Princess of the Leaves

Chapter Four

Kakashi stood at the end of all things, talking to a rock.

"God, that's melodramatic," he said to the rock. "But what else is new? Besides the genin team I'm stuck with. I told you about that, right? It looks like they might stick around, despite my best efforts. Passed the bell test and everything."

Passed on a technicality, if he was being honest. His last two teams had failed the test completely, working alone or even against each other until the time ran out, and that had been simple. The current batch had figured out the rules of his game and played by them. He couldn't really fail them for being smart, but that left him unsure of what they were made of. On a real mission there wouldn't be any rules, just individual selfishness and ego. He wouldn't know until it was too late whether they would rely on themselves and die or on each other.

"I don't honestly know what to make of them. About only ... ninety percent trash? About where we were at that age. The little Uchiha boy's a walking clan cliché. He couldn't be less like you if he tried. Then there's Sensei's kid, and he couldn't be less like him either. And the Sheikah girl is ..."

He didn't know what to make of her. Too smart for her own good, mostly. The Sheikah clan had stopped coming around about a decade ago, and even before that Kakashi had never really known any of them. They tended toward mysticism and kind of a zen way of thinking. And genjustu. Zelda hadn't used any the day before, but she had seen through his illusions easily enough.

"... there," he finished.

Obito's name on the memorial stone made no response. Well, that's what happens when you talk to a rock all morning.

"Honestly, I don't know what old Sarutobi was thinking, giving me a genin team. I've been giving him empirical evidence that I'm unreliable for years, so you'd think he'd catch on by now. I can do missions fine, but ..." But this wasn't just a mission. Missions were easy. You went in, did the job, and got out. But being a sensei? That was commitment. It was the difference between a one night stand and getting married, which ... probably wasn't a metaphor he should use around children. Still, though, he'd be stuck with them for the rest of their lives.

Which, knowing his luck, would be about a year. Maybe two.

That didn't make him feel any better.

WWW

"What's taking him so long?" Naruto complained.

There was nothing Zelda could say that she hadn't said already. The man's tardiness was deliberate, she was sure, hopefully to teach them patience, and with every complaint Naruto demonstrated his need for such a lesson. Time controlled him on an emotional level, and would continue to do so until he mastered himself.

The other possibility was that Kakashi was late to demonstrate his power over them, proving that he could make them wait upon his leisure and his whims. Humility was invaluable for a student, but even more important for a teacher, and if their sensei had failed to master his pride then well, that boded ill.

Or maybe neither answer was correct. Maybe Kakashi was waiting to ambush them to teach them situational awareness.

None of these solutions satisfied Naruto. He paced the training ground, kicked at stones, ripped up stalks of grass, not seeking an answer to a question but an expression to his frustration.

Sasuke coped with their situation little better, but at least he coped silently. It would have been easy for him to lash out at whatever drew his attention, namely Naruto, but instead Sasuke seemed to allow him to voice the discontent they shared.

"I swear," Naruto said, "when he gets here I'm going to punch him in his stupid—"

"Hey kids," Kakashi said brightly, nearly two hours after the appointed meeting time.

Naruto spun around and pointed a finger. "You! You kept us waiting here all morning! What gives?"

"Yeah, sorry about that. I got stuck in traffic."

Naruto stared at him. "You ... you can run on rooftops. How did you get stuck in traffic?"

Kakashi nodded. "Yeah, you'd think that wouldn't be an issue." He clapped his hands together. "So! Who's ready for your first ever mission?"

Naruto's eyes grew wide, and in an instant all of his irritation and displeasure vanished. "A-a mission? Yes! What are we doing? Espionage? Protection detail? Assassination?"

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It was to weed a field. The rice paddies were flooded and drained periodically throughout the season, and when they were drained workers needed to keep the weeds down. Their first D-rank mission was to travel to the outskirts of the village and provide that labor. She adopted her Sheikah form for the mission. Her Sheikah fingers were more callused than her Hylian ones and, just as important, the mud would wash out of the muted blues and greys of her tights than they would the pinks of her dress.

She tried not to see the mission as a waste of time. All experiences had value, and if the time spent weeding a field taught her patience and humility and helped her better understand farmers and common laborers, then this was time well spent.

At the end of the day she was happy to be done with it all the same, and with an extra fifteen hundred ryo in her pocket (not nearly as much as it sounded like), Zelda made her way to the village archives. She remembered going there once on a field trip, walking a few buildings south of the Hokage's tower, and seeing the countless jutsu scrolls that were stored within its walls.

At least, the ones that were common enough to be shared.

The archivist was a man who had reached his middle age at least twenty years early. His body was thin and grey, his hair was thinner and greyer, and he carried a glass eye in his right eye socket. Most striking was the jagged scar that traveled from his jawline down his juglar to his collarbone. How he had managed to survive a wound like that without bleeding out was a mystery as great as any hidden in the building's scrolls.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Masashi," she said, back in her Hylian form. "I would like to access the D-rank jutsu scrolls, please."

His good eye looked her up and down while his other eye stared straight ahead. "ID?" he asked, his voice soft and raspy. Zelda handed him her card. It was half the size of a playing card and bore her name, image, and rank, and looked ridiculously easy to fake. Still Masashi took it and studied it, resting his head in his hand while tapping his finger against his fake eye.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

Hypnotically disturbing. The man was truly an artist of the macabre.

"It says you just graduated last week."

"I did."

He grunted and stood up. "Well, congrats. This way." He led her down the hall to a locked door. Not sealed, like the door to the C-Rank jutsu scrolls. It could be opened with a key of brass instead of blood. "You can't take anything out of here, but you can copy anything you like."

Zelda looked up at the scroll cases along the walls with their criss-crossed shelves. She had always preferred books, lined up, backs straight, like little paper soldiers at attention. "How are they organized?"

"Ninjutsu over there, genjutsu over there, taijutsu in the middle."

Her face paled. Was that it? Were the scrolls just separated into piles? That was ... far less than the organization system she had hoped to find. "What if you wish to find a certain one?"

He smirked. "Go through 'em. One at a time. Anti-theft system. Want one in particular? Gotta carry off the whole room."

"Is theft a problem?"

He shook his head. "For D-rank jutsu? Nah. Most genin go to their sensei's or clans for jutsu. You got either of those?"

"Yes. Hatake Kakashi."

His good eye widened. "The copy ninja? Whaddaya doing here? That man knows more jutsu than these archives ten times over!"

Copy-nin? A curious epithet. "His time is limited, and he focuses on team building exercises when present, and leaves us time to direct our own personal studies." That was one of the more polite explanations she could have given. "Is he that well known?"

Masashi grinned. "It's the worst thing that can happen to a shinobi, becoming famous, but that man's got an endless bag o' tricks that can't be beat. Trained by the Fourth himself, you know."

That got her attention. "You don't say." The Fourth Hokage had both succeeded and preceded the Third, and he had died defeating an invading demon. Zelda knew personally what such a creature could do to a village—or a kingdom—but the battle itself had become shrouded in myth long before her arrival. The academy history books had spent pages describing how the demon fox could demolish mountains or cause tidal waves with a swing from one of its nine tails, but told her nothing of how the Fourth had beaten it. Did he wield a divine weapon? Know a forbidden jutsu? Or was he just exceptionally skilled at punching demons?

The academy instructors had been equally unhelpful, only saying that the details wouldn't be on any test. As if they knew what tests time would impose upon her. That Zelda should be assigned to one of the last living remnants of his legacy, though, was neither chance nor an opportunity she could ignore.

"Yup," Masashi said. "He's got a lot to live up to." He winked at her. "So do you, I 'spose. Anything else?"

"Yes," she said before he left. "Do these archives carry histories too, or just jutsu scrolls?"

He stared at her. "History? Didn't they cover that at the academy?"

No, she thought. They covered children's stories. Enough to give the children a sense of identity and national pride, while hiding the village's past mistakes that might have lent them wisdom. But there were always two histories, the one the kingdom taught and the one the kingdom hid.

How many people still know what the civil war was all about?

She shook away that thought. She wasn't in Hyrule anymore, nor was she still the daughter of the king. She was an orphan kunoichi, trying to make a place for herself.

"They covered the basics," she said. "But I'd like to move on from basic history just as I can now move on from basic jutsu. I ... am not from here. The Sheikah Clan is not based in Konoha, and I would like to know more about the village I am living in."

Masashi frowned thoughtfully. "The Sheikah Clan. Where is that again?"

"In Hyrule." She saw no sign of recognition in the man's eyes. "You may have heard of it under the name the Land of Light?" All of the Elemental Nations shared a naming pattern, and at some point Hyrule had been adopted into it.

"I'll have to check a map sometime."

He wouldn't find it, but Zelda had no wish to entangle herself in explaining her homeland. Early on she had told her friends that ancient magic made it difficult and dangerous to reach her home, and the other children had laughed at her because they couldn't understand. Later on she had tacked on some meaningless jargon about space-time ninjutsu, and the other children had pretended to understand, even though they didn't.

"So, are there archived historical records?"

He shook his head. "Not that the village keeps. We like to keep things oral around here, gives us a reason to keep the old folks around. Some of the clans might hoard old letters and documents, but that's more of a matter of not bothering to throw them away than saving them."

She had no clan, so that wouldn't help her at all, but she doubted that she would get much more here.

"Thank you, Masashi," she said. "You have been most helpful."

WWW

The next morning Zelda found her team in the same training ground they had met the day before, practically in the same positions. And, like the day before, there was no sign of their sensei.

They had arrived early, she noted, expecting Kakashi to make up for his earlier lateness, but that assumed that their sensei would see something shameful or regrettable in his own behavior. Even more presumptuous was the idea that Kakashi would apologize to them, even nonverbally. No. Either Kakashi was late because he was indifferent to their wishes, or because he wanted to teach them something.

Zelda was honestly not sure which, but she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and if she was wrong, this benefited her all the same. He had given her time, and she would use it.

"Do you think it strange," she said as she approached them in her Sheikah form, "that our sensei would have us meet on a training ground when he doesn't intend to arrive until it's time for our mission? He might as well meet us at the Hokage's tower."

Naruto glanced up at her. "He might get here in time to teach us something." He spoke in a tone that suggested that accidents happened to everyone. "I mean, he did promise to push us so hard we puked, and I'm gonna hold him to that."

"He was lying," Sasuke said. "He just said that to trick us into skipping breakfast."

"I'm still going to make him make me puke!" Naruto snapped. "Watch me!"

"I'd rather not."

"Perhaps we should consider his implicit orders instead of his explicit ones," Zelda suggested.

Naruto stared at her. "What?"

"Kakashi-sensei told us explicitly to arrive here at nine in the morning for team training exercises," Zelda explained. "But I believe he implied that we were to do so without him."

"Makes sense," Sasuke said. He stood up. "I'll be on the other side of those two trees. You two can divide the rest of the training ground however you like until Kakashi shows up."

"Sasuke," Zelda said gently. "I believe he wished for us to train together. You know how much he emphasized teamwork during the bell test."

Sasuke shot her a glare, and Zelda flinched despite herself. She understood why so many girls liked him. It wasn't his appearance, but his intensity, frightening and hypnotic like staring into an abyss. But Zelda prided herself on her survival instinct when it came to flirting with danger.

"I'll be ready to do my job when he's ready to do his," Sasuke said, and with the air of a boy who had never needed to appease or cajole a superior, or had ever even recognized a superior, he strode off into his solitude.

"I'll train with you!" Naruto offered.

Zelda turned to him and smiled. "Thank you, Naruto, I appreciate that." They would need to include Sasuke eventually. They wouldn't be a team until all three, no, all four were together, but it began with two.

"So how do you wanna do this?" he asked. "Do we, like, spar or something?" He sounded uncomfortable with his own suggestion. Sparring wasn't supposed to be competitive but it often was, and the winner was often whoever held back the least. Naruto didn't want to lose to her, but neither did he want to hurt her.

"Would you be willing to help me practice a new jutsu?" she asked. "It's a genjutsu, which I can't practice on my own, and it will give you the chance to practice recognizing and resisting illusions."

"A new jutsu? Awesome! Where'd you learn it? Is it cool?"

"It's quite basic," she admitted. She sat down on the grass in front of him. "I copied it from the village archives."

He blinked. "What's that?"

"The ... archives? You've been there before a year ago. I saw you."

"Hmm ..." He shook his head. "Not ringing any bells."

"You knocked over a scroll case and the archivist yelled at you? He called you a ... well, he called you something unrepeatable?"

Naruto frowned helplessly. "Nope. I think you must be thinking of someone else."

"Well, that doesn't matter. There are three main ways to counter genjutsu. First, you ignore it. You recognize that what you are seeing, hearing, or feeling isn't real, and you focus on what is. If I create an illusionary wall, you don't need to dispel the genjutsu to walk through it."

He nodded. "Close my eyes, charge blindly ahead. Got it."

"The other two methods follow the same principles. Wake up. Ending a genjutsu is like ending a dream. Shake the dreamer or harm the dreamer, and he wakes up."

"So I can just, like, stab myself and I'll stop seeing things?"

"Yes, but in practice it's more complicated. If you hurt yourself too much, you won't be able to keep fighting, and if you hurt yourself too little, the dream holds firm. It's easier if you focus on the pain, but we've been trained to ignore it in combat, which you will need to unlearn."

He stared ahead blankly. "Huh."

He wasn't getting it, but she suspected that he would learn better through practice than by lecture. "But I'd rather you not deliberately hurt yourself. Just focus on disrupting your own chakra flow until you throw off the illusion."

"Okay, just like ..." He formed a hand seal and furrowed his brow in concentration. "... that?"

"We will see. Are you ready?"

"Uh, okay. Yeah, hit me!"

Zelda formed a series of hand seals and performed the ghost touch technique. She knew a few techniques to transmit sight and sound, and including touch to that would add a whole other dimension.

"Wow!" Naruto said as he began to squirm. "Ah! Ugh."

That was ... something. "What do you feel?"

"Itchy. Really itchy, all over." He made a hand seal and concentrated, then scowled and scratched himself vigorously. "Okay, that chakra disruption thingy is not working. How am I supposed to shake off this genjutsu when I'm too itchy to focus?"

"Mental discipline and focus, I assume." She had done something wrong. The ghost touch technique was, as the name implied, supposed to make the target feel like an unseen hand was touching them. The sensation of being tapped on the shoulder or grabbed could prove to be a useful distraction, but a full body itch was just annoying.

"Urgh!" he grunted. "I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing."

Maybe if she focused the effect on a single part of the target instead of the target as a whole? She intended to only affect one part of him, but intent and will were two different things. "A jolt. More like a whip and less like a bludgeon." But words alone were not enough. Zelda reached out and touched him by the shoulder, focused her own chakra, and ...

"Woah!" He shuddered. "That was just freaky. Do it again!"

"Ideally you should be able to do that to yourself," she said. There was something ... off about Naruto's chakra, like slapping the surface of a vast lake. But everyone's chakra felt different, and she moved on. "Experiment until you find a method that works for you. Picture something sudden and sharp, like jumping into a winter lake and feeling your body go numb from the cold, or touching a flame and pulling back, even as the heat forms a blister on your hand. Or perhaps you simply fall out of bed. If you visualize it in your mind hard enough, you should be able to feel it in your body, and your chakra network, tethered between them, should follow."

He nodded, a serious expression on his face, and he closed his eyes. For a moment there was only the arhythmic sound of his breathing, then he opened them again. "Okay, I got it! Hit me again!"

It wasn't quick and it wasn't easy, but by the time Kakashi arrived on the training ground, both of them had made progress.

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The next day instead of sitting and waiting for the time to pass, Naruto was up and anxiously awaiting Zelda's arrival, more enthusiastically than he had once awaited Kakashi's. "Alright!" he said. "It's my turn, so prepare yourself. We're going on an escort mission!" He formed a hand seal, and a shadow clone poofed into existence. "Your job is to get this guy from one end of the training ground to the other while nefarious forces, namely me, are going to do everything in my power to stop you."

Zelda bit back a smile. Naruto had come up with not just a game, but a game with direct applications to a common ninja mission. "Could you have your clone transform?" she asked. "I wouldn't want to confuse the client with the enemy."

"Right."

One jutsu later and the clone was replaced with a feeble looking old woman. "I just want to visit my grandchildren," she said, her voice trembling. "Won't you kind, brave kunoichi protect me from this ruffian?"

"Ruffian?" Naruto repeated. "I'll show you a ruffian when I punch you in the face, you old hag!"

"Oh dear," the old woman said, hobbling behind Zelda. "This isn't how I hoped things would go at all."

He had put a great deal of thought into this and had planned it out well. The end result was practical, rather silly, and completely him. There was only one last thing to add before they began. She spotted Sasuke on the other side of the training ground, practicing shuriken throwing. Curved shots, it seemed, aiming around one tree to a blocked target behind it. "Sasuke," she said, "would you be willing to join us?"

Sasuke glanced their way, but Naruto was the one to speak first. "What?" he said. "What do you want him for?"

Because he's part of the team. Kakashi, she hoped, would be more willing to help a team than three individuals. And even in the short term, they'd be better off being able to work together than having more practice working apart. "Numbers matter in some situations more than others. Espionage, for example, is better accomplished by one ninja rather than a large group. A second equally skilled spy doubles the risk of exposure, but does not significantly increase the chance of success."

"Oh, right, the Inverse Ninja Law?"

Zelda stopped. "The what?"

"You know, the Inverse Ninja Law. Or am I getting it mixed up with the Conservation of Ninjutsu?"

"I ... I'm not familiar with those terms, but call it whatever you like."

Naruto shook his head. "No, wait, the Conservation one was when you use the same ninjutsu so many times, the bad guys figure out how to beat it. Nevermind, go on."

Huh. "Anyway, if the mission expects direct combat, then the opposite is true. More numbers means more strength. Escort missions are even more dependent on numbers, because you need to divide your strength to protect your target from every angle from every hour of the day. For this to be any sort of challenge, the attacker would have to accept a severe handicap or ..." She glanced toward Sasuke. "Be outnumbered."

She wasn't pressuring Sasuke. If she pushed him, he would only push back, but if she only invited him there was the chance that he would ...

Sasuke sauntered over to them. "Why not? I'm stuck here anyway until Kakashi arrives. But I'm on offense."

"Oh, sure," Naruto said. "Taking the fun job. Well I didn't want to murder an old lady anyway."

They took their positions, Zelda and Naruto with the client and Sasuke hidden somewhere in the trees. They failed to protect their client, but they made Sasuke work for it. There was nowhere Sasuke could hide that Zelda couldn't find him, and Naruto had more shadow clones to serve as human shields than Sasuke had shuriken to throw. But after he used an advanced fire style ninjutsu that they could not block and their client could not dodge, the game was over.

Afterwards Sasuke joined Zelda on defense in order to show them how it was done, but again they failed to protect the client. They could only be in two places at onces, and Naruto's clones attacked from every angle.

Finally, to make sure that everyone had a turn, Sasuke and Naruto played defense while Zelda was the assassin. By now both of them had failed once, and they had both learned from their failure. Naruto's shadow clones disguised themselves as the target, and Sasuke went on the hunt, forcing Zelda to run and hide whenever she revealed her position. She had managed to eliminate five of the decoys before she was forced to surrender.

She could have deduced which was the target and which were decoys ... but they, she decided, needed the win more than she did.

"Yes! Yes!" Naruto yelled out, punching the air. "We did it!" He turned and offered Sasuke a high five. Sasuke left him hanging, but Zelda was half sure that the corners of his mouth turned upward, just a little bit.

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A/n It has been a long time since I updated this story, and I think I rewrote it more than any other of my recent projects. I started out by going straight into the Bridgebuilder Arc, but it didn't feel right. Naruto is the sort of protagonist that could stumble blindly from one plotline to another, but not Zelda. Also I wanted to expand the setting a bit more.

On a side note, I love Kakashi as a character, but if I had a teacher who showed up late to class every day and spent the whole time reading porn, I'd be pretty disappointed. Especially if I was expecting to learn ninja magic.

Anyway, I'd like to thank my editor Exiled Immortal, Yotam Bonneh for requesting that I continue this story in particular, and the rest of my Patrons, Prime 2.0, Sphinxes, Kelsey Bull, Hubris Prime, Apofatix, Janember, and Svistka.