25. Parent-Teacher Conference
Character(s): Iruka-sensei; Hyuuga Hiashi & Hanabi
Summary: Hanabi knows that, to a ninja, a lie can be as potent a weapon as a shuriken. But she needs a lesson in friendly fire.
The parchment crinkled in his hand as Iruka squinted down at it. Behind him, the final stage of sundown progressed through the sky, and the written characters had become indistinct in the cascading dim. Not that he needed to read them again, and the hot irritation that had been with him since he received the summons stirred around in his belly.
The message was brief, stiffly formal, and permeated with the underlining hostility that Iruka had come to expect from this particular family. It read:
Umino Iruka,
Your presence is hereby requested and required at the Hyuuga Main House for an audience with clan leader, Hyuuga Hiashi, and his advisors at the evening bell. Failure to report for this meeting will have consequences.
On this final portentous note, the message ended. There was no gracious wording, no information about the nature of the 'audience' – not even a signature, although the morose expression on little Hanabi's face when she pushed it onto the battle-scarred surface of his desk left him with no uncertainty. He had been called to a parent-teacher conference. Or perhaps to an inquisition.
It was the reason he was standing here now, just outside the black gates of the Hyuuga compound, even as the last rays of sun warmed his back and warped shadow around his eyes. The faint peals of the evening bell were just fading, and Iruka grimaced.
He knew the timing of this meeting was a deliberate means of unnerving him. It ensured that he would be caught outside the village gates after dark, unable to return to Konoha proper until they reopened in the morning. Iruka's eyebrows stitched together stubbornly; he refused to be intimidated by such a childish tactic.
He fully expected to be kept waiting for some time, so it surprised him when the gates opened almost instantly at his back. A dark shape loomed out of the passage. The man did not waste words: "Umino Iruka?"
The chuunin itched to say, 'As requested and required,' but it was early yet in the evening to be antagonizing his hosts. Anyway, sarcasm was wasted on the Hyuuga. Therefore, it was with careful urbanity that Iruka bowed and obediently followed.
The entrance lead into a courtyard predominated by a manor whose elegantly curling eves he could only just make out. Under the full light of day, it would be a beautiful estate – immaculately tended and sun-bright – but in the twilight it was cold: a smoky, black-on-black image of a place one didn't walk out of easily.
It was deep into the interior of this grand manor that Iruka was led. The sound of his footsteps whispered on lacquered panels and his shadow stretched long against the walls. The teacher could see the virtues of his hosts in every feature of the house: the penchant for a Spartan splendor, for clean lines, for perfection.
Perfection. Iruka scrunched his nose as the word crossed his mind. Yes, that was why he was here.
Their final destination was the main hall. It blazed with heat. Firelight outlined the waiting council like jet, all of them tall and grim as though made from stone. One particularly piercing, transcendental gaze stood out among them – it bore into the teacher like serrated hooks.
Iruka braced himself. And so his 'audience' began.
Forcing himself to show all appropriate decorum, Iruka braced his arms and bowed. The sharp wariness in his eyes undoubtedly belied the courteous manner, but it was nonetheless with perfect politeness that he acknowledged, "My Lord Hyuuga."
The gathering didn't respond immediately, an indignity that Hiashi undoubtedly deemed befitting Iruka's station as a lowly teacher of children. In all the times they had met before (a not insignificant number, as Iruka had been a figure in both of his daughters' educations), the tall clan leader had shown his contempt very clearly. He did not conceal it as he came forward now, either.
"I will not deign to say that your presence is welcome in my home," he began, frowning in a way that only added to the general implacability of his stern mouth. "In fact, I cannot tell you how much the necessity of this meeting nauseates me."
Iruka had a mind to tell the clan leader that he was hardly responsible for the man's indigestion, but some surviving fleck of self-preservation reigned him and he snapped down on the retort before it made it past his teeth.
His restraint didn't seem to impress the clan leader, who turned with a flourish that was just a touch dramatic in so taciturn a family, and – wryly – Iruka wondered how it was that he had managed to serve during the reign of the single Hyuuga hot-head.
Hiashi pressed his hands onto the surface of the broad table at the center of the room. "My daughter brought home her latest exam score yesterday. She says you failed her deliberately, to sabotage her application for early graduation."
The chuunin's eyes stretched at Hanabi's explanation of her failed grade. The test had been a practicum on trajectories, and he knew very well why the littlest Hyuuga had done poorly; weapon handling was not one of her many gifts, and she disliked the rigors of classroom theory. Recently, he'd been working with her on application, and she had shown improvement, but on the exam day she had sullenly refused to participate. Secretly, Iruka suspected that she was embarrassed by her clumsiness and feared being seen as incompetent by her peers. It sometimes happened when children were motivated by approval above all else; he had seen it before.
The teacher focused on the father before him, not wondering that Hanabi had preferred a clever lie to an uncomfortable truth. And it was clever indeed; Iruka's political views were quite well known – he and Hiashi had clashed over them in the past.
He wondered what he could possibly say, short of exposing his student. Facts were the safest, and so he began with those: "When I evaluate my students, it's on their performance and no other consideration." An edge of firmness leaked into his voice. "I would not falsify them."
It seemed impossibly that eyes so white could burn, and yet Hiashi managed. He accused, "And yet you do not want her to be accelerated. You have stood in the way of her advancement at every step!"
Iruka didn't bother to deny it. "My position on early graduation is based on years of experience teaching academy-level students, Hyuuga-san." And personal experience, he added silently. There was not a shinobi in the village over twenty-years-old who had not been a child-soldier. "But that has nothing to do with Hanabi's test score. She has issues."
"'Issues'?" the man growled, "Hanabi has no 'issues'." In a different parent, his outrage might have been touching, but to Iruka, Hiashi sounded as though he was speaking of a flaw in a product he had produced. It made the teacher angry for her, just as he had once been angry for poor, desolate Hinata.
"Hanabi is, in many ways, an exceptional shinobi." Iruka spoke to the man and his panel of kin, all of whom were staring at him fixedly, with eyes like bands of light. "Her charka control is easily the best in her class, and quite advanced for her age. She shows good sense of space and her own body. As you know, she's developing the skills of her clan very rapidly. But – " He paused briefly, pressing on even as he felt the room tense. "But, she is sometimes a poor student, temperamental, and impatient with bookwork outside of her favorite subjects. Her accuracy with advanced level projectiles is still poor, and her mistakes frustrate her so much that she often looses her temper and makes elementary mistakes."
He took a breath. When he continued, it was more quietly, less like a report. "Of course, Hyuuga-san, these small shortcomings are very typical for a child her age."
It was the wrong thing to say. Hyuuga Hiashi did not want to hear his child being described with a word so offensive as "typical". Veins creased his temples, and he frothed, "Hanabi is anything but typical; she was born to be a soldier!"
But if telling the clan leader that his daughter was average had been an error in Iruka's judgment, then the statement about soldiers was a mistake on the part of Hiashi's. Already brittle with barely contained fury, Iruka snapped, "She was born to be a human being."
He wanted to add, 'You pompous, warmongering ass', but didn't.
"And she has weaknesses, just like us all. It is my job to make sure she doesn't die of them in the field, and I will do that, no matter what you or anyone else thinks."
"What do you know of the field?" The clan leader's voice had risen, and he ranged nearer. Iruka could feel the man's charka pressing against his own, threatening and close. It hissed with Hiashi, "You, a chuunin thought so hopeless to any effective purpose that they put you in a school. You, who will never gain rank, never bleed from more than a paper cut for your village."
Iruka bristled. "I make no claim to genius, and it's true that I may never advance. But even if I have no special sight, then at least I'm not blind to the destruction I'm reeking on my own children! Your daughter would do anything for you." He spat, "Except tell you the truth. And if you keep pushing her, she is going to believe that you care more about her rank than you do about her life." Completely beside himself with rage, he demanded, "Are you so willing to get your children killed?"
Iruka didn't even see Hiashi's lunge. Only after the hands had closed on either side of his jugular did his senses return to him. Nerves jumped under the pads of the assailing thumbs, and he was only too aware that the gentlest pressure could leave him flickering like a dying fire, his charka snuffed. Still, he did not move. Instead, he trained all the fire he possessed into his eyes, challenging the glowering shafts of wrath with a conviction that surpassed even his fear.
For a long moment, no one moved.
Then Iruka saw the other men from the periphery of his frozen eyes. They had tensed, shifting forward the barest step – the Hyuuga equivalent of shouting across a room. Their call to halt had summoned Hiashi back to his senses, and, slowly, he withdrew his hands from Iruka's neck.
He moved away then, and it seemed as though his shoulders sloped as he turned his back. Fingers lifted to press against his temples, and Iruka could suddenly see only weariness there. The anger had dried up like a dewpond, and his words, when he spoke, no longer sounded like an insult or a threat. Instead, it was as though he was warning Iruka, voice heavy with premonition. "You. You're going to break yourself, Sensei, on the rocks of greater men's wrath."
Iruka answered with his own metaphor. "Waves may break on the rocks, but afterward they just return to the sea." He thought of his children, and the legacy he was leaving behind. "They are a never ending procession. And if it's up to me, you will be beset by my waves for all times."
There might have been something like amazement in the eyes of the Hyuuga who had summoned him, but it was hard to say; their translucent eyes were impossible to read. For a while, Iruka wondered if he had pushed too far. But Hiashi surprised him.
"I do not want to see my children dead," he muttered, almost too quietly to be heard. Then he said, "I will be speaking to the Hokage about this."
Iruka held onto that bitter note in Hiashi's voice as he was escorted out, hoping that some truth had prevailed here, even if their meeting had been founded on a falsehood.
It took considerable constraint for Iruka to wait until he was alone in the corridor to press his hands to his neck. A phantom pressure remained there, tingling over the charka pathways, and he smiled grimly, imagining how close to death he had been this time. And his colleagues claimed there was no danger in being an academy teacher! Clearly, they had never tried dealing a pack of baby shinobi, and their parents.
His contemplation was interrupted by a soft shuffle, so slight that it was almost indistinguishable from the faint, natural sounds of a quiet house. The teacher let his head fall just slightly to the left, observing a long shadow. "Well," he said, and it was a thoughtful sound, somewhat muted in the big hall. "Did things go as you expected, then, Hanabi?"
The little girl stepped out unwillingly, and ducked her milky eyes, ashamed.
The man nodded, half to himself. He couldn't fully bury his disappointed. "It was a lie that you told," he pointed out. "You know why you failed that exam."
She didn't deny it. But her lower lip, which she had been worrying, pouted just a bit. "Subterfuge is a shinobi's tool. You told us that in class."
It shouldn't have wrenched his heart so much to hear his own words spoken back to him in such a context; if this was how she interpreted his lesson, he had truly failed her. He congratulated her coolly. "In that case, I suppose you achieved your objective. Your tactic was a success."
Her stricken face was hard to walk away from, but he did it anyway, hoping…
"Sensei!"
The young, high voice trailed him, and when she caught up, he could tell that she was deeply conflicted; it was written in every line of her small, round face. "I know that lying is part of the ninja way." Then her fists clinched, and she stammered, "B-but we're allies, aren't we, Sensei."
It was like seeing a shaft of sunlight after a fog; Iruka's smile broke out immediately. "That's right, Hanabi," he said gently, knelling beside her and placing his hand on her shoulder. "You shouldn't lie to endanger your allies. That's a good way to think about it."
His response triggered a knowing look, as though Hanabi realized the teaching moment that had passed between them. Iruka was proud of her for that too; she truly was a sharp little girl.
Afterwards, Hanabi walked with him to the compound gate, frowning when she realized that he would have no where to go once he left. "It's alright, Hanabi," he assured her. "I've stayed overnight in the forest before."
The child fidgeted, and for a moment she looked just exactly her own age – shy and a little awkward and ten-years-old. "You could stay in my room," she offered, as though she were asking a friend for a sleepover. The teacher felt a rush of fondness for her, knowing as they both did just how her father would feel about that.
He turned her down gently. "I think I'm in enough trouble already, even without overstaying my welcome." He sighed dramatically. "After all, now I have to survive a meeting with both your father and the Godaime."
Hanabi squished her nose up, as though imaging just how that might go. In a serious tone, she suggested, "You could try just standing there and letting them yell at you until it's over."
The advice made the teacher just a little sad, knowing that it certainly came from hard experience. He asked, "Do you find that works?"
In response, Hanabi offered him the littlest, tiniest smile. "No," she told him, "but at least they won't give you a spanking afterward."
Iruka choked on his laughter, stunned as he was by its sudden provocation. A Hyuuga with a sense of humor, he thought, whipping his eyes. Well, wonders never ceased. "I will seriously consider your advice, Hanabi," he promised her.
She nodded gravely, and a moment passed. Then, impulsively, she reached for his hand. The smaller fingers squeezed his own, tightly in the dark. For a Hyuuga, it was the equivalent of a full-body hug, and Iruka felt a plug in his throat. Firmly, he returned her grip.
It was one of those moments that made everything worth it, up to and including the promise of an early death.