Published: 8/23/2016
"I'm home," I half-called, half-sighed as I unzipped my vest. I dropped it on the couch once I'd made it to the sitting room, still feeling a little stiff; I was still not quite used to wearing it. It was a heavy thing, loaded with more than just physical weight.
Auntie was out, so Uncle was the one who greeted me. He was sitting at the dining room table with a blank-covered black book in his hand. What seemed to be a whole ream of paper was spread out in front of him. Each and every sheet was covered in lines and lines of writing that, rather curiously, didn't look like Japanese. He swept everything into a neat pile and put it away before I could make out much more about it, though.
"Cipher work?" I guessed. Ojisan was an iryou-nin and it was unusual to see him spending his time on spycraft, but I didn't find it terribly surprising. He was a ninja, after all, and being a ninja sometimes just meant encryption.
"Pretty much," Uncle agreed, but didn't elaborate. I was too much of a shinobi myself by now to pry, so I just sat down across from him and rolled my neck with a tired sigh.
"How did it go?" he asked, folding the little black book shut.
"Well," I reported, because it had. It'd been draining and I was exhausted, but at least it was done now. "I passed with flying colors. They expect me to come back in a month to follow up, but the psych eval itself was totally fine." I quirked a smile. "I'm well within the limits of my sanity, at least for now."
"Sanity's a relative term," Uncle replied with a humorous smile of his own. "But I'm glad to hear it. Did you like the doctor?"
"Hayato-sensei? Yeah, I liked him a lot. I'm glad you told me about him. How'd you make friends with him?" I asked curiously.
I hadn't known prior to Uncle's suggestion that I could pick who did my psych evals, so long as the person was qualified for it, but now that I did, I was probably going to never ask for anyone but Hayato Yamanaka again. Kind, but still-matter-of-fact, not cruel or impersonal, but not patronizing or babying either… not pitying. He was a good doctor.
"You know, I was a doctor once, too," Uncle Souhei said, a little dryly. "Hayato was usually around the camps in the Second War, putting people's heads on right when we field medics couldn't. We were tent buddies all the time. But besides that? He was my genin teammate."
"Really?" I gasped, delightfully surprised by this unexpected discovery. "But Hayato-sensei said he never goes into the field anymore. And that he's still a chuunin."
"I don't go into the field anymore, either," Uncle pointed out. "And it wasn't like he was required to be promoted because I was. He's fine with his rank as it is; he's told me that himself. Not everyone is meant to become a jounin, you know."
His words made my cheer fade, and I found myself going silent. Itsuki-sensei had often said that he was only a jounin in name, and that he'd only been promoted because no one else was left. Not in humility or self-deprecation, but as a fact. Considering what had happened to Akihiko and me just a few days ago, I was willing to believe it. I didn't feel particularly like a chuunin myself.
"Do you think," I began quietly, "that if they hadn't promoted Sensei before he was ready, everything that's happened… wouldn't have, you know…?"
Uncle put on a knowing look.
"Happened?" he finished for me, placing his chin on his hand. "It's hard to say. I don't know. You can't change things once they've passed. And even if you were to know ahead of time..."
He trailed off, suddenly pensive and silent. I waited for him to finish, but he never did. His gaze began to stray about, drifting left, and then right, and eventually coming to a stop upon the black book still resting in his hand.
"Never mind it," he sighed and stowed it in his back pocket. "Things are as they are."
I creased my brow and wondered how to respond to that. Both Auntie and Uncle had lived through the Second War, and they were bound to have lost people of their own. I didn't know who Uncle might be thinking of right now, though. They never spoke of those days.
We were both quiet for a little while, just sitting at the table and listening to sounds of the empty house. It wasn't often this quiet around here, but today, we were the only ones home. Auntie was out with the toddlers at the park, the Academy-aged kids were at school, Chiharu and Jinta and Akira were all training with their teams, Tenrou and Nodoka had missions... and the oldest of us had already gone to spread their wings in the world. Nanako was out fighting with the Kumo-nin in the north, and Minato—
I sat up straight, feeling a small twang at the edge of my awareness. Minato is here, a voice within my head informed. And not just Minato, I realized as I furrowed my brow and found that the one small twang was actually two. Two people, standing close together outside like the notes of a perfect fourth played in unison. I looked over toward the hallway; the sound of the front door sliding open reached my ears a moment later.
"Tadaima!" chorused a set of two voices, one light and feminine, the other deeper and male. A grin spread over my face.
The oldest of us had already gone to spread their wings, but at least this one often came home to roost.
"Okaeri," Uncle and I both chimed, smiling. Minato and Kushina appeared in the doorway, dressed in casual clothing and wearing identical grins.
"We made cake!" my sister-in-law beamed, holding up a large rectangular box. "Big cake!"
Uncle Souhei began to chuckle. He made a welcoming gesture.
"Are you telling me," he snorted amusedly, "that you took a whole week off so you could spend your honeymoon baking?"
I found this puzzling, too. I understood that travel wasn't particularly an option at the moment, given the fact that Konoha was at war and both Kushina and Minato were very infamous people, but there were plenty of nice places within the village, too. They could've gone to one of the onsens or something.
"Don't knock it, old man," Kushina snorted back, coming over and setting the box down on the table. Uncle Souhei, who had been used to being respectfully referred to as "ojisan" by her, let out a startled little laugh at the insulting address. Given that that was what Kushina had likely called her own father, it was probably quite endearing. "Baking's fun. Besides, we're doing other stuff, too. I never realized that having my own house would be so awesome."
Until now, both Minato and Kushina had been living in small single apartments. Minato hadn't wanted to take up a whole house in the compound just for himself, and Kushina, though she had a jounin's decent pay, had been pinching pennies. Now that there were two of them, though, Minato had happily staked his claim on one of the vacant homes near the compound's edge, and the rest was history.
"I never realized that you were a gardening maniac," Minato-nii replied, seating himself on the cushion next to Uncle with a smile. "You'd think an Earth Release master had gotten into a fight in our backyard," he whispered to me conspiratorially.
"You'll be grateful when those fruit trees start to supply you with the means for pie," Kushina retorted as she took the spot next to me. "And I'll have you know that I make excellent fruit pies."
"I do know," Minato replied happily, a warm grin on his face. "All of your cooking is excellent."
Kushina swatted at him from across the table, but there was no doubt she was pleased by the praise. I giggled. I doubted a cuter couple existed.
Things unfolded into small talk. They had come to deliver cake, but it seemed that that had just been an excuse to come over and socialize. An odd way to spend a honeymoon, but it seemed they were content to just run around being unrepentantly adorable newlyweds. Well, I considered with a faint pang, this would be the last time in a long time that their days would be so peaceful; perhaps they were just looking to enjoy it while they could. Once the week was over, after all, they were going back to war.
Eventually the conversation wound itself around to the subject of my promotion. They'd seen the vest lying discarded on the couch, and when they asked who it belonged to, I claimed ownership. Congratulations immediately went into order, but their delight quickly faded when I was obliged to recount the circumstances of its origins. It was a sour story, to say the least, and by the time I had finished Minato and Kushina both were frowning severely.
Looking to change the subject, I quickly broke off talk of the Missions Office and said, as though suddenly remembering, "Oh, but that's right, niichan, I've been meaning to ask you about something. I'm having issues with one of my seals, and I think it might have to do with the Serizawa factor."
Minato-nii's look of displeasure did not fully dissipate, but he saw my attempt for what it was and decided to leave it be for now.
"What's going wrong with it?" he asked.
"I'm trying to link something to a storage seal, but the fragmenting is uncontrollable," I explained. "I've tried seven different baseline arrangements but no matter what I do the middle seal keeps cracking. It's a set of three," I clarified when they gave me confused looks.
"Three linked seals, huh?" Kushina asked musingly. "Do you think we can see them?"
"Sure. Let me go get them."
I stood, dashed upstairs, went to my room, grabbed the seals I'd been working on since my return from Tatsumi River, thought to take some extra paper and a pencil, and then skipped two steps at a time back down to the sitting room. In no time at all I was spreading the three scrolls out for their perusal. Uncle took one look at the massive ink squiggle blobs, chuckled ruefully, and excused himself.
"Oh, I see what you mean," Minato-nii said once he'd left and we'd all crammed ourselves together on the same side of the table. "The middle one has to support two links. It's under a lot of stress… I'm not surprised you're having issues."
"Your fuuinjutsu is so linear," Kushina exclaimed as she picked up the big master seal. "It's like a block. You probably could save yourself a lot of space if you took the stuff in these two quadrants and arranged them into spirals."
"I've mostly been copying out of Minato-nii's old notes," I replied, rubbing my neck. "Can baselines be circular? He never drew any circular ones in his notebooks."
"Eh, you're still reading out of those old things?" Minato asked, looking a little embarrassed. He'd left me a lot of his old fuuinjutsu supplies when he'd moved out, mostly because he'd upgraded to better-quality stuff, but it looked like he'd forgotten his early works had still been mixed in there. "Those were from before the summer Kushina's mother visited and gave me tips. It's more of Jiraiya-sensei's style…"
"Well, that explains it," Kushina commented, tracing a finger around the circumference of the seal. "No wonder it's so bulky and kekkai-esque. Very Jiraiya-sensei."
Jiraiya, if I recalled correctly, was actually quite well-known for his barrier jutsu. I wondered where he'd learned his sealing from. His teammate had been Hashirama Senju's granddaughter, so it was possible he'd had the chance to learn from Mito-sama when she'd still been alive. That would make sense; from there he'd probably gone on to develop his own style by incorporating concepts from other jutsu that he knew. Since kekkai were usually big, solid things, Kushina classifying his style as "bulky" made sense, too.
"You don't need something so static for this," Minato said thoughtfully, tapping the problematic middle seal. "With some trimming we could probably improve its performance quite a bit. But it also bears asking if the two-way connection is needed in the first place. Is the third seal necessary?"
"There has to be a physical connection," I replied doubtfully. "If I get rid of the third I can't touch what comes out of the second."
At that, Kushina gave me a dubious look.
"That's going to involve a lot of stretch," she said. "Your kunai would disintegrate if the seals were more than half a foot apart."
"It's going to use ninja wire," I informed, and pointed to the master seal again, where the verb maku was written. "That's why the alignment matrix has a coiling mechanism, see?"
Suddenly, Minato's eyes lit up with comprehension.
"Oh, I see what you want to do," he exclaimed. "You're trying to simulate the use of shuriken-led wires without actually throwing shuriken. You obviously can't get the same wrapping motion with just a propulsion matrix, since the angle will be wrong, but creating a crease in space to bypass distance and then physically manifesting an object… that's actually not too dissimilar to the concept behind Hiraishin. You've got a better grasp on space-time ninjutsu than I realized, Suzu."
"I didn't think of anything as complicated as that. I just got the idea off the kunai you gave me," I informed sheepishly, pulling out said knife from my holster and holding it so the sealwork on the handle was visible. And that was the truth, because I had not the slightest inkling of knowledge about the physics-defying study known as time-space ninjutsu. "I hope you don't mind."
Minato grinned at the sight of it and ruffled a hand in my hair. "Not at all. Nidaime-sama invented the technique, after all—I just adapted it for my own use."
I let out a laugh and reached up to ruffle his hair in return. Obligingly, Minato lowered his head for me.
"So let me get this straight," Kushina said, shaking her head a bit at our antics. "Basically, what you plan to do is use this big master seal to hold the wire. You'll put that second seal down on your target, and from a distance you'll activate the third. The second seal will pull wire from the master seal and explode out on the target with the force from this propulsion matrix," she put a finger on the character for "burst" in the center of the second seal, "and the third will anchor that wire back on you once the target has been bound. Am I right?"
"Got it in one," I confirmed, giving her an admiring look. Kushina immediately flashed me a cocky grin.
"I am an Uzumaki, you know," she boasted. "I grew up doing this stuff."
"Only by force, according to your mother," Minato put in teasingly. "She told me pretty often that I was a much more well-behaved pupil than you were."
Kushina threw him a dirty look, but didn't reply, which probably meant that it was true. I giggled again.
"Anyway," she went on pointedly, "if that's what you're aiming for, Suzu, you're probably better off just taking this big activation mechanism in the middle seal out. Since it only goes off when you activate the third seal, all you need to do is thread a trigger through the same link you're using to express the anchoring mechanism. Here, just let me..."
Taking a sheet of the paper I'd brought down and plucking the pencil up in her left hand, Kushina sketched out a rough draft of what the improved seal would look like. I oohed as Minato leaned over me.
"And now there's room for stabilization," he said eagerly, pointing at the blank space the activation mechanism had once occupied. "And you could put in vectors to guide the direction of the propulsion. And you could add a mechanism to adjust the number of wires you want to use at once!"
"That'd be useful," Kushina murmured, eyebrows rising, as she began scribbling in his ideas. "Hey, if you link this portion to the third seal, too, don't you think…"
Quite suddenly a whole lot of jargon I didn't understand began flying between the two. Kushina pulled out another sheet of paper and drew out her suggestion. Minato excitedly began to point out more and more possibilities, and then somehow, before I knew it, I was looking at a set of seals that bore only a passing resemblance to the ones I had come up with on my own.
"I guess they had more problems with them than I thought," I said, bewildered, once they had finished with their modifications.
"Oh, that's not true," Minato quickly assured me, waving a hand. "You were right about the Serizawa factor issue. It probably would have worked fine as it was if we'd just fixed that."
"Probably?" Kushina repeated slyly. She tapped the pencil on the master seal.
"Well, there might have been a few other things we would have needed to adjust," Minato acquiesced. "But other than that I'm sure it would've been okay."
"Thanks, niichan," I said wryly, not at all fooled. Kushina began to laugh.
The next day was not nearly as lighthearted as the last. Akihiko's morning greeting consisted of this:
"Are you finally ready go on a mission, then?"
He was panting hard. The training log in front of him was splintered badly on one side, and I knew grief-induced anger when I saw it. Well, he probably needed take his outlets where he could get them… I sure as hell wasn't going to be one of them, though.
"I'm not going to apologize for looking after my mental health," I replied sharply. "And it's not like the village would have let me take anything major without the psych eval, anyway."
He gave me a mutinous look. "Aren't you so calm and collected," he bit out, turning and bringing his leg up to give the training post another wincingly hard kick. "Yoshiya would be proud."
His name hurt to hear as much as the implied insult of you don't care did. I bit my lip, breathed in through my nose, and said, "That's too far, Akihiko."
His shin connected with the log again, and a large sliver of wood came flying off. It snapped backwards and struck him across the forehead as if awarding him a cosmic comeuppance.
"Shit," he hissed and clapped a hand over the stinging cut. I grimaced and began searching for a bandage and some antiseptic in my belt pouch. That was probably going to leave a nasty mark.
Akihiko had been scowling when I'd located the items and stepped forward with them in hand, but by the time I was actually rubbing the bandage across his skin, his lips had softened into a guilty frown.
"Sorry," he mumbled, looking at his feet. "You're right. That was bad. I…"
"You're forgiven," I mumbled back, recalling my own experience with mourning outbursts. Even as an adult, those sorts of reactions were hard to control. "Just… don't do it again."
Akihiko nodded. We were far too old to hold hands at this point, and I doubted a hug would go over well, so we settled for marking our reconciliation with an awkward shoulder-elbow bump-thing. There was an uncomfortable silence.
"Guess we should go get a mission, then," I tried, smiling weakly.
"Yeah," Akihiko agreed, still staring at the grass.
Neither of us moved. We just kept standing there. The silence was miserable; it had been easy not to think about what a wreck things were when I'd been busy with my sealing project or worrying about my evaluation, but now the terrible truth was staring me straight in the face once more: Team 11 had been split and gutted, and now it was empty, a mere shell of the amazing, incredible, limitless squad it had once been. It would never be the same, never again. Sensei had gone off to God knows where and Yoshiya was dead forever.
"Are you crying?" Akihiko asked, horrified. "I really am sorry! I wasn't thinking and I didn't mean it—"
"No!" I denied, swiping my hands across my face. "I'm not crying! It's fine!"
"But—"
"I'm not crying!" I insisted. "Let's just go get a mission!"
I slapped my hands across my cheeks and then power walked away before he could respond, sticking my chin out in an attempt to ward off any more tears. If I stayed like this, I'd never recover. Work was what was needed now, badly.
There was a brief pause, and then I heard Akihiko's feet crunching in the grass behind me.
Work was what we got. And what we kept on getting, well after I had calmed down. Akihiko was throwing himself at it with a will. Now that we were chuunin, we had the clearance to carry correspondence for the war operations, and there was an endless number of messages to be delivered at any time of the day. Sometimes we would get lucky and things would only need to be shuffled about in the village, but other days, they would need to go to the outposts. And the outposts were everywhere, radiating out from Konoha like sunrays in all directions for miles and miles. Life suddenly became a gauntlet of endless running.
Akihiko preferred these running missions, though, because we could take more of them. Co-ops with other squads took time and effort to coordinate, and most squad leaders and jounin-sensei already had their hands full with the teammates they actually knew and cared about. People were having a hard enough time keeping themselves together; there was no concern to be spared for two orphaned genin who weren't even genin anymore. Cold as that was, though, I couldn't blame them. I probably would have been the same if I had had a squad of my own.
An echo of Tatsumi River's lonesomeness began to permeate my days. Of course, my family was around to keep things from reaching an unbearable level, but they were busy, too, and I had never had an abundance of friends. I'd only had two of them, and the one that was still alive was doing his best to work himself into oblivion.
I don't remember those days very well. Truth be told, there wasn't much to remember about them. They had been empty, mindless days. I worked; I trained; I practiced my calligraphy; I ate and I slept and then I did it all again. There had been a point where Uncle Souhei took it upon himself to teach me the trick to chakra flow—he might have felt bad that I had no sensei to mind my development, and he seemed to enjoy the chance to observe me work—but beyond that I can't recall anything of significance happening at all.
It took a long time for gaping wound that was the remains of Team 11 to stop bleeding. By the time we were ready to try prodding it again, we were a little too raw to tell anyone else about what we were really feeling. Perhaps that was why neither Akihiko or I were able to help each other in a really meaningful way; if we had, it wouldn't have been so hard to for us to rely on each other. Both then, and later on...
A/N: Sorry for the uneventful chapter. To make up for it, I posted a sidestory involving Souhei and Hayato, so take a look at that if it tickles your fancy.
What do you guys think of the new cover image? It was a lot of fun to make. Sorry it's so colorless, though, haha. I have horrible shading skills so I tend to conceal it by means of black-and-white palettes.
Well, that's it for now. As always, sorry for typos. Drop a review if you can!
Cheers,
Eiruiel
Notes:
1. "'...It probably would have worked fine as it was if we'd just fixed that.'"
Minato is too nice to say it, but I'm not. It was utter crap, and Suzu's a sealing scrub.
But with that said, she's also significantly more intelligent in the rewrite than she was in the previous draft. I'd been too timid to try writing a properly smart character because I didn't think I could pull it off without making her into a Mary Sue, so you see a lot of exaggerated overreactions where I'd originally intended to have cooler analysis. With proper foreshadowing to stave off deux ex machinas and asspulls, though, hopefully I can get it right.
