I am on my fifth C-rank mission, and I hate it, I remind myself. They manage to be both stressful, and boring simultaneously. Nori-sensei feels strongly like we should do as many as possible, both to help Konoha and improve their skill simultaneously. He makes us practice splitting up and getting to Konoha independently, in a case a future mission requires them to split up. He is doing this for a good reason, I repeat.
Nori-sensei sends them each with a seal that they can trigger if they need to that will give him their location. I am safe. (Ish) Besides that they are genuinely on their own though, and it's pretty terrifying my brain reminds me, which is not very fun. Every rustle of a bush is a monster and every shadow is a missing-nin.
I make the very logical decision to keep running until I get home, because Ka-san will make me soup if I look sad and cold. Which will not be hard because I am hot from running and already sad (because running, duh), and by the time it is night the air will be cold enough to chill me.
Around hour five though, I am genuinely contemplating if a missing-nin can just become farmer and live the rest of their lives happily. I could do that.
I have a future I can see for myself.
I pass the chunin exams and get a job at the mission desk. I meet a pretty civilian in five years, and five years later we get married. Even desk work plays pretty well, so she wouldn't have to work if she didn't want to, in which case we could have kid. (Or not, I don't have a strong opinion either way, but kids are what come after marriage right?) I'll abdicate the family name to Hideo, who'd like it better anyway. Asano will stop trying so hard to be a shinobi and learn to live a safer life, she's not made to be a shinobi. Kimiko will be a genin or chunin when she falls in love and retires to raise her own brood.
My family will be safe. (I will be safe.)
(Some bitter part of me points out that I'm not even needed anymore, Hideo can become the next Senju head, he's better fitted for it anyway. Much to my disgust he's even noble. After several days of pushing to understand why he would reveal himself, Asano admits that her friend was being bullied and Hideo had protected her. Some girl. As if Hideo's life was worth less than Asano's friendship. And that's what it was, his life. He's doomed, even if he doesn't know it yet.)
I am- I am alarmed at the bitterness I can feel growing inside me. It's normal, I imagine, to feel some level of annoyance and bitterness when you are the only one of your siblings who definitely won't pass on the bloodline to their children. Even Kimiko, who had no hint of it in herself, shows that her children have a 25% chance of developing the mokuton. Apparently it was in her blood or something like that.
My chakra lashes about within me, cold and viscous. (Shadows with weight, with power.) Fire affinity would be useful if I was part of the Nara clan. I could learn to blow a fireball overhead and stretch a shadow out below, but I'm not. I'm not, and so I'll never learn their shadow tricks. All I can do is light a campfire.
(Even my poor orphan teammate is improving faster than me. Driven perhaps, by his desire to reach jonin.)
(On my best days I just want to be a paper ninja, on my worst, being a missing-nin doesn't seem so terrible at all.)
I think it says something about how paper ninja are viewed that they are called 'ninja' like civilians and children, instead of 'shinobi' like the Sannin. Like real shinobi. Maybe I'm just being hypersensitive though. I am, after all, 'ninja running' through Konoha forest at this very moment, and a civilian sure as hell couldn't do this.
Language, as Asano always reminds me, is important though. And ninja running is barely even considered a ninja skill, genin can do it after all. Even some academy students can.
Now that I think about it, Asano is kinda weird about language. She used to be terrible at grammar. (Though now that I think about it, she got over it really quickly once she was at the academy. Maybe she just did it to be cute?) She is terrible at writing, mostly because he never remembers her kanji, though her hiragana and katakana is pretty good. Actually ignoring her grammer, her writing is pretty awesome. What she's shared of it at least. Maybe she'll drop out the academy and become an author. That would be nice.
The forests always make my thoughts go funny. Or maybe it's the running. The sky is dark now, though it's hard to tell through the thick foliage, and if I hadn't been raised by Ka-san who has always been a firm believer in training early (well, before Kimiko was born she was). When Hideo was a baby they used to walk through the forests…
It's one of my favourite memories of Ka-san. She taught me about the forest and the trees and the life that was hidden there. They hadn't gone very often, maybe every month or so, but it had been peaceful. Even though it meant he had to get up and leave his blanket behind.
That's why he can't be a missing-nin farmers have to wake up early in the morning, and I just don't want to do that. I would probably starve to death. Maybe I could be a prostitute. They work at night. It probably wouldn't be that hard. The thought of it makes me feel dirty though, so I put it aside.
The light breeze brings in the smell of city, and I know I am close to home.
Most of my thoughts are just that, ramblings in my head to distract myself from the long journey and the longing I feel for home and warmth. But some tiny part of it is more. A bitterness, a desire to escape. It the the cold angry part of myself that all people have and I, although smarter than most, can fall victim to it as well.
As the walls of Konoha come into view the dark part of be recedes and I just feel… tired. (An aching deep into my bones, an exhaustion no amount of sleep seems to cure. A feeling of emptiness, like my psyche is cracked and no one has bothered to help me put it back together. Cracked is the best way to put it. Under stress, but not yet broken.)
I don't like C-ranks.
Checking into the village is annoying because the chunin at the gate love to make jokes about 'baby genin all alone', but it's fast enough so I don't mind too badly. They say that Nori-sensei wants us to meet at the mission desk tomorrow, early afternoon, so I'll have time to sleep in a bit. That's at least one good thing. I'm not sure who else is back yet, since the gate chunin said it would be better to leave a bit of suspense.
Next weekend the Sakurai family will be moving to a house on the edge of Konoha, the building used to be a large family home. The kind where the whole 'clan' would stay in one building. The Nohara Clan home I think? They died out in the last war, but the building has been empty since then. In part because it needed a good deal of fixing up and in part because most people prefer to be in central Konoha, which is better protected in case of attack.
The Nohara Clan home, soon the be the Sakurai home opens up on the small forest training ground that is rarely used, and Ka-san sent in an application for it to become private property.
The rebuilding was mostly done by Oji-san, Asano, Hideo, and Ka-san since they aren't running missions. (Kimiko 'helped' with the paint apparently, but she's only six, so how much could she really have done?)
I haven't actually spent any time there since it's been patched up since Nori-sensei wants us to be ready for the chunin exams coming in 9 months. We'll have only been genin for 15 months, less than a year and a half at that point.
I'll admit, I'm nervous. It's not that I don't trust in my own skill, but rather, the chunin exams are quite dangerous. Also, I really want to pass. It's not that I don't like Sachi and Bachi, or that I don't like spending time with Koji, but they have very different goals from myself. Sachi wants to be the first Inuzuka ANBU captain who keeps her dog (how she knows she would be the first, I have no idea). Koji wants to be a jonin strong enough to protect everyone (though mostly the orphanage).
I just want a steady job, time to find a romantic partner maybe? I want to be safe, mostly.
"I'm home!" I call, before pausing to realise that it's fully dark outside and everyone might be asleep. I make my way upstairs, peeling my clothes off as I do. I'm hot and sweaty, and the cool April breeze. The weather will be warmer soon, but not quite yet. Hideo bet it would be two weeks, I bet it would be a month. Based on past years it doesn't actually get warm until the start of May.
I don't want to take a shower, so instead I go to the bathroom and use some water from the sink to wash off the worst of it. Asano is giving me a knowing look over her notebook when I enter our room, mostly devoid of worldly objects which already got moved while I was on mission.
"Oji-san's senpai is coming for dinner tomorrow." Asano says when it's clear I'm not going to start a conversation. I grunt, quietly though because Hideo's asleep. I want to be asleep. It's been 23 hours since I've closed my eyes longer than a blink, since our camp got scouted.
I pull on some pajamas and glance at Asano's notebook which contains some wobbly looking seal work.
"You're not going to actually try and use those, are you?" Nori-sensei and the my academy sensei had been clear that imperfect seal work was incredibly dangerous, despite the fact that no one I knew had even tried it.
"Nah, not until they're perfect, I'm not using sealing ink or paper until them." Asano says, dipping her brush into ink again and making a small, and slightly blobby mark.
"Are you sure you should be doing this on your bed?" The bed moves slightly as she leans forward to make more markings, and the ink sloshes slightly in the bottle.
"Nope, it's probably a horrible idea," Asano agrees, "but it's much more comfortable than the floor."
"It won't be when your bed is covered in ink." I remind her. I don't particularly care either way, but she'll be in a lot of trouble if it does happen, which could be annoying for me if Ka-san's in a bad mood.
"Eh, yeah. But then I'll just sleep in your bed." I start to make a sound of protest. "You're not here most nights anyway."
"And what if I am here?" Also she'll probably have ink all over her. Asano is not a messy person in most things, but if she's used ink in the last week, you can tell because she's covered in it.
"Then I'll share with you?" Asano says, scratching her cheek with any inky finger that rather proves my point.
"You've got ink on your face."
"I figured."
It's calm as I crawl into bed, but despite exhaustion my brain whirls in cowardly thoughts of fear and betrayal.
"Asano?"
"Yep?"
"Why are you learning sealing?"
"Well it's a long story, but mostly because the chakra control for it is very easy. And at this point in time I think I'll need to focus on genjutsu, since I can't really become a master at ninjutsu without elemental transformations. I'm not really strong enough at this point to focus on taijutsu, and I'd prefer to avoid being a close contact combatant. Therefore genjutsu, and some point of support, which made me think of sealing."
"That is… very well thought out." Better than I expected for sure. (Better planned out than I had been at her age.)
"Also, I like stuff where if you do the right thing, then the right thing happens. Sakura's looking into a book about biology and experimentation - I should show it to you another time, it's really cool - and it says that sometimes even if you do everything right, the experiment or medical procedure will still fail. And I- I don't think I could do that," Asano whispers. I open an eye to glance at her, sitting stiffly with all thoughts of sealing abandoned as whatever she's thinking about consumes her.
"Isn't sealing really expensive?"
"Well…" Asano draws out, reluctant to say such a thing for a moment before she relents, "yeah. It's pretty expensive. That's why I'm using normal paper and ink right now. The real stuff is super expensive." Asano puts her brush into her ink pot and leaves it there are she blows gently on the wet ink. The smell drifts across the room and I wrinkle my nose slightly.
"Oji-san was clear that I'll probably never be able to use elemental chakra, not unless my entire chakra network was healed one channel at a time. And the only medic skilled enough to maybe do it is the Slug Sannin."
"The one who retired and left Konoha before we were born?" I ask, thinking on how coincidence is a terribly cruel master.
"That's the one." Asano agrees, and it feels like she agrees with my thoughts as much as my words. My little sister, crippled by luck.
"The last living Senju?" I ask, because I want to be sure. There might be multiple Slug Sannin, I've never asked. Oddly enough the stories don't really intersect. She is either the Slug Sannin or Tsunade-hime, I've never really heard a story where she asks as both.
"Yep." Asano confirms distractedly, trying to get a particularly stubborn spot to dry.
"You know she's our Great Aunt or something like that right?" I say, trying to close my eyes so that I can go to sleep. It seems to be a losing battle. I ask despite fact that I'm pretty sure she knows, since Ka-san and Tou-san were very good at talking about how the Senju without being clear about our connection (or the effects of our connection) to them. Perhaps to keep us safe, perhaps because they found it awkward to talk about.
"Yep." Asano pulls a tissue from a pocket and dabs the paper, no doubt smearing ink everywhere. Asano is good at many things, but I can already tell that sealing will be an uphill battle more due to her poor handwriting and inking than to her inability to understand what she's doing.
"Do you think she'd come back to heal you?" I ask, curious. I have no particular reason to believe that Asano will know the answer, but maybe Oji-san advised her on it?
"No." Asano replies flatly. For a few silent seconds we both rage at a woman we have not met for her selfishness that could cost my sister her life.
"... Is that why your friend has been looking to medicine?"
"Biology as a whole actually and… I don't think so? Honestly I'm not sure. Maybe." Asano says, shrugging lurchy way that makes her bed shake slightly.
"I'm not sure I'm ready to be a chunin." I admit to the silent room after a while.
"I know, but you'll do a good job anyway." I hear as my brain finally quiets at my confession.
I am not ready.
A/N: Alright, so there's a little less than 10,000 words left from NaNoWriMo that I have written. Those chapters will be published each morning. After that I'm going to update every weekend.
Also a warning, this chapter is the start of a shift to darker tone.
Questions:
1) What's a character you really hate reading about?
2) What is your favourite self insert trope?
3) What do you think of Asano trying to learn sealing?