Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by Drowsyivy, Fishebake, UmbreonGurl, and aflowerydeath
"You have such a February face, so full of frost, of storm and cloudiness."
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
"Is it…" Dan scuffs the bottom of his shinobi issued standard blue sandals against the dusty path we were standing on. "Is it possible that Sensei gave us the wrong scroll?"
"I doubt it," I cut in before Shinku can say something else.
There's really no need to give Dan a nervous breakdown before everything goes to Hell in a handbasket. He might be nervous and neurotic and probably just a bit too soft for the war that's about to come, but that doesn't mean I have to terrorize him the first day we're working together. The thought helps to temper my tongue.
I don't have to terrorize him because we are supposed to be working together. Our fates are entwined for as long as we are on the same team.
Back to the problem at hand.
This scroll might be blank, but Sensei isn't. She wants us to fetch something, even if we don't really know what it is.
There are infinite possibilities, and we have to find her the right one.
It's like searching for a single life amongst the infinite cosmos, one dim star amongst trillions.
Which is...hopeful of me, I guess.
I turn the scroll sideways. There is...still, obviously, nothing on it. I hold it up, letting the sunlight fall through it. Still nothing.
At this point, I'm tempted to heat test it to make sure there's nothing on this god forsaken piece of paper. It would be something Mom would be fond of doing, but hers would involve seven layers of chemical analysis.
But we don't have time for any extensive chemical tests, so Sensei likely didn't leave us some sort of cryptic message. No, the message is the scroll.
But the scroll is blank.
How can we fetch her nothing?
Thus round and round goes the dilemma.
"But then what do we do?" It seems like he's anxious without even trying.
Good God. I wasn't even trying.
"Well, first we don't go out of our minds because that will help nothing." We could reserve a moment for a Team Panic Session after we dig ourselves out of this test.
"But if we fail…" Shinku trails off. "If we fail then we're going to the Genin Corps."
He's ninja born as well, shinobi raised. The Yuuhi are a prominent Konoha ninja family, if not a particularly large one. Genjutsu specialization runs in the family, but as Konoha is home of the Uchiha the Yuuhi had been largely underutilized and overlooked by comparison.
Which is unfortunate, because I can say that while the Uchiha are talented, I much prefer Shinku over any of my Uchiha classmates when it comes to being on the same team.
He at least doesn't have a stick so far up his ass that it impedes his ability to talk. He knows how heavy the border tensions weigh right now. He's well aware of the political landscape.
I survey the two boys, all of us scrawny, lean as only ninja children are. "I don't think we're going to fail."
This is only a guess, a wild hunch based on what I know, and what I can piece together.
The three of us make up the best balanced team of the entire graduating class.
No, we weren't this year's Rookie, Top Kunoichi, and Dead Last. Two lifetimes and I still hate trigonometry with a burning passion.
One's ability to throw a kunai that hits a target perfectly every time, alas, does not translate into the ability to calculate the arc of that kunai as it launches from my fingertips based only on muscle memory.
I still hate math, but I hit a perfect bull's eye ninety nine times out of a hundred, and I can safely say that both of the boys before me can at least match, if not exceed it.
But we are a valuable team. We're all shinobi children, even if none of us come from a big clan. We're balanced. Each of us means something.
Maybe it's just my wishful thinking, but I don't believe that we are a team Utatane Koharu has taken on just to fail.
"How can you possibly know that?" Dan wrings his hands, a quaver in his voice.
I remind myself that he is seven years old and this is likely the first time someone's seemingly rejected him like this before.
"Think about it." I roll the scroll back up. "We're the first team Elder Utatane has ever bothered to take." And we might be the first team Utatane Koharu has to fail. "So clearly, she gave us a blank scroll on purpose. The test isn't to find whatever object she wants us to 'find.' The test is to see if we know what she wants us to find."
Dan sits down on the ground, in the dusty street, and folds his hands together tightly. He squares his shoulders, raises his chin. There's a backbone in all of us, I guess, even those of us that start out more nervous than others.
"So we just have to find that thing." He closes his eyes and breathes out. "Let's go ask the archives what they know about Elder Utatane that we didn't learn in a history book."
"That plan isn't half bad." Shinku pats him on the back. "We'll get somewhere."
I breath out. No, this isn't an overinflation of my own ego.
We aren't going to fail.
There is an answer to the riddle and we're going to find it.
Half an hour into searching the Archives, we'd found our new sensei's mission records and not much else about her.
Given that we're fresh genin who haven't even passed our Jounin-sensei's test, well, it's to be expected. We don't have the clearance for anything important.
"What do you think she'd want?" Shinku grouses as he slams down another stack of paper on the table we'd been organizing our information on.
All he manages with this is to send up a cloud of dust that gets into all of our lungs.
Dan chokes on a cough, and I wave a hand in front of my face. "Do you mind?" I ask him.
Maybe we have to work together because all of our fates are tied to the same scroll that could either doom us or set us free, but that doesn't mean that I have to put up with other people throwing up dust in my face.
"Yar yar yar," Shinku coughs and flaps a hand at me. "Quit trying to bite me, Hatake. We need to solve this, or none of us are going to get out of this alive."
"You're forgetting that none of us are leaving this life alive, Yuuhi." I refuse to accept that we're all born to die, because songs aren't sung just for the purpose of ending them. Doesn't erase the fact that we're all going to die.
A character might survive until the end of a show, if the cruel god writing is indifferent enough, but as people?
We're all going to die.
"Aren't you a ray of sunshine," Shinku frowns at me. "I want to live until old age, alright?"
"You're not the only one." I'd died at age twenty, hadn't accomplished much of anything the last time around. I'd lingered in the space between adult and child, and hadn't managed to fully define myself as one or the other. Too independent to be a child, not grown up enough to be an adult. "Don't make assumptions, Yuuhi."
I'd voted in one election, bought my own groceries, never learned to drive.
Is it so bad that I want to live long enough to grow old? To grow properly into a life at least decently well lived?
"Ah," Dan looks between us, a frown on his face. "No one should assume anything. We all share the same goals, so let's not take our stress out on each other, alright?"
Both Shinku and I stare at him — he's quaking, but he's offering the both of us a shaky smile — before we drop the argument.
It doesn't lessen the tension between us, but we put our heads down and keep reading.
And reading.
And reading.
There's something about this that I'm forgetting.
"Can I see the scroll again?"
Dan tosses it to me over a pile of papers that he's looking through. "I still haven't found anything that might give us a clue, but apparently, Sensei was in the Land of Wind not a month ago."
The scroll is still blank, as it was when this whole thing began.
"What if…" I say, slowly chewing through all the options we have open to us. "We put something on this blank scroll, and bring that instead."
That's one way to answer this riddle.
She'd said "fetch me this."
Thus, we bring her whatever we put on the scroll, and we pass the test.
"Would it really be that simple?" Shinku looks up from where he'd been browsing tax records.
At the very least, it's a mildly intelligent parlor trick. "We have until sunset to fetch her something, don't we?"
The sun's sinking on the horizon even now, golden light spilling all over the musty shelves and papers in the stacks.
We look at each other in a panic, and do the first thing that comes to mind when a fresh Academy student does when confronted with a blank sheet of paper.
Three names end up on the scroll, and we abandon the Archives forthwith.
When in doubt, bring yourself and your team members.
Sensei actually cracks a smile when she unfurls the scroll and sees three haphazard names scrawled on it in our haste to make it back to her tower office in time.
"So tell me, why this choice?"
We look at each other once. To be perfectly honest…
"We brought ourselves because that's what makes up a team."
It's… Dan. He seems to have recovered his footing well enough. "The test was about proving if we were committed to being shinobi, wasn't it?" He scuffs the bottom of his sandal against the wooden floorboards as he continues. "And there's no team without the sum of its parts."
He's surprisingly eloquent now, more so than he'd been earlier today or that I've noticed in class.
But the most surprising thing is that he genuinely believes in what he's saying. There's no team without the sum of its parts.
But sometimes, a team isn't what you wanted.
I don't know what exactly it is that I do want, but I am uncomfortable here, out of sync and out of place.
"Very pretty." Koharu-sensei hums. "But let's see what your teammates have to say, shall we?"
Shinku speaks up next. "Every member of a team pulls their own weight."
Koharu-sensei considers it for a mere second, and then she's moved on.
"And you, Tsutako? Why is your name on this scroll?"
I owe her some form of truth at least, I guess. If she is to be my sensei, even if she hasn't said that we passed yet, she deserves at least part of the truth. "If I didn't write my name on the scroll, none of us would pass." And I can't afford to fail.
Every day, every hour, every moment, the future bears down on me, like I'm on a runaway train hurtling straight for the side of a stone cliff. If the lever isn't pulled in time to divert the path, I and all the passengers on this wild ride are going to end up splattered on the side of a mountain.
I can't afford to fail. I don't have the time to try this again.
Koharu-sensei lingers over this answer a moment longer than the other ones.
I almost imagine her weighing my words on a scale, though I don't know which way the fulcrum tips until I see one corner of her mouth tilt up.
"A truthful answer." She rolls the scroll back up with one flick of her wrist. "Meet me here tomorrow at 6:30 am. Your physical training will begin then."
I walk back through the older parts of the city on my way home. I don't have my basket, but if Saku-nii is going to be home for the next few days, I'll have to stop by the butcher's.
He's hitting a growth spurt again on top of the grueling mission schedule his sensei had been keeping his team on to make sure they qualify for the next Chunin Exams, so he needs to replenish his energy when he's at home.
I'm not sure about me yet, but I imagine my new training will be tougher than before. Thus, it wouldn't be such a bad idea to buy an extra pound of pork on top of the two chickens I buy nearly every week.
Niisan has a fondness for chicken soup.
The bell fixed to the door of the shop jingles when I cross the threshold, not that it helps notify the people inside more easily.
Kobayashi Yuuto is deaf in one ear from an accident that no one has ever fully explained to me, and he doesn't generally respond to the door unless I announce myself when I arrive.
"Kobayashi-san!" I call into the back of the shop.
He's normally in the front in the afternoons, weighing up meat, wiping the counter, or slowly sharpening some knife or other from his stash.
Sometimes he'll sharpen my kunai too, for a discount price compared to the weapons dealer down the street, and just about the same quality.
He'd only be in the back if there's an animal he needs to take cuts from, and that happens in the mornings, rarely in the afternoons.
"If it isn't Hatake-chan." He beams when he sees me, wiping his bloody hands on his apron smock before leaning over the counter to look at me, a dark shock of hair falling over his forehead. "I drained thirty chickens this morning, and I saved the biggest two for you."
"I need a pound of pork too." I prop my face up on his counter so that we are eye to eye. "Preferably leaner because I want to make dumplings."
"Your brother's back home then?" He unhooks the two chickens hanging in the freezer.
"Uh-huh." I wait for him to bag them, peering at the cuts of meat he's laid out from behind the glass of his cold case. "Saku-nii got home last night." There, that looks like a cut of about a pound. "Can I get that one, please?"
He nods at me and finishes bagging the chickens.
"This going on the family tab?" He asks as he weighs up the pork.
Once a month, Dad's bank account pays off the tab at any places Saku-nii and I might've racked up for food, weaponry, and other odds and ends.
That's the family tab.
I don't generally run it up with anything frivolous.
Two lives, and even if money is not hard to come by in this life, I know its value. I know how my parents and elder brother earn it.
It's literally bought in by blood.
"Yeah, put it on the family tab please." It's a pound and a quarter. The chickens are a normal purchase, the pork is extra.
He wraps the meat for me in wax paper and bags it in a separate bag from the chickens.
"Have a good night, Hatake-chan," he calls after me when I nod to him and head out.
In the outer foyer of the house, I can sense the difference the moment my foot crosses the threshold.
There's a felt hat hanging on the hat peg by the door, a tan canvas cloak hanging from a peg, a pair of black boots muddied a bit from the road propped up by the door.
"Dad!" I call as I drop my purchases and slip off my own sandals.
Halfway down the hall, my measured walk blurs into a run. I see him stepping out of the master bedroom at the other end, sleeves rolled up, his hair down and his arms spread wide.
"Dad!"
I slam into him with enough force that in another life, it would knock him back against the wall.
He doesn't even budge in this one.
Hatake Hayashi is famous for many reasons, but I don't care about the White Wolf as much as I care that he is Dad, and he is home. He is home so rarely now that I can walk and talk and be reasonably expected to take care of myself.
"Goose!" He swings me around once, twice, a third time for good measure before setting me down. "You've grown so tall!"
I frown at him. "You've only been gone for two months."
He laughs. "You've grown taller since I was home last." He pulls back, takes a good look at me, and brushes the bangs from my face. "Congratulations." It's a simple acknowledgement, and it's all that I need.
He might not have been home for when I got it, or been there to tell me that he believed I would pass Koharu-sensei's test, but he's here now.
"Daaad." I rearrange my hair so that it sits as it normally does. "I haven't grown taller at all. You're making that up."
Only now do I remember the meat I dropped in the foyer.
I pull Dad back down the hallway by his hand, chattering all the while. "Are you hungry? I was just about to make dumplings!"
A.N. In which we are introduced to more of Tsutako's people. The general stage setting should wrap up next chapter and then we...kind of just hit the plot.
Thank you so much everyone for a wonderful response to chapter one of this fic. It means the world to me.
~Tavina
