.

Obstacles don't have to stop you. If you run into a

wall, don't turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb

it, go through it, or work around it.

"I wanna be a ninja."

Maen hesitated, a brief wave of stiffness passing through the muscles in his back. When he turned away from the stove to face me his expression was pulled into an impassive mask.

"Alright," he said, a measured word, slow to pass his lips. "Any reason in particular?"

Plenty.

"I… wanna be able to protect people."

My own person was ranked chief among the general allotment of 'people', but I didn't feel the need to mention that. It wasn't that protecting my friends and family and village wasn't appealing, especially with Konoha inching its way towards feeling more like a home rather than just the place I happened to be living, but the origin of the urge was selfish in nature.

Summer was nearing. My fifth birthday had passed in a blur, as had the one-year anniversary of my coming to Konoha, and I didn't care to remember either of them, despite their significance.

But a year was a lot of time to think. The notion of becoming a ninja seated itself in me early on, once I recognized just how much danger was in my immediate future, and it hadn't faded as time wore on.

I wanted to protect myself; I didn't want to have to be reliant on those around me to do it.

Not that I doubted they could. Maen was a jonin, having been promoted in the recent months. If danger ever showed itself, I had no doubt that Shikaku would jump to my defence, as well, and he was more than capable of handling himself in a fight. By the time everything really went to hell-in-a-handbasket, Shikamaru would have come into his own, bringing the tally up to three powerful Nara who would come to my aid in a time of need. That wasn't counting any other friends I may make along the way.

While the sentiment was comforting, the idea of sitting back and crossing my fingers and trusting the people around me to do the brunt of the work didn't feel right.

I was well aware that there was nothing romantic about being a ninja, despite the bullshit that was shovelled into the open mouths of children and civilians. The morality of it was dodgy at best. Murdering, stealing, spying—wrapped up in pretty patriotic sentiments, of course, but the truth of it was undeniable.

Yet, when one looked at it out of the lens of the world, these things grew increasingly less immoral. This was a cruel word; dog-eat-dog was an apt description of the mentality held by most. If you didn't murder your adversaries, they'd kill you first. If you didn't steal from your enemies, they'd rob you first. If you didn't spy on those around you, they'd gather information on you first. You were either proactive or dead, there were no two ways about it.

The thoughts left a sour taste in my mouth, but I knew that meant they were along the right track.

I doubted I would ever take glee in killing or in inflicting pain on another. So long as I lived long enough to feel the aftermath of those acts, though, I knew that I could do it and overcome whatever challenges committing them brought me.

I would do it.

Maen watched me, breakfast sizzling on the stove behind him. "You do?" he asked. "You've never mentioned this."

"I didn't think of it until I heard Shika talking about going to the Academy."

That was a half-truth—more, I didn't think to mention it before today because I assumed I would be going to the Academy. It wasn't until I overheard Maen and Shikaku discussing the prospect of me in civilian schooling and how I was bound to mentally scar a few teachers that I realized my assumption was misplaced.

"This is a big decision," he reiterated. "Have you really thought it through?"

"'Course I have," I huffed.

"Uh huh."

"I wanna do it, I know I do."

Maen reached over across the counter and picked up a towel. He rubbed his hands dry with it, buying himself a second to think my words over. His neutral expression remained intact.

"Alright," he conceded. "We'll get you signed up for the Academy next month."

I smiled. "Thanks."

Well, that was easy.

He nodded. "We've gotta go by the hospital, then, and get your medical records updated. In the meantime, I'm going get you started on your physical training—oh, and I'm going to get Yoshino to increase the pace of your reading lessons."

I groaned at that, and the grin I received in return was borderline sadistic. "Physical training?"

"Running laps, learning kata, running laps, doing pushups, running laps, doing sit ups—did I mention running laps?"

"You're cruel."

He shrugged and turned back to finish making dinner, but didn't deny the statement.

The table shook as my forehead dropped onto it.

The medic pressed the piece of wood against my tongue and hummed to himself, staring down into the depths of my throat. I fidgeted on the edge of the hospital bed. In an attempt tried to distract and avoid making awkward eye contact with the teenager, I averted my gaze up to the blank white ceilings.

"Say 'ah'," the medic said.

"Ahh."

The flashlight flicked on and off a couple of times before he was satisfied. He removed the stick and took a step back, slipping the flashlight into his back pocket. He reached over and picked up the clipboard to jot down a few notes, intermittently tapping the end of the pen against his lip in thought.

"So?" Maen asked from his spot in the corner.

The medic flicked his eyes—which were a lovely shade of blue—over to Maen. "Everything's peachy."

"How about her coils?"

"Ah," he said, shifting to set the clipboard down at the foot of the bed. "They're still inactive."

Maen frowned. "Damn."

"I'd suggest activating them now," he said. "She's going to have a headache and a touch of nausea for a couple of days following it, just while her body adjusts, so it'll probably better to get it out of the way now."

"I was planning on it."

"Uh, what?" I asked.

At my intervention, both of them turned to look at me.

The medic gave a little laugh. "Do you know what chakra is?"

"Kinda."

"Well, you see, everybody has spiritual and physical energy that makes up their chakra. It moves all through our body in these things called pathways," he explained. He poked a finger against my chest and then dragged it up to my shoulder, down through my arm, and ended at the tips of my fingers. "Our body is always making more chakra and keeping it flowing through the pathways."

The medic paused. He moved his head to look at Maen, his expression uncertain. Maen gave him a nod.

Somewhat annoyed at being brushed off, I said, "I get it."

"Good. Okay, so there is a minimum amount of chakra that your body needs moving through it to keep it alive. If somebody is only producing that minimum amount of chakra, without creating excess, then their pathways are considered 'inactive'. People who have inactive pathways can't use their chakra for anything—no jutsu, no cool super strength, nothing. That's what your body is doing right now."

As he talked, the medic rummaged around the room. He rolled his chair back to get at a cabinet off to the side and pulled out a fresh pair of white gloves to snap on.

"Having 'active' pathways means that your body is using more than the minimum amount of chakra in their pathways and can produce excess chakra. People with active pathways are able to learn how to perform jutsu and make use of their chakra. If people do start using chakra, more than just what their body uses in their pathways, that's when they'll begin developing what are known as reserves—extra chakra that their body stores for them."

I mulled over the information, trying to apply it to what little I knew about chakra from the show. "So, like… ninja are the ones who have the reserves, right?"

"That's right."

"Huh." A thought occurred to me. "Wait, do all the other Academy students have to get this done?"

"Not quite. It's, ah… complicated. You see, there are a few ways somebody's pathways can open up. Any kunoichi will give birth to children with active pathways, 'cause chakra reserves are stored in the belly right by where the fetus sits in the womb, and the exposure to chakra opens the pathways," he explained, gesturing to the rough areas on his own body as he spoke. "Civilians who have active pathways are able to pass it on biologically, too, but it doesn't happen that often."

He leaned back into his chair and tilted his head, a finger raised to his chin. "It's also possible for you to open it up on your own if you spend enough time trying to use your chakra, sorta like working a muscle." He gave a shrug. "The ones who have to come in and have them activated manually are in the same boat as you—just didn't have any of the above happen."

"Oh."

He grinned. It made him look young, even more than he already did. He couldn't be older than sixteen or seventeen. "Interesting stuff, yeah?"

I nodded. "Do I get to learn 'bout this in the Academy?"

"A little," he said. "You get an intro to the basics of chakra in your first year. You'll get a bit more in-depth stuff in the second and third year."

"Cool."

The medic scribbled a few more things down as he shuffled his chair closer to where I was. He parked it in front of me and set the clipboard back down at my side.

"Alright. To activate your chakra pathways, I need to use a bit of my own chakra to kickstart them," he said. The medic stood from his chair and smiled down at me. "This'll only take a second. When I activate your paths, you're going to feel some tingling. You might feel some pressure, too, like somebody giving you a really tight hug—don't panic if you do, okay? Just relax and all of it will be over in a minute."

"Okay."

His palm was warm as he pressed it against atop my head.

There was nothing, for a second. Then the warmth increased and the tingling he mentioned blossomed out, down from my scalp to the centre of my forehead, to my throat, and branched out from there to the rest of my body. It was an almost pleasant sensation—until it hit the end of its path, the tips of my toes, where my body met my shadow, brought to life by the afternoon sun.

Like a switch had been flipped the world around me exploded in feeling. There were things and sensations and noises around me, an overload of stuff, of fuzz, of heat.

My fingers curled around the edge of the bed as if to brace myself against the onslaught. Eyes wide, my gaze shot around the room, trying to comprehend what I could see was there, what I could feel was there. Tears burned in the corners of my eyes. My mouth opened in a silent scream as my entire body seized up in panic, ice cold all through and white hot at the end of each nerve.

What the hell?

What the hell?

All of it burned my skin and my eyes, my mind and my soul.

So much, so fast. Colours and… and that stuff, what is that stuff?

Hands were pressed against my shoulders. My gaze jerked forward to look at Maen. His lips were moving but the words were lost on me, drowned out along with the rest of the world out by the ringing my ears. His brows were furrowed together and while his face was composed, his grip on my shoulders was shaky.

His face was there, he was there, but there was something else as well, a brightness, like a surge of sunlight that was imposed over his visage. The light pulsed and ebbed.

The edges of my vision began to grey.

There was one comprehensible thought in my mind amid the panic. "It… it hurts…"

His face tightened. He turned and directed a handful of words at somebody else—the medic, who was stood by the door with a stricken expression. The medic looked to Maen, paused, then nodded and bolted from the room.

Even though I couldn't see where the medic was going, I could feel the shift in the world around me as he ran through the hospital.

Spots danced over my vision. My breath started to come in gasps as I felt my consciousness start to fade, my body shutting down underneath the weight of the heightened awareness I was experiencing. The grey curled in, overtaking more of my vision with each second that ticked by.

Maen's gaze moved downward and his eyes widened. The last thing I saw was the brief flash of horror that marred his features before everything faded to black and my body went limp.

.

.

Maen leant back in the uncomfortable plastic chair and took a drag from his cigarette, his head settled against the bleached white walls.

He figured smoking was prohibited in the hospital, but he wasn't in any mood to care.

He'd been there for three hours, sitting and waiting in front of Kasumi's hospital room, stuck stewing on the situation. There was nothing he could do to help. The medics were in there, trying to work out what happened; he had his own suspicions, which didn't match up with what the medics had told him an hour prior, but he didn't think voicing them would be productive. He wasn't a medic, after all. He could think they were wrong all he wanted but that didn't make him right.

He heaved a sigh.

"You're definitely not supposed to be doing that."

Maen turned towards the voice of his cousin, whose eyes were on the cigarette. "You think anybody has the guts to try and tell me that?" he asked.

"With a look on your face like that? Not a chance." Shikaku strolled forward, hands in his pockets. The closer he got, the easier it was for Maen to pick out the hints of tension that were threaded through his body, pinching his face and tightening his shoulders. "What happened? The chunin you sent didn't give me any details."

"The medic activated her pathways and she freaked—panicked, said… said it 'hurt'."

Those were words he didn't think he could ever forget. The look on her face, the tremble in her voice, they were burned into his mind.

He never wanted to see or hear her say that ever again—he wouldn't, not so long as he lived and had anything to say about it. Nara may have their lazy reputation and fulfil it well, but everybody knew that the second a Nara got motivated, they were a force to be reckoned with. There was a reason that it was a Nara who held the title of youngest acting Jonin Commander, and the laziest of them all, to boot.

"Do they know why?"

"They think she's hypersensitive to chakra," Maen said. "The second her yin chakra kicked in the sensitivity did too, and her body had a negative reaction to its own chakra."

"You don't believe them?" Shikaku asked, catching the unsaid implication.

Maen shook his head. "No. I think she might be a sensor."

Shikaku's eyebrows shot up. "Why?"

"She… it was like she was looking at everything. Her eyes were moving like crazy and her pupils were dilated. She wasn't just feeling something, she was seeing something."

Shikaku exhaled through his nose, a slow release of air. "What else aren't you telling me?" he asked. "You and I both know a civilian can't be born a sensor."

"Remember that odd invisibility bloodline that the ninja who killed her parents had?"

There was a beat of silence.

Shikaku let out a groan. His hand rose to pinch the bridge of his nose and his eyes closed tight. "You're shitting me."

"It was only her hand, and I don't think she actually knew that she did it, but there's no denying it was the same technique."

"And because her pathways were inactive, her mom must have been civilian, and her dad was a ninja," Shikaku muttered. "Kid just wasn't lucky enough to have her dad pass on active pathways."

"But he did pass on a blood limit. If he can pass on that, I don't see why he couldn't pass on sensing abilities as well."

Shikaku nodded. "Well, at least now we know why they chased you across the damn country for the kid," he said. He walked forward, pausing to clap a hand against Maen's shoulder, then continued forward towards the hospital room. "I'm going to go talk to them—they'll listen to what I have to say. Give me a few minutes to try and explain this."

.

.

"There's not really much we can do for her, sir, if that's the case."

"You can't just force them down?"

"No, sir. She's the only one who can actually shut them off. Even when she does, though, she'll retain a certain level of passive awareness that will take time for her to adjust to. All we can do is keep her calm, reduce her pain, and take the severity of it down a notch, but those are temporary measures at best, things we can do while she learns how to control it herself."

"Well… shit."

"I agree with the sentiment, sir."

.

.

The first two weeks after having my pathways opened were a bit of a blur, a side-effect of the drugs they had me on to keep me calm and dampen my sense while I learned to reign it in. I was fine with that. All of the memories would have consisted of ugly hospital rooms, terrible food, drug-induced giggling, and the monotonous process of meditating for hours on end while I messed around with my newfound ability.

There wasn't much there to be missed.

After getting over the initial waves of shock that tore through my system from developing an additional sense, having my chakra sense open wasn't as severe. The extra level of awareness was uncomfortable, even borderline painful when the hospital was especially busy and chakra was flaring everywhere, but none of the time I spent learning to get a grip on my senses had been anywhere near as bad as that first day.

Most of the work on controlling my sense had been done in my own time after the medics vacated the room and Maen was gone home for the night, when it was just me and the sea of dormant chakra signatures around me. Shutting off my sense was one of those things that, once it clicked, I was able to do it as easily as I could close my eyes—well, for the most part. There was the small radius around me that lingered, but the few sensors that were brought in to provide assistance told me that I'd get used to it.

They were right. By the time I was discharged from the hospital, that brief area of awareness had dulled into a manageable buzz in the back of my mind.

I watched the goings on in the village from my vantage point on Maen's back; there was a surplus of people milling around under the evening sun.

With my senses firmly sectioned off and shut down, I couldn't see the chakra of the people who passed us by, but I could feel it. It was disconcerting, having the intangible knowledge that there was something there without having any type of visual indication of its existence, like being able to hear the tinkling of wind chimes without being able to see them sway in the breeze. Part of my mind was certain that I was imagining things, while the other part was insisting that there is so much stuff around.

The sense-based dissonance was, admittedly, messing with me.

"Hey, kiddo," Maen murmured, shifting me so I sat a bit higher up on his back. "How're you doing?"

"M'fine," I said. "Just… a lot of people around."

"Yeah? Want me to take the rooftops?"

I grimaced, recalling the nausea and noodle legs I'd gotten the last time he had done that. "Nah. This is… it's fine, honest."

"Alright."

Truthfully, being around the village, with the overabundance of civilians, wasn't anywhere near as bad as the hospital had been. The whole building had been like one massive blow horn, blaring on my raw sense.

The chakra in the civilians, though, was toned down and calm when compared to any of the ninja who wandered among them, a flickering flame in contrast to a roaring bonfire.

"What're you doin' with your chakra?" I asked, the words muffled by his shoulder. "It's all… weird looking."

He snorted. "'Weird looking'?"

"I dunno how to explain it."

"I'm suppressing it," he said.

"You can do that?"

He hiked me up again. "Yeah, it takes some practice, but most higher level ninja learn to do it."

"Huh."

As we walked the rest of the way home, I closed my eyes and watched the world around me through my sense. It was almost like having a series of fairy lights shining against my eyelids, a sea of stars set against a backdrop of black in my mind. Aside from the obvious fact that the lights represented chakra signatures, I didn't know what made the lights different from each other, why some shifted and some were still, why some were pulsed and others were a steady light. Opening my sense didn't help me with that, either; opening my sense only served to provide me with further details to the signatures that I didn't yet understand.

It would take time.

I would figure it out, though. I had to.

"Hey, Kasumi."

My pencil stilled on the page. From my spot on the couch, I answered, "Yeah?"

"Come over here. We need to talk about something."

That wasn't ominous at all.

"'Kay." I tossed my drawing pad onto the other side of the couch and walked over to the kitchen table where he was sitting, two cups of tea already in the ready position. "Is something going on?"

Maen scratched the back of his head, his lips pulled down in a frown. "Sorta. It has to do with what happened when your pathways were open."

He pushed my chair out for me with his foot. I sat down and instinctively cradled my cup of tea between my palms.

"What, something 'bout my senses?"

"No," he said. He cleared his throat. "I think you might have a blood limit."

The words rolled over me. They didn't sink in at first. It took a second of Maen watching me expectantly for the weight of his statement—because there was a certainty in his voice that made his declaration a statement of fact, not a wild guess—to dawn on me.

"I—uh, what?"

"It happened right after your pathways were activated," he said. "You were in shock and occupied with everything going on, so you probably didn't notice it, but your hand disappeared."

"My… my hand… disappeared?"

"Up to the wrist. It was brief, and it went back to normal when you passed out, but it did happen."

The implications that came along with me having a blood limit were startling.

One of my parents had been a ninja.

Though, thinking on the information I received earlier about the way chakra pathways work, I could already discern which one of my parents had been a ninja—my pathways were closed, and all kunoichi passed on active pathways to their children. My mother was born and raised in Kiso, a village that lacked any trace of ninja activity.

But my father was a foreigner in Kiso, something that people never let him forget.

"Papa was a ninja."

Maen nodded. "That's what Shikaku and I figured."

"He never… he never did anything, no weird jutsu stuff, nothing."

"It makes sense," he said. "With the, uh… circumstances that brought you here."

He was right, of course he was, but…

"He never told me," I murmured. My grip on the cup tightened. "Why… why didn't he ever tell me?"

That was what got me, the fact that he hid it from me. There were never stray weapons lying around the house, he didn't use chakra to take shortcuts on the farm, his movements didn't hold the same kind of unnatural grace that most other ninja had.

He seemed so damn normal.

Had Mama known? Had her family known when they agreed to let the two marry?

What the hell was a rogue ninja—that was what he had to have been, as with a blood limit came a clan, and with a clan came some kind of affiliation he shirked in favour of a village life away from all things ninja—doing in a Kiso, of all places?

I was bursting with questions and the fact that I'd never get those answers burned like nothing else.

"It was probably for your own good—you and your mom."

"Not like it worked."

Maen stared.

His lips were parted like he wanted to say something, wanted to help, but couldn't find the right words. I blew out a breath between my lips and set my cup down on the table, slipped off of my chair, shuffled around the table, and crawled into his lap.

Words may not have been Maen's strong suit, but he had developed into quite the competent cuddle-buddy under my tutelage. Really, he was damn lucky that physical comfort was just as, if not more effective, than emotional comfort when it came to calming me down, because if I had been somebody who needed soothing words he would have been screwed.

His arms wrapped around me and he settled his chin on top of my head.

"We'll figure it out, kiddo."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."