrological signs, and even those based on pure mathematics. Apparently prime numbers such as five or seven were more commonly used in unstable seals, whereas even numbers like six and eight were used in stable ones.

There was a lot of repeating in seals. Sometimes the symmetry of the seal was what made it work or not work. Minato-sensei taught her a famous example of a storage seal that used only one kanji, simply repeated over and over again in the shape of a dodecagon.

Apparently blood was often used, being a fabulous conductor of chakra as well as a representation of life. Commonly the symbols for life, or a person, would be removed entirely from the seal and it would instead be written in blood. There were shops that sold blood mixed with ink, for some shinobi that thought themselves above using pure blood in combat. When dealing with ink, ink tended to be weak on its own, gaining strength when mixed with chakra, or having chakra applied to it during the sealing process. Again, a fine example of this was exploding tags. They were sold in two different types, those hand detonated with chakra, or those touch detonated, those applied with chakra prior to their sale.

"Your lessons?" Hitomi-sensei asked, snapping Keika out of her thoughts. And when a pissed off Hitomi-sensei asked someone to do something, they did it.

Keika blinked, "What?" she asked, puzzled about where the conversation had been while she had been thinking.

Hitomi-sensei frowned, the annoyance in her eyes growing by the second, "As you clearly weren't listening, I shall repeat the question. How were your lessons?"

A grin formed on her face at this, "Wondrous. I had no idea that there was that much knowledge in the world!"

This clearly had not been the answer that her teacher had been looking for, "I meant, did the Yondaime ask any questions about you that would be difficult to answer?"

"Who?" Keika asked. The fourth Hokage hadn't been there, it had just been Kushina-sensei and Minato-sensei… "Minato-sensei is the Yondaime Hokage!?" she gasped. The expression in her teacher's face showed her that this was true. No wonder Hitomi-sensei had been so adamant about Keika not learning from him. From what she had seen, Danzo and Konoha, got along, but at the same time, no one liked to think that they got along. Minato-sensei seemed like the kind of person who would not like the sort of things that Danzo got up to, not one bit. This also explained why Hitomi-sensei had to follow his orders. So now there were two people in the whole world that could make her teacher bow. That was rather good to know, that Hiromi-sensei wasn't as all powerful as Keika had once thought.

"Of course," Hitomi-sensei snapped, "Now answer the question." Her teacher was annoyed, that was for certain, and something was stressing her out as well, something major. Was it simply because of Keika learning from the fourth? Or was there something more going on? Certainly Danzo would not be pleased to learn that she was studying under the Yondaime. Danzo knew that she was learning from another teacher, one that he probably had assumed to be from Konoha proper. Did he simply not want any secrets that his weapon held to get out and become public knowledge?

Keika racked her brain. Had Minato-sensei asked anything that…? "He did. He asked me where in the village I lived," Keika recalled.

Hitomi-sensei sighed, "Great. Now I am going to have to worry about that as well," she ran a hand through her short hair, "When we get back to the base I want you to practice your thrown weapons. I need to have a chat with Danzo-sama."


As she had been told, Keika returned to the room with the moving targets and spent the next few hours there. Her mind was still focused on seal arrays and methods and she felt herself slipping into a state of subconscious again, fighting only in body. That would be bad, deadly, in fact, in a real battle where her opponents moved and thought the same as she did, but it was rather comforting during training. Just the feel of her muscles burning with her eyes automatically targeting the red dots that she didn't even need marked for her anymore because she already knew the weak points by heart. She had to. They had saved her life on that battlefield.

That was something she was never going to forget. She knew that. The battlefield would stay with her for the rest of her life, as permanent as a second shadow over her mind, a shadow of crimson that she would see forever. Damn her eyes. They had caused her naught but trouble and pain back at that little village in Iwa that she had never called home, and it seemed as though they would keep up causing trouble for her whole like, never letting her get a brief respite from the pain. As she threw thin kunai and flat shuriken and even long and pointy senbon, she found her weapons hitting the targets eyes more than in the heart. She hated her eyes.

A small part of her that was gradually growing larger considered the plus side of simply taking a kunai and gouging out her eyes right now. She couldn't never forget the battlefield, but removing her eyes from her head would stop fresh memories of more battlefields being burned into her mind. And she would have done so. If it weren't for Fushidara-nii-san. Although it had been so long since she had seen him, she knew that he would never approved of her hurting herself, and she would never do something that he didn't approve of. If Keika lost her eyes, then she would be of no use to Danzo, she knew that for a fact, and things that were useless to Danzo got removed. She didn't know if he would outright kill her or simply toss her out of the village, her mind and memories unspeakable through some torturous seal or other form of jutsu.

Much as she hated it, she needed her eyes for her fuinjutsu and she needed her fuinjutsu for Fushidara-nii-san. Connecting all the dots in her mind was easy, but removing one and hoping the pattern would stay was not. She had to find a safer way of removing the seal that didn't end like hers, the user collapsed and dying from chakra exhaustion, and there was also the issue of the excruciating pain that the process caused. She didn't want Fushidara-nii-san to have to go through that pain as well.

There was only one thing about this that she was certain of. It was going to take a while.

She pressed the switch on the wall after she awoke from her last dose of the poison in the senbon, stopping the wooden wheel with the targets from spinning. She trained till she passed out, that was one thing that Hitomi-sensei had made very clear. Train until it is physically impossible to keep going. The first two weeks that she had been here, her training had been going by so fast, never a spare moment to rest and relax. After the battle, she assumed that the sped up training had been because they knew that the battle was coming and they wanted to make sure that she was ready. But even now, her training schedule hadn't relaxed. If anything, it had increased.

Everything was a test, and they were testing to see how long she could go before she simply fell and couldn't do anything anymore. It was sick and it was cruel, and Keika would not let them win. She would keep going for as long as she had to, living in the short hours of sleep and the fuinjutsu lessons that were mostly theory and held no physical demands. They would not see her break because she would never let herself break. If there was one thing that Keika was, it was contrary.

As she removed her weapons from the wooden dummies, she noted how many had missed and how many hadn't been hit enough times. Only two missed. That was good. She was improving. Her small hands no longer had any trouble holding the sharp metal and her tiny stature was compensated for Keika's jumps to reach higher targets. She pulled fistfuls of senbon and kunai out of eyes and realized just how much she wished that she had the Sharingan instead. Itachi had been lucky in that way. His eyes could turn off.

She left the room as silently as a ghost, having quickly learned that this was how ninja walked to avoid detection and that everyone else in Root walked this way as well. Sometimes it was best to learn to fit in.

The Disk welcomed her with a gust of freezing air that would have made her shudder four months ago on her first day here. Now, it simply made her pace quicken a fraction. Out of curiosity, she glanced down at the bottom on the Disk, intrigued as to what she would find there. But to her disappointment, there was nothing at the bottom, no people, no crates or boxes, just a stone cold floor and something that made Keika feel empty inside.

She walked down the large steps with ease and quickly and quietly made her way to her room in section B. Hopefully, with the war no longer a threat, section E would be re-opened and training outside in the sun and the warmth would become a real possibility. Her eyes lazily passed over the clipboard filled with names and room numbers that marked the entrance to this particular floor of the section. After the battle, there had been a huge reduction in the Root forces. Names had been crossed off that list ever hour as bodies were found and names. Nothing official, of course. Danzo only sent into battle shinobi that wouldn't be 'suspicious' if turned up dead, or so Hitomi-sensei had said.

Was it possible…? No, Keika was sure that she was the only ninja who had been taken from Iwa, her teacher had said so, and it wasn't as if Danzo had stolen kekkei genkai ninja from Konoha proper. He wouldn't have. There was no way. But she still did not completely dismiss the thought because she knew the look in Danzo's eye whenever he caught a glimpse of a powerful new ability that he did not yet have in his collection.

When Keika opened her door, to her delight, her roommate Mitsuo was still in there. The dark haired boy was sitting on the floor in the center of the room, his legs crossed and his wrists resting on his knees, a look of contemplation on his face. Keika hated to disturb his mediation, but she paused for a moment after shutting the door to get his attention.

His plain white eyes cracked open an inch to see what she wanted. Annoyance and impatience flickered across his face and he asked, "Kamiko-san, may I be of assistance?" She was taking up his time, time that he had been spending productively until she had rudely interrupted him, and she knew this.

"Yes, I require your help," Keika said calmly. There had been this new technique that she had been trying, and unfortunately she didn't want to ask her already too busy Hitomi-sensei for help and Keika herself couldn't tell whether or not it worked, "I want you to tell me if you can see a change in my eyes."

Mitsuo stood and gave her a look over, evaluating what exactly she was planning, "Very well."

Keika nodded her thanks and held up her hands into a single seal. This was the henge. Again. She knew that there was no way that she could perform a technique that was a lie, that was impossible for her to do. But she had been thinking about her eyes, about how she had to wear her hair down in public because her eyes had to be kept hidden. If she could change her eyes, even just a tiny bit, then she could go out without her eyes covered, and that, she knew, would raise fewer questions and acquire her less hatred and resentment like from her old town.

The way that she planned this, at least the theory of it, was that it wasn't going to be a lie. She wasn't going to give herself pretty blue eyes like Hitomi-sensei, or those deep hazel eyes of Fushidara-nii-san. All that she was going to do, was going to be a blur. She was going to take the grey mirror and the black swirl and blur them in her mind so that they appeared just plain dark grey. That wasn't a lie, and that was possible.

She slowly gathered minute amounts of chakra to her eyes, willing the iris to be blurred. Come on, just this once. "Henge!" she called out as she finished the technique.

She shuddered as a wave of pain hit her, burning at her eyes and in her mind. And then the pain was gone, and she looked up at Mitsuo, "Did my eyes change?" she asked cautiously.

"Your doujutsu blurred for a moment, and your eyes became a blank grey for a few moments. Then they reverted back," Mitsuo supplied calmly.

Keika sighed. Still needed work, "Thank you for your help. I apologize again for interrupting you." Tired, and thoroughly annoyed, she collapsed onto her bed and shut her eyes tightly, feeling the pain from before drain along with the chakra. She would get it to work. She would. She had to.


Thwack!

Keika brought her leg back down and took a deep breath. Then she slammed her leg once again into the wooden post. This sort of menial training bored her and made her mind draw up the most complicated seal arrays that she possibly could, just so that she could keep her mind from rotting away because of boredom. She knew why she had to do these things, but it was still no fun. Three hundred of this kick, five hundred of this punch, just simple repetition of basic moves designed to improve her form and increase her stamina. Add the wooden post, and it also did wonders for her tolerance of pain.

"Hitomi-sensei?" she asked, kicking her leg into the post once again, "I have been meaning to ask, and please correct me if I overstep my station. That fire technique, the one you used during the… battle, why haven't you taught me that? It looked basic."

It was difficult to read her teacher's emotions when her back was to Hitomi-sensei, but Keika could still gauge the fluctuations in her voice with relative accuracy. That was one of the funny things about Keika's eyes. If she couldn't see someone, but she could hear their voice, then she could pick up tidbits of emotions and intentions. But she was never wrong, either she knew or she didn't, but there weren't any mistakes made with her eyes.

Hitomi-sensei gave the question a long time to vanish into the air before she answered, "It's… an Uchiha traditional technique. We're all taught it at some point, and mastery of it acts as your initiation into the clan. The Gokyaku is the starting point for all of our fire jutsu. We all know it."

Eyes didn't see, but her ears heard and the eyes did their work anyways, "There is something that you're not telling me," Keika said sternly as she kicked again, "I will not repeat your secrets. And you want to get this off your chest."

Her teacher sighed, a deep tired sigh, "You know that… I was never considered an Uchiha. As soon as I was born, and my eyes were blue… they knew that I would never awaken my Sharingan. After that, any achievements of mine, all my hard work, even the praise given to me by my superiors, all of it was practically non-existent to the clan." She was tired, so tired. Her voice carried a deep echo to it that shouldn't be there, because the emotional burden that went with that echo wasn't something that Keika ever wanted to let her teacher bare.

"Because your eyes weren't Sharingan?" Keika asked, still feeling as though she was missing pieces, as though her teacher wasn't telling her everything, "Why would they do that? If you were a powerful shinobi, then why would they continue to ostracize you?" She kicked the post.

There was a weak laugh from Hitomi-sensei, "You've clearly never met one of the Uchiha elders, kid. Even in this day and age, the elders, and a good chunk of the clan, are of the opinion that women should not be shinobi. Of course, we are expected to awaken our eyes, but to gain mastery of it was like an unspoken taboo. Women's eyes were seen as a trait to pass on to their children, not as something that they should dare to use in battle. Most of the women in the clan had their prowess as kunoichi ignored in favor of a promising marriage. Without my eyes, I was nothing. My skills were ignored out of tradition and stupid belief. They never looked at anything besides the lack of Sharingan, and my raw skills were all I had. I could have been a kage or a genin, and it wouldn't have made a difference to the elders."

Thwack!

Keika's leg connected with the post. "So if they didn't consider you part of the clan, what happened to you?" She had to know what was it that had made her teacher so alone. Why was Hitomi-sensei so alone? From the looks of what she had seen before, Hitomi-sensei's sister, Mikoto-san, had been happy to see her sister alive and well and held no animosity. So what had happened?

"I was ignored," her teacher said simply, "No inheritance from my father or mother. No quick ascension through the ranks like the rest of the clan. A lot of little things, I suppose. My father would say 'clan business' and then make me leave the room while my five year old brother could stay. I was never taught the Gokyaku," she laughed harshly at this, "I had to sneak around, stealing notes from my brothers and sister about it, try out pointless hand signs in hopes of stumbling across how to perform the technique. My dumb little defiance I suppose."

Thwack!

Pressing the issue, Keika continued, now not knowing if she was asking her own questions, or asking the questions that Hitomi-sensei wanted her to ask, "And how did you end up here? Working for Root and Danzo-sama seems like a strange ending to your story."

Her teacher sighed, "Being a shinobi became my life I guess. Jonin, and the ranks prior to that point had all been easy for me, a game instead of the challenge that they were to others. And then… I passed the age where the clan said I should be married. Father wanted me gone, he wanted to get rid of me, and he had hoped that marriage would be the perfect way to do that. When he found that I wanted nothing to do with such a life, he arranged a marriage for me. Some tiny shinobi clan with no special skills or recognition, just a place that my father could shove me and get rid of me."

Keika froze up before she let her leg hit the post, "But that's horrible! That's…" she shuddered as she thought of just how happy her parents would have been to get rid of her, marriage or murder, "That's exactly what my parents would have done. How did you get out of that?"

"It went against the strict rules of the clan for a woman, especially one without status like me, to directly disobey the orders of her father or acting guardian," Hitomi-sensei stated bitterly, "My skills were all I had, and to be forced into a family that I neither wanted nor was ready for was a direct insult to my status as a shinobi. I challenged my father to a fight. All or nothing. I won, and he would allow me to leave freely. He won, and I would be forced to do as he said."

Thwack!

"And did you win?" Keika asked hurriedly, the impatience to know bleeding into her voice.

When her teacher replied, her voice lacked energy, lacked vibe, and the sarcasm fell flat and dull, "What do you think?" Hitomi-sensei asked sadly, sounding on the verge of tears, "I was winning, and easily. Then he… he trapped me in a genjutsu. But nooooo…" she continued, her voice turning to anger, "That couldn't have been enough for him. He humiliated me publicly, in front of the entire clan. That genjutsu was designed specifically for me. It would only work on those without doujutsu, targeting the eyes specifically. He said, 'If you had been of worth, then you wouldn't have failed. The Sharingan is my victory, and it is what makes you worthless.' Then he told me to get out of his sight. I knew that he wanted to marry me off, but I took that as an order and left the clan. I ran until I found Danzo-sama, and I promised that I would never see my father again."

"Kainashi," Keika said slowly, the thought dawning on her in a misty cloud of realization, "They named you 'worthless'?! How cold hearted are they? To name their child something like that?" she gasped, "And your name now…"

Hitomi-sensei turned bitter, "Yes, Danzo-sama was oh-so clever when he thought up that one, wasn't he?"

"Beautiful eyes," Keika said sadly, "He made up your new name with the sole intention of taunting you for your failure. Sensei, I am so sor-"

"Spare your pity," Hitomi-sensei barked out, "I don't need it from the likes of you!" She sounded broken, desperate, pained. Like her soul was being torn apart and her mind ripped open. Keika hated to feel that, hated to have to hear the emotion and the pain come into her mind in the form of sound and stay there. She could feel the loneliness as if it were her own, and it had been, back in that town before Fushidara-nii-san. And she hated that loneliness.

Thwack!

The post cracked and split in two.