"Your student and her friends are batshit."
He raises an eyebrow at his former teammate. She doesn't appear to be drunk. He does smell sake, though.
"What did they do this time? Did they, by chance, catch Uchiha-ku on fire again? Bust a drug trafficking operation? Throw a wildly out-of-control party?"
"What, no—they throw parties?"
"Indeed. You would fit right in. I do not recommend challenging Honōka-kun at the gambling table. She always wins."
"Apparently she always wins at fist fights too."
"Fist fights?" he narrows his eyes. "That is news to me." He doesn't ask after his student's condition—she won. Obviously. Tsunade would be leading this conversation with any significant injuries she may have incurred, had they occurred.
"She kicked the shit out of Uchiha Obito—apparently because he was 'shit at fighting'. She was still spitting mad when I treated their minor wounds. Dislocated shoulder for the Uchiha brat—and some kind of soapy residue in Honōka's eyes. The Uchiha brat fights dirty."
He chuckles. Oh, to be brought low by one's own creations. He knows the feeling.
"Why are you telling me this, Tsunade? This is hardly the most problematic behavior you have seen from young shinobi."
"She dislocated the boy's shoulder and cracked several of his ribs. From an armbar. She's strong, and she'll beat her friends half to death to get it through their heads that they are not—and that they'll get themselves killed in a real fight. Does that sound 'calm and collected' to you?"
He frowns. He hates it when she throws his words back at him.
"I hate to tell you, but your kid's got a temper and a few screws lose. Uchiha Obito's not much better—he called it 'pushing Honōka's buttons', like it's a game. The other two—Nohara Rin and Might Guy? Jury's still out on them. They at least looked a little ashamed.
"But back to the 'pushing Honōka's buttons' part. He temporarily blinded her and she kept fighting—acted like it didn't even faze her. He goaded her into fighting at a disadvantage, Orochimaru, and she kept. On. Fighting. If someone does that to her on the battlefield, she'll die."
"Or, she will win."
"Is that a chance you're willing to take?"
He leans against the back wall in Tsunade's office. They're supposed to be discussing his student's piece-of-shit father, not the shenanigans his precious student gets up to when his back is turned.
"Honōka-kun has a fragile, unassuming appearance. An appearance she carefully tweaks from person to person. She uses it to protect herself, to disguise herself. And, she knows what she is underneath it—knows how she affects people." A self-awareness he did not have at her age, unfortunately.
Tsunade looks troubled by his words. She hasn't quite reached the biting her nails stage, but she's close.
"And I suppose you've seen what's underneath? She's shown you, at least?"
He lets out a short bark of laughter.
"Heavens no—not even a glimpse!"
That does not assuage Tsunade's nerves in the least. If anything, she looks alarmed.
"I am trusting my gut instinct here, as Jiraiya would say, and it is telling me my student has claws she likes to sharpen in plain sight. Someday, we'll both look back and wonder how we missed it."
He tracks down his student after his conversation with Tsunade concludes, or she tracks him down. She appears in a very casual shunshin at his side.
"Did Tsunade-san tell on me?"
He attempts to feel stern. By the quirk of Honōka's lips, he guesses his general amusement with the entire situation is what she actually picks up.
"Why? Is there something that should be told on?" he feints. It works.
She frowns, probably wondering if he really is just in a good mood and hasn't been informed of her latest misbehavior yet.
"I think she did." Honōka says. "You started looking for me after you left the hospital."
Now it's his turn to frown. That's rather… unexpected.
"Honōka-kun, are you keeping tabs on your sensei?"
He just knows she's about to do it.
'So-so.'
He sighs.
"Please do explain?"
"I think, maybe, most shinobi have some chakra sensitivity?"
"This is true."
"So everyone's a sensor—just not in the same way that I am."
"An argument that can indeed be made." He says.
"So, when you want to find me, specifically me, your chakra does this weird thing."
He stops her. "My chakra or my emotions?" because he's fairly certain they've established that her sensor ability is a chakra enhanced emotion detector. Distance dampens it. Obstacles hinder it. The person being within eyesight or possibly hearing distance significantly enhances it.
"Hm. Both. You're looking for me, wanting to find me, so your chakra kind of fans out, maybe? And when it's close enough to mine, they brush and I get this feeling like, 'oh, Sensei's looking for me'."
He tries to break that down in his head. Honōka looks at him expectantly. He musters his patience.
"Issue number one: I did not flare my chakra at all—that is a technique to attract the attention of, ideally, friendly sensor-nin. In fact, I deliberately suppress my chakra signature down to the absolute minimum at all times. I am typically a very difficult presence for even skilled sensor types to track.
"Issue number two: You are proposing that my emotional desire to find you was urgent enough that it crossed a considerably large distance to interact with your sensory-field—which, might I remind you, roughly two hundred meters, barring particularly intense emotions like killing intent and blood lust. My interest in finding you was meandering somewhere in a long list of things that needed to happen in the next four hours, at best."
"Addressing issue number one." Honōka begins. She skips to keep up with his walking pace. "Chakra is an energy that flows through the body. It also exists in most everything, living and non-living. However, chakra from an individual person is unique. Clan members are noticeably more similar, but still unique. This is how skilled sensor-nin are able to differentiate between friend and foe."
"And where did you learn that?" he asks. He has a sneaking suspicion he knows.
She shoots him a look—one that she learned from him!—for interrupting.
"Minato let me borrow a book Jiraiya-san gave to him, which he technically borrowed but didn't return to Hokage-sama, who inherited said book from the Second Hokage."
Typical Jiraiya. He waves for her to continue.
"Right, still issue number one." She finds her train of thought again. "So, chakra is unique to the individual. And, a sensor-nin has a sensory-field, like you already mentioned. Since everyone is technically a sensor, everyone has a sensory-field. What happened wasn't our chakra interacting, but my sensory-field and your sensory-field overlapping."
"Hypothetically?"
"Hypothetically."
"And issue number two?"
"Right, issue number two… Tsunade asked me why I never turn off my sensor ability. I thought about it, and I think I'm already constantly suppressing it down to its lowest possible setting. Intense emotions still get through. When I dislocated Obito's shoulder, I felt his pain, and it broke me out of the fit I was in. The other exception is people I'm familiar with. If I look for my friends, it doesn't seem to matter where they are—granted, I haven't tried with anybody outside of Konoha. Yet."
Yet, indeed. He boxes up the casual mention of the mere possibility that her current ability is the lowest possible setting and focuses on more important things.
"This 'fit' you were in. You caused your friend pain, and you felt it as though it were your own? Could the anger you felt while fighting him have been his anger as well? Did he not stop feeling angry when the pain of his injury was too great to surmount?"
In which case, Orochimaru has a problem. It's one thing if his student has a slight berserker aspect, and another thing if her empathy can actively work against her while in combat with an enemy-nin.
"No. Obito was still barking mad after I dislocated his arm." She says. "He was just in too much pain to do anything about it. That's the thing about Obito—he's a ball of rage most of the time. Set him off good and he'll stay mad for days. Most of the time I just tune it out, but he called my taijutsu discipline stupid, twice."
"So, the anger you felt was justifiably your own—but the pain you felt was definitely your friend's."
She nods. "I was angry—but Obito's my best friend—er, one of my best friends. I didn't mean to hurt him like that."
Unbidden, he thinks of Jiraiya and the Ame orphans. Jiraiya was hurt by his callous suggestion back then.
"Did you apologize?"
He takes a moment to run diagnostics on his hearing, but no—Honōka did just ask him that. This must be how Minato and his student feel when she anticipates not only what they're feeling, but what they're thinking as well.
"You feel guilty-sad." She explains, as if that's the polite thing to do after very nearly giving someone a dissociative episode. "Did you fight with a friend and hurt them like I did?"
"…"
She waits for him to gather himself. He also briefly considers just ignoring her and hoping she forgets she even asked. Not likely.
"It was not a fight, but I hurt him, nonetheless."
"You didn't apologize?" she asks.
"I thought I had nothing to apologize for."
"And now you feel guilty-sad?" she says.
He sighs. "Please do not combine words to describe emotional nuances, Honōka-kun. The feeling you are trying to describe, that I am feeling right now… is called remorse."
There, he said it; he said it without spontaneously combusting or throwing up in his mouth. Eugh.
His student looks surprised—and he's preparing to scold her for looking so damned surprised that her teacher feels remorse like a normal, healthy, person.
"Sensei, I think that's the first time I've ever felt anyone feel remorse before."
He's about to rebuke her—surely someone in her life must have felt remorseful at some point—but then he remembers what her family is like and just a little killing intent leaks out.
"Are you certain I mustn't murder your father?"
"Sensei—no."