.

Continuous improvement is

better than delayed perfection.

"Train with us."

I spread my legs apart, hands in front of me in a measured stance. "No."

Step forward, left-hand punch. Right-hand followup.

"Why not?"

Step forward again, left palm strike, step forward, right palm strike. "'Cause."

Both hands dart forward in a rib-jab.

"That's not a good reason."

Step back, breathe, open stance. Right punch, left punch. "Tough shit."

Ino huffed and Sakura shot me an uncertain look.

"Ino, maybe we should go," Sakura murmured.

"No way," Ino hissed. "You want to get better for Sasuke, right?"

"Well, yeah…"

"Then we need her help."

I paused in my exercises long enough to cast them an irked look. "Find somebody else to help you train," I answered, the last word coming out in a rush as one of my hands darted forward to strike at my invisible enemy, picking up my kata again. "I'm busy."

"That's a perfect time to help us," Ino countered.

"Go away."

"Please," Sakura said. "We… we really need the help."

"You both have teachers for that," I reminded her. Left leg kicks out. Right leg kicks out. "Go bother them."

Left-hand jab, right-hand jab, half pivot. Left-hand jab, right-hand jab, close stance.

"We don't want their help for this, we want yours."

I let my muscles relax, a sigh leaving my lips. "You're not going to leave, are you?"

"No," Ino answered.

I turned to look at the two of them, standing at the entrance of the training ground, Ino with her hands on her hips and Sakura's eyes darting between her and myself.

Their clothes were, in and of themselves, the most tangible proof that my words those years ago had had some level of effect on them.

Ino had on a fitted purple tank top over top a long-sleeve ninja-mesh shirt, plain black leggings covering her legs, and her headband wrapped around her waist. Sakura had a light pink t-shirt, black shorts, and a pair of knee-high boots rather than the typical sandals, her headband hanging around her neck. Each had on kunai holsters, Sakura on her waist and Ino on her thigh.

Both of them had hints of makeup dotting their faces and perfume that I could smell from a few feet away, but they looked like kunoichi. They looked like they were ready to train. Sakura had even pulled her hair back into a thick braid rather than let it hang loose down her back.

"Alright, look," I said. "If I help you—if—you need to commit."

"We will!" Sakura cried. "Really, we will!"

"Totally," Ino agreed.

"I don't have a lot of time to train to myself as it is, so just know that I'm not here to teach you," I continued. "You can train with me, but I'm not your damn teacher. I won't be teaching you kata unless you pick up on the ones I'm practicing, I won't chase you down if you don't show up to training because I don't care whether or not you come, and I won't go easy on you. Clear?"

"Got it!"

"Yeah!"

Both of them were smiling in the wake of their success. They were excited at the thought of training with me, unaware of what they had gotten themselves into—how adorable.

My lips curled up in a feral, cheshire grin. "Then it's time for you two to get warmed up. Go run twenty laps around Konoha."

Kakashi stood a few feet away from me, pushed his hands through a set of signs that passed faster than my eyes could track, and spat out a human-sized fireball. I felt the heat radiating off of it as the plume of flames careened forward and decimated the training dummy that was unlucky enough to stand in its path.

"The name and list of hand signs are here," Kakashi said, reaching into his pocket and removing a scroll, tossing it in my direction. "Gather your chakra in your mouth and expel it from there—don't bother using a lot right now or you'll just burn yourself."

I plucked the scroll out of the air and unfurled it, my eyes roaming over the scant instructions. There were a couple of brief diagrams, showing the gathering of chakra in the mouth and transforming it into oil, a few sentences outlining the ignition of the oil, and then the sequence of hand signs.

I looked up, the words "is this it?" dancing on the tip of my tongue, but Kakashi was gone—he was sitting by where the boys were working on their chakra control, his book open in front of him.

Asshole.

.

.

"Kami, this tastes fucking awful!"

.

.

"Fucking—my lip! That burns so fucking bad!"

.

.

"Ow! Ow!"

.

.

Knee up, jab left, jab right.

Foot touches down. Sharp downward strike.

Left punch, pivot, right punch—

I dipped down, dodging the kunai.

Pivot.

Crouch. Leg darts out in a low sweep.

Roll forward, up, close stance.

Quick jab—

A kunai whizzed by my chin and I forced my weight back onto my heel, the blade skimming my skin. I lifted a finger up, dabbing at the blood as it leaked out.

I turned to look at Kakashi. "Seriously?" I asked. "Can you at least aim for the chin down?"

Kakashi raised an eyebrow, twirling a kunai around his index finger that he chucked at me by way of response. I dropped into a crouch and let it soar over my head. He wasn't throwing hard, to make it possible for me to dodge in the first place, but a kunai was a kunai and it would hurt like a bitch if I let one of them hit me—which was the entire point.

I huffed, retaking my stance.

Asshole.

.

.

"What's she doing?"

"You idiot—she's meditating."

"Don't call him an idiot," I said, the words leaving my mouth without a thought.

"Wait, what does that mean? It just looks like she's sleeping funny."

I didn't have to have my eyes open to know that Sasuke was rolling his eyes.

"You use it to help train your yin chakra," I said. "You focus on your yin chakra and stop focusing on the world around you."

"So then why—"

"Naruto," I said. "You know I love you, but right now, I need you to just… not talk."

"Oh," he said, letting out a sheepish laugh. "Sorry."

"It's fine."

I took in a deep breath, let it out.

In, out.

The world around me faded out and the chakra signatures of the village faded in.

A massive chunk of the village was within my sense, with the level of detail in the signatures depending on their distance. While the growth of my sense had been gradual for as long as I could remember, over the previous few months, after the point that my chakra reserves—my yin chakra especially—began to see exponential growth, the amount of detail I could ascertain and the distance of my charka sense skyrocketed.

Nobody was quite sure why or how.

Maen had figured that it had to do with my yin chakra—his theory, at least, was that the low density of my yin chakra made it easier for it to spread around when I opened my sense, as chakra sensing was based in yin chakra.

Shikaku had questioned how I could garner the level of detail that I could if my yin chakra was such a low density.

Maen had answered: bloodlimit bullshit.

Frankly, I had been satisfied with that answer. There was no way to disprove it as nobody knew a damn thing about my bloodlimit. It wasn't unheard of for a bloodlimit to come with multiple components, especially considering that my chakra sense, with the hyper-awareness it gave me of my own chakra, was a significant component towards my being able to use my bloodlimit in the first place. Combining that with the fact that my bloodlimit itself was based in my specialized yin chakra and, well, it seemed plausible.

The biggest issue was that the increased limit made it that much more difficult for me to use my chakra sense for any extended period of time; it was like reverting back to the earlier times with my chakra sense, with my range outdoing my mental capacity.

"She's still meditating?"

"Idio—"

"What did I say about name calling?"

There was a grunt. "Hn."

"Words, Sasuke."

"Shut up."

"There you go! Was that so hard?"

"Hn."

I stood up and stretched, turning to face the two boys.

Kakashi had left an hour prior—or, rather, he had 'disappeared' and promptly taken residence in the branches of the nearest tree. He was testing us, I assumed, though for what I had no clue. Either way, I decided that the best course of action was to keep the boys training. It had taken a bit of cajoling—see: blackmail—to convince them both to stick around for the extra hour and continue their training together, but they had done it with minimal bickering.

"Well, I think you guys did well," I said. "Let's go out for lunch."

"Ramen!" Naruto cried, scrambling to get to his feet.

My lips stretched into a grin, though it was cut off by my wince when the action pulled at the sore, burned skin around my mouth. "Ramen," I agreed. "You're coming too, Sasuke."

"No, I'm—"

"It's free food," I said. "I'll pay for us."

"Ninja shouldn't be eating ramen," he said. "There's nothing healthy about that."

"Nah, but it tastes damn good," I said. "Come on. One lunch won't kill you."

.

.

Kakashi watched the three of them trail out of the training grounds, not missing the brief upward flick of Kasumi's middle finger from behind Naruto's back as she led the boys away, aimed in his direction.

He bit back a sigh.

He had done some terrible things in his life, he had, but he didn't think any of them were horrible enough that he should deserve being her teacher.

I trudged through the sliding door and walked into the Nara living room, stepping into the slippers that I had brought with me from home. The home was empty save a lone signature that occupied the couch a few feet in front of me.

Shikamaru looked up from the TV at my footsteps. The edge of his mouth lifted up in a smirk.

"Pyjamas?"

"Shut up," I said.

I flopped onto the couch, filling the space that he had vacated on instinct—I had the boy well trained. The action sent tingles of pain across the skin of my arms and legs, jarring the scratches that lined my limbs, battle wounds from our earlier encounter with the demon cat.

We had been given the Tora Mission.

It was our fourth D-rank of the week, with the missions getting worse rather than better as the days had progressed. It had started with gardening for a neighbourhood of retired ninja. After that we had cleaned the home of an older civilian lady, who had taken every available opportunity to make the loveliest little comments about the musculature of my arms and the scars that littered my skin, using the same persnickety tone I imagined she took up with her granddaughters; she was an old hag. Then there was the babysitting, in which I sat through two hours of being intermittently shat and barfed on by a two-month-old—the poop that babies produced, it turned out, smelled rancid.

I had thought all of that was bad.

The Tora Mission, however, had been so much worse. Three hours trailing a damn cat across the village, two hours staked out in the forest, and a final hour of chasing the thing around and hoping that nobody saw us because there was a special form of shame that came from being outmanoeuvred by a cat.

I was cranky. I was very, very cranky.

I reached out and grabbed the TV remote, flicking through the channels.

Shikamaru groaned. "C'mon, Kas—I was watching that."

"Too bad."

"It was in the middle—"

"I don't care."

"Troublesome," he muttered.

I settled with an old cartoon that depicted a talking kunai and a scroll with a face.

It was stupid, but there was something about children's television that served to lessen the maelstrom of annoyance and frustration that churned in the back of my mind.

I wiggled around to get more comfortable and flicked my hair, a wavy mass of auburn, off my shoulder; Shikamaru grunted and pushed it back.

"Shika."

"What?"

"Don't touch my hair."

"Don't put it in my face."

"Then move your face."

"Just braid it, that's what you always do when it's annoying."

"I don't have a hair elastic."

"Go get one."

"No." I turned, eyeing his hair. "You could give me yours."

"What? No."

"Or, better, you could braid my hair."

"Not a chance."

"Why not? You suggested it."

He scoffed. "I'm not braiding your hair—that's so much work."

"Then I hope you like having my hair in your face."

A pause.

I heard a sigh as the body behind me shifted.

"Sit up a little," he muttered.

I leant on my elbow, craning my neck back to look at him; his hair was sitting down around his shoulders and he had the elastic held between two fingers. "Wait, really?"

He rolled his eyes at me. "If it'll make you leave me alone then yeah, whatever."

I sat cross-legged and Shikamaru mimicked the action, with one of his legs pressing against my back and the other leaning off the arm of the couch. He pulled at my hair, tugging some of the strands and sifting through them, handling the duty of braiding my hair with all the grace one would expect out of a twelve-year-old.

"Divide it into three chunks," I said. "Each of them has to be equal."

There was grumbling but I felt him follow the instructions. It took him a minute of weaving but I heard the sound of the elastic snapping around my hair and felt the braid drop against my back; half of my hair escaped the 'braid' and splayed around my face.

I let out a snort, raising a hand to try smothering the action, a losing battle.

"Uh…"

"You did it too loose."

"What, how tight do I do it?"

"Tight enough so that it actually stays."

"Uh-huh."

Attempt number two saw no more success, the hair unravelling half-way through and slipping out of his fingers.

Another bout of chuckles that I failed to hide.

"Tight, Shika."

"Whatever."

The braid was completed on the third try.

I pulled it over my shoulder. My hair was gathered into an awkward, unevenly wound pattern, with strands of hair spilling down onto my shoulders at even the slightest movement. I took one look at it and broke down in a fit of loud, ugly laughter.

Shikamaru stared at me like I'd lost my mind.

"It—I'm… I'm sorry, it's just—you can't braid!"

"No?"

"You're a damn genius with an IQ over 200, but you can't braid," I wheezed, leaning back into him and holding my ribs. "Sorry, but I just… didn't see that one coming."

I pulled at the elastic and let my hair fall loose, my fingers winding through it to work out the knots, chuckles still bubbling from my lips. In all of five seconds I had it gathered into a neat plait that fell down to the small of my back.

He blinked, his face impassive. There was a thump as he fell over and lay back down on the coach.

"You're so troublesome," he muttered, turning into the pillow and shoving his face against the fabric.

There was a grin on my face as I lay back down beside him. "Thank for trying though, Shika, I appreciate it. I think I really I needed that."

"Whatever."

.

.

"Kaa?"

"Yes, Shikamaru?"

"Can you show me how to braid?"