I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by drowsyivy and UmbreonGurl.
"No, none of those things that meant so much survive."
— Hannah Sullivan, 3.32, "Repeat Until Time"
Hatake, as it turns out, is what Fire Country calls our last name.
But in Iron Country...where they speak Mandarin…
Hatake is Tian.
And I'd always known that Hatake was written with the same kanji as "field", but to know that is one thing.
To connect it to something I'd known in a different context from my past life, well, that is something else.
Tian is one of the hundred old surnames, not as ubiquitous as my old one — the second most common surname in the world, the old world, where things made sense — but certainly not unpopular either.
Hatake Hayashi had sprung from nowhere and nothing, and Sarutobi Sasuke had taken that secret with him to the grave.
But I grab at this bit of my own history.
I dig up the grave.
And in tracing these words back to their roots… I find both more and less than I had ever hoped to find out about my family.
Hayashi, as it turns out, is 林.
Lin.
Under this new context, Dad's name read… 畑林. Tian Lin.
Distinctly… Chinese in its roots, so much so that it would make sense to the young couple from Iron Country if I could get it written down in front of them. Not entirely what I would recognize as a proper name were it to have appeared in my old life, but recognizably a name nonetheless.
The god of this world jests with me, with a cruel pen.
Hatake Hayashi had sprung from nowhere and nothing, but Tian Lin had come from Iron Country some number of years ago, and became Hatake Hayashi. Somehow.
Child born of immigrant parents coming from—
Children born of immigrant parent from Iron Country.
Where else could we have come from to carry the same name characters?
And Meijin had said I have coastal hair.
Did Iron Country have a coast? I would have to pull down a map to check, and if so…
If so.
Could I ever ask Dad about it? Would he be able to tell me?
Or had Sarutobi Sasuke really taken this to the grave with him?
My excitement over discovering a portion of my identity in this life vanishes. Not all at once, but in fits and starts.
Drips and drabs.
In the end, I still don't know anything personal.
Where did Dad come from? What were his parents like?
From what history did I come?
Where do I belong to?
Where am I meant to fit in?
I still don't know.
And the people who could tell me would never be the ones who would want to.
Dad comes back tired and, finding out that I had tomato and egg stir fry on the stove, picks up the corners of his mouth for the space of a heartbeat before it tiredly flattens itself back into a line.
"Food for the soul," he murmurs when I dish him a bowl of rice and set the plate of stir fry on the table.
"War prevention efforts going badly?" I ask, knowing that he won't tell me.
I'm not even supposed to know that there is a possibility of war.
He looks at me for a long moment, all of twelve years old, and yet already too tall, too jaded, no longer wide-eyed and wondrous. "You know I can't talk about that."
"It's above my clearance level, yes I know."
Sometimes, I wonder if this is how Mom feels about him too.
His clearance is high enough that there's stuff he can't say in front of her as well.
But more to the point, over the years I've realized something about Dad that I can't unrealize.
For all that Mom isn't easy to swallow — Hatake Ume is all sharp edges, a switchblade knife you could pull on an unsuspecting person in the dark — Dad is…
Always late.
He never wanted to be, but he could never refuse the call when it came for him either, and that turned Mom bitter.
Between his family and Konoha, he picked Konoha, not sometimes, not mostly, but every time.
And that would turn anyone bitter, I expect.
"You're angry with me." He's still watching me.
"You never tell us anything." I am angry about this, but angry like a burnt out match struck too many times is angry. There's no fire here, just a girl complaining about things that will never truly change. "What do you think that does to us? Are we supposed to just sit here and take it?"
"Tsutako." Something has shifted in Dad's face. A heavy frown, drawing his brows together.
Like this, he looks neither laid back nor friendly.
"Do not ask about things you do not want to know the answers for."
He rises from the table, chair legs scraping on the wooden floor. "Thanks for the food."
I stand there, listening as his footsteps — slightly uneven — head for the master bedroom.
And I wonder, for the first time, if I did manage to inherit my rage from someone I am descended from in this life after all, not some leftover relic of a distant past that has no roots in Hatake Tsutako.
With the way we'd been expecting a war to break out any day now for the past two years, the actual… outbreak of the war is…
Anticlimactic.
In fact, we don't even realize it had happened until a week or so after the event where the war actually started, until the formal declaration starts getting pinned up on news bulletins and gets passed along by word of mouth.
The strange thing about it is that I am out with Dan and Shinku, since we'd all managed a bit of free time, and are, at the moment, celebrating the fact that Dan had graduated from Junior Fish Killer into Advanced Intermediary Cut Stitcher, which can only mean food when we get the news.
Formal declaration of war against Iwa, just a short eight months after the peace talks where the Diplomat had engaged the Tsuchikage.
And yet on every mouth, "well, the Diplomat tried."
It didn't count against him, even if the peace talks didn't work because he didn't really want them to succeed.
But that, well, that is the way of the world.
Dinner had gone…decidedly quiet and more than a little sour after that bit of news.
Shinku has a hard grip on his mug of raspberry jasmine tea. "Well," he says, to no one in particular while staring at nothing of note. "That went over well."
"Do you think," Dan asks shakily, while also staring at nothing in particular and asking no one specifically, "that we'll end up on the front?"
"Probably not." I stare down at my cooling tea. "Neither of you are frontline."
No, the ones I worry about…
My sweet brother, still not entirely recovered from the death of a second teammate in as many years, is a frontline fighter.
So too, I assume, is Dad.
And Dad is forty-six now, long past the age when he ought to be out there.
War comes for all men, young or old, but it comes for old men more than it comes for young men sometimes, and Dad…
While I would hesitate to call old, is not…
Young, either.
They'll only start sending essential workers like Dan and Shinku out to the front if it gets really desperate.
And the war with Iwa isn't that far gone so early in the game.
No, they wouldn't send Dan or Shinku out there unless it gets really bad.
"But what about you?" Dan blinks at me, worried, even though I still have no idea why. It's not like we're all that close and well.
Well, it's not like I'm all that great to him either.
I knock back my tea even though the bottom is still hot enough to scald my tongue a little. "It's fine," I mutter, still unable to meet anyone's eye. "Don't worry about it."
"Well," Shinku pushes the remaining sprig of salad in his plate round and round, "don't die, Hatake. That'll just make this whole thing depressing."
I rise from the table and stuff my hands in my pockets. "I suppose it might."
But I wasn't meant to be given life in the first place.
I wasn't meant to ever make a difference in this world.
The lines and planes of our lives were already pre-drafted, prewritten, backstory.
Backstory, backstory, someone else's backstory, background.
Maybe this is the war in which I die.
It's the one where Dan died after all.
But there he sits at the table in front of me, dark eyes worried, quite evidently alive.
I hope he doesn't die.
He'd have people who'll miss him.
And I am alive as well, in this moment.
I am alive.
Maybe I ought to act like it. No one's going to kill me before I decide that I've had enough of this world. "Well," I say and scuff the toe of my sandals against the fake plastic wood on the balcony of the restaurant we were at before sliding a few bills and coins onto the table to pay my tab. "I'll try, I guess."
Dad's tab at various shops and other locations did not include restaurant food. Then again, I'm not even sure if Dad even knew about the existence of restaurants given how frugal he is.
It's not much, but it's the best I can do.
I feel Dan's worried gaze on me until I turn the street corner.
I am handed my newest mission assignment with a group of others in the Tower someplace close to the Hokage's office by one of the younger chunin.
Most of the group is older than me, but that's typical.
What isn't typical is how we're all being sent to the front together. Mission duration is three months.
Objectives are to join up with the rest of a squad already up there and to report to their commander.
We are to head out at dusk.
I go home to pack.
On my way back, I pick up a few nonperishables that could conceivably be considered food.
Kyogi's curled up on the couch when I come in, and he greets me without his usual enthusiasm.
He's lonely.
"I'm sorry." I scritch him behind the ears and wonder when I've turned into someone that sounded like Dad.
A broken record. Repeating excuses. I've got to go again. I'll be back before you know it.
But don't we all know it.
Absence yawns with a thousand mouths.
And eats with the appetite of the famished.
I pack carefully for the front, given that I'll be there for three months, whetstone first since that will be the heaviest.
I leave a note for whoever gets back first to let them know where I'll be going.
Mission. Front. Three months. Back later.
I go to arrange for the old lady next door to take care of my garden.
I'd planted it a month or so ago with all the hope in the world that I'd be back to tend to it all summer, even sporadically, but—
It looks like I'll be gone.
No garden this summer for me, and if I survive this summer, it looks like there won't be any for me next summer either.
People want this to be a short war, but I know it won't be.
That would be too lucky for the rest of us.
I don't have time to send a note to Kobayashi before I leave, but I hope he understands.
I'm sure Saku-nii can explain what happened to me to the butcher if he even thinks to consider it. He doesn't like Kobayashi the way I do, he just went there for our meat while I was away because Dad's tab is set up there and it's cheap.
As far as I'm aware, Kobayashi doesn't like him either.
Still, he could bother with telling the butcher what'd happened to me if he thinks that the butcher might want to know.
And if Kobayashi asks.
I never do know if he asks.
The front is...quiet when I get there with the rest of the group I'd been sent there with.
Still the youngest, still the least talkative, still not really a part of the group I'm in.
Then again, I don't know if I want to be a part of this group.
Something about the fact that most of them were convicts set my spine on edge, but it's not like I get the luxury of choosing my assignments and they didn't get to either, so we're all stuck with each other.
There'd been gossip as we trudge up towards the Fire-Frost border.
Beyond it lies Iwa, which has been our major problem thus far.
"Heard it's cold enough to freeze your balls off up there," one man mutters. "Godforsaken snow hell."
Another snorts. "You're not living long enough to worry about the snow."
"You take that—"
"Get fucked," the squad leader mutters. So far, all he's done is mutter, but since he's bigger and meaner than everyone else here, they all shut up.
Which, in of itself, is a blessing.
There's only so long I can listen to jokes about balls freezing off, and it appears the squad leader is the same.
There are a few other women here, all older than me, so it's likely they all don't care for the joking either, though it's not like I've taken a poll so I don't know.
The squad leader is a man in his early thirties, a man by the name of Morino Ichisake, though what relationship he has with Ibiki, as of yet unborn, I have no idea.
"Alright, you fools," he mutters when we line up. Even if it's not very loud, it still carries. Probably some sort of chakra trick. "Make camp for the night."
I make camp, sleeping roll, field rations, tent — which I'll share with someone else, a blonde woman I don't know, even though I won't be sleeping there for hours yet.
While I do, I go over what I remember of the gossip on the way up here, through various checkpoints, pit stops and things people have been talking about on the trail.
So far, I've learned that the old king has died and that the bitter struggle our eastern allies are engaged in to restore order has fouled the process of them sending troops in to defend strategic points along the borders of Fire.
The squad leader appears out of the gloom as I take the twilight watch, wordless for a bit as he stands there next to me.
"Heard you're a bit of a diva, from someone up on the main command." He glances at me, sidelong. "But you're younger than I thought you'd be, with a reputation like that."
"What does it matter?" I ask, knowing full well that it won't help me. "This is where I was assigned."
"You're what? Twelve?" Morino asks, which is right. Even if it hits like a punch to the gut. "I'm gonna tell you something, and I think you're going to hate it, kid. But even I'm not screwed up enough to not bother warning you." He shoves his hands in his pockets and stares straight ahead. "Someone up in main command doesn't like you, and they're powerful enough to get away with sending you up here. Who'd you piss off kid, cause you better apologize before your attitude gets you killed."
The anger goes straight to my head. "I haven't got an attitude problem."
He barks a laugh. "And I'm the Daimyo's wife, kid."
I glance at him. "You're not pretty enough, sir."
"Think about it," he tells me as he walks off. "Don't let it just go to your head. You're young, you've got life to live."
And it still goes to my head anyway. I sit there, fuming in the quiet, unable to really put it all together even with the pieces there.
So I've got a reputation now? For what? Being a bitch?
Like there aren't other people who're a bitch for worse reasons than me.
Like I don't still get my work done.
Didn't matter though.
Someone has it out for me, and I don't even know who they are.
The other woman's still up when I get back to the tent, instead of sleeping, which would be the reasonable thing for people to be doing.
"So what's a kid like you doing up here?"
Everything in me says just to roll myself up into my bedroll and go to sleep.
Despite it being late spring, it's cold up here, and I'm tired from the events of the day — getting up here, the stupid jokes, the keeping tabs on political situations, the squad leader and his cryptic diagnosis of me having "an attitude" and the rage that'd accompanied me for the rest of the watch.
I shouldn't look and I shouldn't say anything.
The longer I don't say anything the quicker this woman will give up trying to be friendly.
"Someone wants me dead," I mutter, rolling myself up in my blanket. "That's why."
"Oh," she says, though it doesn't seem too concerned. "That's rough. I'm here because I put the heel of my palm through Shimura Danzo's nose."
I'm not sure there is anything I can say to that, I just stare, flabbergasted. "You did what?"
"I smashed his nose. Bastard deserved it." She seems...oddly proud of this achievement.
I continue to stare, wide eyed from the shock.
"Well," I don't know when I'll actually get my wits back, "that, that's something."
I wasn't aware that people with bigger attitude problems and death wishes than me existed.
She shrugs. "Like I said, bastard deserved it. Did whoever you pissed off deserve it?"
"I don't know." I still don't know who would've recommended me. "I've pissed off a lot."
I still don't know what exactly had been the last straw.
As for who I've pissed off well, it seems like I can't help pissing people off. Could never learn to stop scowling, couldn't ever get myself out of this mess, couldn't keep a leash on my tongue.
All I've done since living here in this world is lash out and burn bridges, ever since I figured out where I was.
"Well that's not great, is it? You haven't even got any justified anger." She pats me on the shoulder. "But then, you're young. It's not the end if you haven't figured it all out yet."
Somehow, that didn't seem as patronizing coming from her.
I nod, vaguely, still trying to find my footing.
"I'm Yamanaka Mio, who're you?"
It feels different this time, somehow. Introducing myself. "Hatake Tsutako."
A.N. Wow, it's been a hot minute since this fic has been updated, and by 'a hot minute' I mean something to the tune of 'ten months'.
A lot has been happening in real life. I'm in my senior year of university, working in a research lab, going to be applying for another grant, working out applying for graduate schools...So much has been changing, but oddly enough, it feels like fic and fandom has been one of those constants in my life, and I want to thank you guys for being here on this journey with me. Whether you've been here since I started posting chapters or gave this fic a shot after this latest update, it's been great to have company.
~Tav (Leaf)
