.

.

"Well, it's because she never studies," mom told Tamura-sensei outside of the academy. Kunoichi classes had just ended a few moments ago and upon picking us up, mom spotted Tamura-sensei exiting the building about to retire for the day. Of course, she just had to stop and chat him up because she couldn't believe how I was placing so poorly. Right now, I was twelfth out of the entire class. Two months ago I was fourteenth. All that time from when I was forcing my body to spend chakra obsessively, took a horrible toll on the mediocre chakra control I had originally. I was lucky I'd caught on quick, otherwise, it would've taken a lot longer than two months to set everything straight.

"Sachie-chan does well on written tests. It's the physicals she has trouble with." Tamura explained calmly.

"That can't be. She always goes out for runs in the afternoon." Mom brought up. "Besides, Rin's in first place. They always do everything together."

To the right of me, Rin looked at the ground. She always did when mom mentioned her placement. I had noticed the transformation a few weeks ago. While we were preparing dinner one night, Rin had instead opted to finish her homework. This wasn't on purpose to get out of work or anything. We just had a test the next day.

"Don't you have homework too?" Mom asked, peeling potatoes over a strainer.

"I'll do it later."

She stopped peeling for a moment, twisting her neck toward the bedroom door with a vacant expression, before quietly resuming dinner.

From there on out, she began to point out all the little things. "Oh, what are you reading? That's not a book for class..." or the ever so popular "Rin's first again this month." Which would immediately cue the girl to stare at the floor in self-abasement.

As much as I wanted to say something I knew it would just spur her on to a long tangent. So held my tongue then, and I held it here too as she began to explain to Tamura-sensei how I always did classwork at the very last minute.

"I don't know what to tell you Nohara-san." He said eventually. "Sachie does fine with her schoolwork."

She opened her mouth a sliver of protest, before deciding against it and gave a little nod. "Alright, have a nice evening then."

Tamura returned the sentiment before leaving.

I could feel her gaze on me, so I pretended to be staring at the trees. Then I felt someone else's presence. Almost as if a ghost had passed through me, stirring up all the ultra-fine hairs along my body into a rigid posture.

Haltingly I looked back at the school. On the steps leading to the academy, with a hand around her chin, was Hifumi Yamanaka. Meeting my eyes, she began to smile.

.

.

"Sorry I'm late!" Shouted Obito Uchiha, sliding the door open with a hollow thump!

I cringed, focusing entirely on my notebook rather than paying any attention to him. It's not that I hated Obito. I wouldn't have cared about him at all if he didn't have a role in Rin's death. Ultimately Madara needed him to get his Mangekyō Sharingan. The only way he could achieve this was by having Obito witness the death of someone he loved.

Honestly, Obito was an idiot for not having figured it out himself before Madara literally spelled it out for him when he came into the Kamui dimension to retrieve his Rinnegan. Although I guess that was easy for me to say, knowing Madara's true intentions all along. It didn't really matter. Similar to joining Team Minato, becoming friends with Obito was practically suicide.

"I don't call this late," Tamura-sensei paused. "I call this absent."

It was already early afternoon, and the sunshine streaked across the windows so that you could see the dust in the air. Obito fumbled over his excuse.

"I-I was helping an old lady get out of a tree!" He stuttered before realizing his mistake and backtracking. "I mean, I was helping an old lady's cat get out of a tree!"

Tamura-sensei was not amused. "Go to your seat, Obito."

His face got tight in the effort of suppressing deeper emotions. It was made worse by the poorly hidden laughter of our classmates. It was hard to imagine the apathy that would overcome him in the future. But the image of him callously murdering Torune was forever ingrained in my conscience. So when he glared at the teacher I felt sick. No matter how innocent he was now一no matter how many times he scanned the room for help, I would have nothing to do with him.

As he passed our desks I kept my head down, pretending to be writing something but admittedly scribbling circles, again and again. My wrist curved in an arc and out of the corner of my eye I couldn't help but notice Rin watching him. A thoughtful expression blooming across her face.

Of course, I had expected something like this. Rin was one of those people who can, even from a very young age, easily grasp things about people that they cannot see for themselves. As shinobi, we are trained to observe body language. Our textbooks have all kinds of pictures depicting faces and gestures. We are supposed to be able to anticipate a fight before it begins. To be able to watch the hard to interpret signs of the hands and feet and read them as well as faces.

Just the week before we had all been paired up and made to practice "mirroring" each other. We would copy our partner's look, then try to guess what emotion they were portraying by wearing it ourselves. The seven universal reactions being: anger, contempt, disgust, sadness, surprise, happiness, and fear. Sadness was the most difficult to fake.

For most of the class, this was just a fun way to introduce Konoha's counterintelligence division. Only a few would genuinely latch on to the idea of viewing everything so analytically. Rin was not one of them. While there were benefits to being able to detach yourself from natural countenance, there was also a downside. That is, what does it feel like to wear an expression you've never experienced for yourself?

What did Rin see in Obito that I didn't? That I couldn't.

I closed my eyes. After a while, it wouldn't matter. I just needed something to distract her from feeling sorry for the Uchiha in the time being. A friend. Rin needed a group of people besides her family, besides me, to keep her busy.

A cluster of girls sat in the front. I stared at the back of their heads, a black mass of hair standing out from all the others. Kurenai Yuhi, was the obvious choice, and probably my safest bet too. As horrible as it sounds I knew she wasn't going to die anytime in the near future, and I couldn't say the same for the rest of the girls in our class.

After befriending Kurenai, maybe Rin would naturally assimilate with their clique. Already the girls in our class had arranged themselves into a social order. Those who feared being left out clumped together, bonding through this association rather than shared interests. Not that I could judge. During all these months I hadn't bothered playing nice with any of our classmates. At first, I thought it might be a little like moving to a new school where you have the chance to reinvent yourself and become any kind of person you want. But then I realized the extent of the mental gap between me and the rest of my class. People say all kinds of stuff like "maturity is when you learn to let things go" but when the last thing your peers refused to let go of was a toy building block, you've really got to acknowledge that it's a whole new ball game.

The more I thought about it the more I sold myself on the idea. Kurenai would become an ideal kunoichi, specializing in genjutsu, and working her way up to a Jōnin. Perhaps she didn't have the greatest feats, but if anything that made her more approachable. Yes, I decided. Yes, Kurenai will do just fine.

"Hey," someone whispered in my ear. "Where's your other notebook?"

I turned my head slowly. "Huh?"

Grinning at me with an increasingly familiar mien was Hifumi Yamanaka. "Your other notebook," she said again. "You didn't bring it today."

She leaned forward over her desk behind me. How long had she been sitting there? It's not like we had assigned seats in class. Anyone could sit wherever they wanted at any time. Although most people stuck to the same areas. However, clan kids were different. I hadn't even noticed someone like Kakashi because for the first week he had tried to be inconspicuous.

"What do you want?" I scowled, hiding my shock with anger.

"Hehe," her pupilless green eyes glinted with mischief. "Can I come to your house after school?"

"No." I turned back towards the front.

She poked my shoulder. "Well, how about-"

"No talking," Tamura-sensei scolded firmly.

I whirled around in my seat; for once glad at being reprimanded. Hifumi's stare continued to bore into my back, but I ignored it looking down at my paper. The notebook, but not this notebook. This notebook only had the circles I'd drawn looping all over the page and filling it with nothing.

.

.

I clomped down the staircase to the school courtyard.

"Why do you want to eat with Kurenai all of the sudden?" Rin asked, swinging her bento back and forth on each step.

"She seems pretty cool, don't you think so?" I opened the door to the outside. Blinking from the sudden light of the sun.

"I don't know," Rin shrugged, following me across the grass.

The yard was large, with an array of playground equipment near the academy walls, and the rest a vast green lawn, cherry trees skirting the edges. Kurenai was sitting with a small pack of girls under the school eaves. Not all of them, I realized were from our class. There were eight girls in all. I only recognized five of them, the rest were presumably from the grade above.

Every year or so a sizable portion would drop out. The classes became smaller and smaller the higher grade you were in. Moreover, usually by the last year, there were hardly any girls that some teams would have no kunoichi at all. I remembered Gai's team being like this.

Fukuda-sensei would always encourage us future kunoichi to stick together and build strong relationships now, as once leaving our original genin team, most would strictly go on missions with other kunoichi or shinobi in their fields. And while of course, anyone could go into whatever operation they wanted, it was just a fact that most kunoichi stuck to the lines of intelligence gathering, or medical teams, generally filling a support role rather than direct combat. With this in mind, it wasn't all too strange seeing the girls from a grade above merging friend groups with our class.

If anything It made me more confident to approach. After all, Rin was at the top of our class, and despite my shortcomings, I was steadily climbing that ladder too. In a few more months I was sure I'd be in the top ten.

"Hi," I started abruptly. "Can we sit with you?"

The girls all looked at each other cluelessly. Trying to get someone to step up as a leader from my question. As the seconds ticked by, I decided to be bold and sat first. It was silent for a moment before their talking resumed, quieter than before.

"Hey, Kurenai-chan," I paused. "I can call you that, right? Since we're in the same class?"

"Uh sure," she nodded.

"Ok, then you can just call me Sachie, or Sa-chan if you'd like."

She nodded again, slowly.

"And this is my twin sister, Rin."

"Hello," Rin said between munching on a slice of pickled daikon.

The other girls started ragging on their teachers, and I took the time to spread out the furoshiki cloth that had been covering my lunch. It was the last day of school for this week so we got to take dessert with us. Today it was a small sponge cake with mango jelly inside. I split it in half crudely with a chopstick.

"Kurenai, do you want some?"

I held out her half with the clean side of the furoshiki.

"No...I don't really like cake." Kurenai tucked her hair behind her ear. She noticeably turned her body away from me, and I wondered if this was on purpose. We had just been learning about body language after all. Then one of the other girls complained loudly about how hard the last test had been.

"I got a forty-three," admitted Yuzuki, a girl from our class with short black hair and hazel eyes. She fiddled with her chopsticks, pensively waiting for everyone's reaction. At once all these girls chimed in with polite tittering or other mollifying remarks. And Yuzuki gave a small pleased smile, before noticing Rin.

"Oh, Rin you're still at the top of the class right?" Yuzuki didn't wait for her answer. "So you must have gotten like a one-hundred or something."

"Well, yeah..." Rin hesitated, suddenly understanding the comment hadn't been so innocent. "I mean I did okay."

She ducked her head under their stares, her cheeks burning bright red under the purple rectangles.

"I got a ninety-two!" I announced. "It wasn't so hard."

Their stares were transferred to me, and it dawned on me that this was absolutely the wrong thing to say.

"How nice for you."

.

.

I was not looking forward to going to school the following Monday, and for once, neither was Rin. I had really screwed up my chances of her becoming friends with Kurenai as long as she continued to hang out with Yuzuki and the rest of them.

So imagine my surprise when upon entering the classroom that morning Kurenai wasn't in her usual seat, but in a desk behind ours, chatting eagerly with Hifumi Yamanaka.

"Hey! What are you standing there gawking for?" Hifumi called out as soon as she saw us. "Pick your jaws off the floor and come sit down, Sachie一 Rin!"

I almost turned around and walked right back out the door, but Rin, sweet Rin went on ahead. Like a moth drawn in by the flame, an icy blonde flame. Hifumi gave a big grin, and started talking to Rin even though she was still halfway across the room. She asked my sister all kinds of questions like "Did you see the frost Saturday morning? Geez, all our flowers nearly froze to death, haha!" Going, on and on, like you wouldn't believe. I hadn't forgotten what she had asked me on Friday. In fact, her words had haunted me for the entire weekend.

'Where's your other notebook?'

God, I was such an idiot!

"Sachie!" she gushed, pumping so much charisma in my name一 it was really extraordinary. "Stop standing there like an idiot and come over here!"

She was practically reading my mind already... I was totally screwed.

.

.

.

.

.

A/N: Not my favorite chapter, and much shorter than usual...but if I hold it off any longer it would become even more of a problem.

Hopefully, the next one will make up for it ;)