Day 16: "Putting in the…"

At Botan's request, I stopped by her training grounds to bring her and Hiei some lunch one warm spring day. It surprised me at first to hear that Hiei had agreed to continue training her, but as I came upon the clearing in the woods where they practiced their techniques, I supposed it wasn't entirely shocking, either—because Botan sure had shocked Hiei the night she used her Jagan Eye to track down his hideout. Something told me that if he'd agreed to keep training her even after the Dark Tournament came to a close, it was because he sensed potential in her just waiting to be unlocked.

Pity Botan couldn't see that for herself.

As I settled my bento-laden backpack beside me in the shade of a gingko tree, a wave of nostalgia washed across my wandering mind. Watching Hiei and Botan spar with lengths of green bamboo in that clearing brought back a rush of memories: I'd watched Hiei train Botan there before, and this was where Kurama and Hiei had trained Kuwabara before the Tournament, as well. In fact, I'd sat under this same tree with Botan to giggle about Kurama's haircare routine at one point. Listening to her grunts of exertion and Hiei's sharp rebukes, I smiled to myself, lost in a wash of happy memories as seductive as the warm sunshine filtering in green ribbons through the leaves rustling overhead in the wind.

But I had things to do besides nap, much though the allure of sleep beckoned. Neither Botan nor Hiei acknowledged me when I arrived that day. They only had aggressive eyes for each other as they sparred, leaving me alone with my notebook to write. I was working on revisions to a manuscript, ones prescribed to me by none other than Sato Shogo, and I found myself quite absorbed in my work by the time Botan broke apart from her tutor to throw herself down in the shade at my side. She did so with a groan and a curse, flinging an arm over her gorgeous face as powder-blue hair fanned out around her head in sweaty ringlets.

"Tough time out there?" I said with all sympathy.

"You can't even imagine, Keiko!" She didn't bother lifting her arm off her face, though she did pound her opposite fist into the dirt once, twice, three times. "I'm not getting this at all. Hiei is a fine teacher, I'm sure, but I make a poor student. At this rate I'll never…"

Below the curve of her arm, her jaw clenched. Her lips thinned. The barest tremble possessed her chin, and without a second thought I shut my notebook and set it aside upon the grass.

"Hey. It's OK," I said in a vain attempt to soothe. "You'll get it eventually." To lessen the horrific tension (and hopefully to still the quiver in her lip) I tried to crack a joke. "Not that my non-psychic ass understands what you're trying to get, exactly, but…"

A harsh bark of laughter erupted from her mouth. "It's just—how does he do it?" Botan said, tossing her arm aside so she could stare at me in pleading horror. "It all seems to come to him so easily!"

"Of course it does," I said. "He's had a Jagan eye for a lot longer than you have, and he's been fighting seriously for even longer than that."

But Botan wasn't satisfied, heaving a sigh as she said, "Still, though…"

I waited for her to look at me, before pasting on a small smile. "You've watched Yusuke play RPGs, right?"

"Of course," said Botan. She sat up and leaned backward, hands propped against her hips until her spine gave a slight crack. "And Kuwabara, too."

"OK, so think of it like this," I said. "You're a level one adventurer. Hiei is a level fifty adventurer. But he started from level one, too, and he got to where he is by logging 10,000 hours on his game file. How many hours do you think you've logged, meanwhile?"

Botan gulped. "Certainly not 10,000…"

"My point exactly!"

Although Botan seemed to understand (she didn't protest, at least) her lips pressed into a tight knot. She hunched forward to slip her arms around her knees, chin resting upon then as she stared forward, into the clearing. In its center, Hiei slashed at the air with his bamboo stick, parrying an invisible foe with strikes so fast, I couldn't even see them. The bamboo sliced the air with cracks like a whip, cutting through vapor like a jet breaking the sound barrier. Botan watched him for a long time, eventually lifting a slender hand to curl an errant strand of blue behind her ear.

"10,000 hours," she murmured, eyes locked on Hiei. "How long will it take me to get there, do you suppose?"

"A long time," I admitted, "but every moment you spend logging hours adds up to that magical 10,000."

Magenta eyes cut sideways, curiosity lightening their bright hue. "Is there a reason you said 10,000 specifically?" she asked. "A bit of a random number if you ask me, and you keep mentioning it, so…"

I smiled. "It's something my mom used to talk about. My old mom, I mean. She was a believer in Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours of practice theory."

Botan frowned. "Malcolm who?"

"He's writer who basically said anyone can become an expert in a field of study if they dedicate 10,000 hours to practicing," I explained, trying to give broad strokes instead of specifics (because I wasn't entirely certain if Gladwell, my former mother's favorite writer, existed in this timeline at all). "Hiei's probably logged that many hours. You haven't even been trying to fight for a year." Patting her shoulder, I said, "Give yourself time."

"I have been giving myself time," said Botan in swift protest. "It just seems like I've made no progress at all!"

"But is that really true?" I countered, trying to combat anxiety with a cold ice water bath of sheer logic. "Do you really think you're exactly the same as you were when you first started training?"

"Well… no." It took Botan a while to admit as such, and she didn't look any happier for the effort. "I have grown. But I'm still not where I want to be, either."

Invalidating her feelings wasn't going to help, so I didn't bother telling her she was wrong. I just reached out and patted her hunched shoulder, trying my damndest to radiate understanding.

"You'll catch up, Botan," I told her. "And hey—even if you don't catch up, that's OK, too."

She stared at me like I'd presented her with a dead rat on a silver platter. Coughing into a fist, I soldiered on, trying to salvage the moment and not let this moment become a stepped-upon rake.

"So long as you feel like you're doing something worthwhile for yourself, it's worth the effort, even if you don't get to Hiei's level," I said in a rush. "We're not all built the same, and our goals don't need to be the same, either." When her eyes lit up in sudden understanding instead of skepticism, I pressed on, encouraged. "Maybe you're meant to learn techniques that aren't the same as Hiei's. Maybe his are just a jumping-off point for you. And if you learn that that's the case, you'll course-correct, and you'll kick ass at whatever you try next." Patting her shoulder again, I said, "In the meantime, keep putting in the work, Botan. No matter what happens, at least you can say you tried."

She didn't offer me any dead-rat looks that time, instead just gazing forward at the still-practicing Hiei in contemplation. Her stare lasted for quite a while—long enough that I began to suspect the conversation was over. But no sooner had I picked up my notebook than did she glance in my direction, blue brows lifted high upon her sweat-streaked forehead.

"And you, Keiko?" she said—unfairly gorgeous despite her bedraggled hair and exertion-flushed face. "What have you put 10,000 hours into?"

Sunlight dappled the back of my neck like a spread of heartfelt fingerprints. I looped my forefinger into the spiral of my notebook, staring at its cover in silence. The front of the notebook was plain. Inside, all but the last few pages had been filled, each covered in the spidery handwriting I'd developed in this life as Yukimura Keiko. Quite a lot of words, there, and even more in the notebooks stashed beneath my bed at home. Not nearly as many as I'd filled in my old life, but… it was a start. Or at least that's what I told myself.

"I don't think I'm an expert at anything just yet," I admitted eventually. "I've probably put the most hours into my writing, but…" I shook my head, finger slipping deeper into the spiral of my notebook, rings of metal cutting and cold. "If there's one thing I've learned in my two lives, it's that you never stop learning—never."

Botan didn't reply. Hiei called for her before she could say anything else. But when I saw her again a few days later, running into her when I dropped off a load of Yusuke's laundry, bruises ion the shape of a bamboo sword decorated the skin of her upper arm. A cut marred her silky cheek, leaves tangled in her hair as she chugged a protein shake in the kitchen. I caught her eye as I passed, stopping to give her a concerned once-over, but Botan didn't shy away from my stare. She just grinned, a look of unabashed satisfaction she wore with obvious pride.

"Hi Keiko," was all she said. "How are you?"

"Oh, fine." Another once-over, this one more pointed than the first. "You doing all right?"

"Oh, you know," she said with a shrug—and then she grinned. "Just putting in the work. That's all."

And indeed, it appeared she was.

The next time I saw Hiei, he, too, bore the faintest of scratches across one cheek.

The "10,000 Hours of Practice" theory has been debunked statistically, but mostly post-the time NQK is supposed to have died. Either way, it's still something my mother says to me a lot, so of course I'd bring it up to comfort a newbie who's stressing over a perceived lack of progress. It's rare to be good at something without practicing first; try not to compare yourself to The Greats when you're just starting out. We all had to start somewhere. Tough to keep that in mind sometimes, though. At least it is for me, anyway.

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