.

Chapter Eleven

.

"It's okay, Kana-chan! Uncle Gai is coming to get you!"

Ah, there was nothing quite like that melodious voice to bring fear to my heart—except perhaps the familial word it had uttered.

I thank you for your concern, friend of my father, but there's really no need to concern yourself. In fact, you're actually the reason I panicked.

Gai made it to me before his . . . resonant echoes died out. His arms wrapped around my tiny body like a steel leg trap, drawing whatever attention had not yet been drawn to the inevitable sunset genjutsu. I shuddered. Likely because I could no longer breathe. Unlikely out of happiness, although the hug was at least shielding me from the very public eye.

"Where is your father's noble partner?" Gai asked, searching the ground as if Pakkun could possibly hide behind or underneath me. Had Pakkun actually been with me, I had no doubt he would have taken the opportunity to disappear.

"Mmf," I said. Gai noticed. His parenting skills were currently limited to "friends close, enemies closer" and "hold the talking football at arm's length," but hey, this way my lungs could reinflate. "He had to talk to Daddy."

Allow me to think this one over. I could honestly say that Pakkun was dozing on the couch, thus prompting Gai to tuck me under his arm and carry me home and potentially repeat the process every time he sees me. Or I could decide that Gai would never see me unattended in public again. Since only one option involved henges, I chose that one.

"How unfortunate," Gai replied, letting me squirm to the pavement. "Why did you not go with him?"

His disappointment curled into my stomach. "I wanted . . . I wanted to buy Daddy a birthday present."

The disappointment instantly turned into understanding. We were surrounded by ninja weapons and supply shops. Most of them wouldn't let a four-year-old in their front door, let alone sell her something. My "rescuer" flashed me a smile. "Are you sure that he wants a present from here?"

"Yes," I said immediately.

"Very well, Daughter of my Eternal Rival. Which store would you like to visit first?" I could buy him hot pink shirts or a floral print mask. If I had enough money, that was. I shrugged.

Gai swept us into one of the weapons shops and introduced me to the saleslady. "Kakashi's kid?" The woman nearly spit out her gum. "I suppose I can see it, but only because no other breed of toddler would want to come in here."

Gai and I exchanged a glance, an action I'd never thought I'd do with him. But no, I assured him, children these days were very willing to visit these types of stores. The lady was most likely insane. I told her that, too, tactfully. "Huh?"

"Well, sure," she drawled. "All the ninja shops on this street have minor genjutsus placed on them. It's a little competition that's been going on for a few weeks—nifty seal it runs off, too. Only affects the outside of buildings."

I ran to the opposite wall and traced my chubby fingers over a glass display for fūma shuriken. "One seal?" Gai questioned, sounding thoughtful. "Then why are the buildings different?"

The woman choked on the bubble she'd been blowing. "Right," she said. "As Kakashi's rival, you must be decent at genjutsu detection. Most higher level ninja would just dispel the illusion and not notice it. Huh. Underestimated you."

Gai's smile was almost audible. "It wouldn't be the first time."

"No kidding." Gum popped and managed to work its way into a solid rhythm once again. "My uncle bought the seals in Earth Country last November from a sealmaster who was about to croak. They're a brilliant design. You write what you want the building to look like on them and just slap the tag on a wall."

"Do you have any in stock?"

She winced halfheartedly. "Nah, sorry. We sold our extras to the other stores. We've tried copying them but haven't gotten a successful replication so far. It's a terrible loss." Pop, went her gum. "You don't happen to have any sealer friends, do you?"

"The only one currently in the village is my Eternal Rival."

"Oh, Kakashi." She waved dismissively. "He took a gander at it last week, on his yearly explosive tag run. Said he could replicate them with a month of research. Problem is, the seals disintegrate after a few weeks and we're already on our last one."

There went the hope for buying explosive tags. For Daddy's birthday. Yeah. I'd have to find something more unique. Like ninja wire. I've seen some pretty interesting cat's cradle-esque creations with that stuff. Weevil was a fan of glow-in-the-dark.

"Kid!" the saleslady yelped. "Get down from there!" She didn't pin me to the upper cabinets with senbon like Anko would have. I hopped down behind the shelves of shuriken. What wasn't to love about shuriken? They were symmetrical, unlike kunai, and didn't have to be thrown straight.

I considered them the frisbee's adorable cousin.

Besides, frisbees—sorry, shuriken—had tens of possible modifications. They could be hollow. They could retract. They could expand or unfold. The nicer ones were insanely expensive and had collapsible parts. I grabbed one of those, the fūma shuriken, before the saleslady could throw something through the display glass. You're so shiny and beautiful. Were we in love? Yes, we were in love. You're so sharp, like an overgrown meat cleaver. We will stay together forever, you and I. We will feast on the—whoa, wait, hang on.

I stared at the weapon, distantly aware that Gai was crying joyfully and spouting his youth nonsense, and that the lady was shouting at him. The shuriken didn't feel like it was influencing my thoughts. Which would be the whole point.

"One scratch and I'm suing your father. Put it down, kid! Gai, get her away!"

Gai reached over the counter and deposited me in the middle of the floor. He forgot to remove my pet shuriken, which gave me plenty of time to open it. Shing! cried the weapon. It wasn't alone in its noisemaking.

"Gai!" the woman snarled. The jōnin reached for the battle-ready fūma blade with fingers faster than sound. I jerked it out of his reach with my own trained reflexes. Well, I say out of his reach. A better description would be close enough to my body that he wouldn't dare touch it. Close enough that I suspected it was touching me. And finally, close enough that warning bells were sounding in my head—correction, that was the shop's door.

I love my life. It's so full of happy coincidences.

Morino Ibiki raised an eyebrow as I dropped the giant shuriken. Gai pushed me backward before it could amputate a foot. The saleslady was still ranting.

And somehow, there was utter silence when I crashed backward through a few racks of armor. I winced and covered my ears. Ever since Yasahiro's relevation, I'd tried to stop sending chakra to my ears. If my hearing were not genetic, I reasoned, then surely it was adjustable? Nope, it wasn't. Not in the slightest.

Once the armor (and decorative senbon, of all things) stopped raining, I picked myself up and waved at Gai. He didn't spout anything about the power of youth or its prevailing, but I'd moved on to bigger concerns.

Morino Ibiki was eyeing me like I'd just escaped the bottom of his shoe. I knew who he was. I'd probably thrown up on him as an infant. Most importantly, he was on the list of people I couldn't afford to be suspicious to. And what did I do with those people?

I grinned. His eyes widened ever-so-slightly. I pounced.

If there was one thing I wanted Ibiki to remember me as, it was an adorable, affectionate, adorable, adorable child. And very, very harmless.

The look on his face said he was pretty sure I was poisoning him somehow, but hey, I'd been known to have done that before.

I directed my attention to cuddling my way into his affections until I was pulled away. I moaned. Contrary to popular belief, moaning was not something I did very frequently. I happened to glance down.

Those would be the senbon. Oh, and that would be the pain.

Even so, I had plenty of time to reevaluate the outside of the shop as Gai needlessly rushed me to the hospital. "Konoha Quilting and Needlework," the sign advertised. Suddenly, I wanted to turn around.

.

I was back the next day, limping. The girl behind the counter jumped as the doorbell sounded. I limped inside, ignoring the fact that the medics had completely healed my stab wounds. "Hi," I prompted.

Her gum popped. "Oh! Welcome to Akatsuki Weapons."

There are days when one forgoes deciphering the written language in favor of seeing weapons in the window, and then there are days when one is too busy wondering why one cannot see a genjutsu. I choked on something insubstantial. "Akatsuki?"

Her head bobbed up and down. "You've heard of us? Was it because of our store-wide discount on armor?"

"No," I admitted truthfully.

She huffed, nearly losing her gum. "It's not fair. Everyone's heard how my great-grandfather tried to murder the First Hokage, but no one remembers that he was already disinherited."

I remembered to breathe again, which was convenient. "Actually, I heard about you from my brother's jōnin sensei." Did I mention I was henged? This time I'd attempted an older version of myself. It would have been simple if we'd had any properly-sized clothes in the house, but Daddy had apparently skipped the entire growing phase of his life.

The girl glanced over me more seriously. "Your brother?" Oh, dear. I knew that tone. It was the same tone that nearly every female Daddy's age used when addressing him. Should have made myself more ugly. Maybe I won't get his nose.

This wasn't the same lady that had been manning the shop yesterday, even if they were similar enough to be clones. This girl was younger. She didn't seem to know every ninja in the village, either.

"Do you have anything for a twenty-some ninja who needs nothing?"

Her nose wrinkled, putting her on the younger side of teenage. "Um, what does he like?"

I smiled dryly, happy to have escaped the awkward situation. "Teasing me." Her eyes immediately dropped down, and my heart leapt into my throat. The skirt I was wearing was actually one of Daddy's old pairs of shorts.

"About," she swallowed and went for the delicate observation. "Your leg?"

I decided that I never wanted to set foot in this shop for the rest of my life. First Akatsuki, now a rude question about a feigned limp. "Sure," I said. "End of my career. The works." I waved the apology in her face away. "I was wondering if there's anything like the genjutsu seal I heard about?"

Her face fell, and this time she did swallow her gum. "I hope not. There's a competition going with the other shops, and civilians keep walking in and asking where we keep our cloth. I like keeping a tally. I only work here when Mom's busy."

I nodded. To be honest, I was ready to leave.

"But I was trying to copy it, because one day I want to make all of our storage seals. We pay a fortune for them, you know."

The genjutsu was painted on the front of the display window. Individual brushstrokes danced through the backbones of several different quilt squares. The paint flickered, reminding me of my unstable chakra.

I'd seen through quite a few henges as a baby. Not all of them, definitely. Still, for all I knew, I was simply getting better at detecting illusions.

The better theory had to do with the chakra Yasahiro had described. Anything similar to what fueled the Sharingan was very likely to mess up genjutsus. Since I couldn't stop my super-hearing, it was perhaps reasonable to assume that my brain needed the special chakra to function.

The question was, how could I control this "brain chakra"?

Could I expect for all genjutsus to take time to kick in? Because they hadn't before. They'd been rather hit-or-miss.

"It's really complicated," the girl continued desperately, sensing that she was losing me. "Have you ever tried copying a seal? I've heard they do that in the Academy, so you must have."

"Sure," I agreed.

"Yeah, well, you know how most seals have a few layers of writing?"

I nodded, letting the matter of brain chakra drop. I wonder if Daddy will bring any research back to the house. Meh, wouldn't understand it, anyway.

"This one's got a dictionary. I think I got it all, but I have no idea how it fits together, you understand?"

"Sure," I repeated, idly reaching down to scratch my borrowed weapon pouch. Only. Hang on, Daddy's shorts went to my knees.

I had a weapon pouch sticking right out of my skirt.

Scratch everything, I was an idiot. Teenage outfit, ninja pouch, limp that I could claim as my retirement because I couldn't claim to be a ninja because I hadn't managed to find a forehead protector. I limped toward the counter and asked to see her work, fully intending to make a break for it.

She didn't head into the back room. She reached under the counter and pulled out a four-inch stack of paper. She pointed to a small piece of paper on the wall beside her with the words "Konoha sewing shop" jotted on.

We pored over the seal for an hour and many times after that. When our attempts at copying it failed spectacularly, we changed the angle of our entrepreneurship and tried derivatives, instead. When those became successful, I spent many nights hunched under my bed with a light and a pen to meet our production quota.

However, our sealmaking breakthrough happened months into the future, not half a year before Daddy's birthday.

.

While I prowled around the village with and without Pakkun, Kato worked on his chakra feverishly. He was every bit as obsessed as I'd been before I'd been able to henge. I didn't see why. As far as I was concerned, my brother had been using chakra for years.

I'd written it off when he was younger, but now I was convinced. My little brother was . . . shocking. Everything confirmed it. He didn't even wear socks, for one.

Tenzō, Asuma, and Inoichi had all spoken to Daddy about his son's affinity.

What had started as an unusual excess of static electricity had turned into frequent shocks. The shocks had recently turned visible. I was waiting for first-degree burns.

Kato was blind not to have noticed, but then the Hatake family seemed to have automatic mental blocks. Daddy had long ago decided to be the perfect ninja. I had forced myself into creating a physical henge. Kato was unconsciously emitting elemental chakra.

I half expected my goldfish to start talking.

No, wait, it was a Nara goldfish.

.

"Happy birthday, Daddy."

Our father raised an eyebrow at the miniature box I'd handed him and smiled. "Why, it's even wrapped in my favorite color!"

As I highly doubted his favorite color was hot pink with orange flowers, I shrugged. "Are you going to open it?"

Clever fingers demolished the tangled mess I'd made of the ribbon and proceeded to unfold the wrapping paper. He paused. "Explosive tags? That was thoughtful of you, Kana-chan." His voice said he was pondering where I'd gotten real, live explosive tags.

I grinned. "I met a lady who makes them." Strictly speaking, the seals were more of a collaboration. My sealmaking buddy provided the finishing touches, but I filled the papers with cramped handwriting and thought up most of the ideas. "Will you use one, Daddy?"

He glanced at me, suspicion surfacing before he pushed it away. "Anything for you, Kana-chan." He tied one of the paper creations to a kunai and lobbed it at a tree.

The forest disappeared, immediately replaced by an achingly familiar sunset and wave-torn beach. Daddy sucked in a breath, but the scene vanished without causing lasting mental damage.

"Actually," he said after a long, deliberate pause. "I may be able to use these."

I snickered. The rest of the "explosive tags" were filled with other types of genjutsu—notably swarms of rubber duckies—and weren't as scarring. Oh, who was I kidding? Large clouds of glitter were always terrifying.

.

.

~I'm heading back to school soon, so I hope you enjoyed the almost acceptable update speed. We'll see what school does to my writing. Probably what it did last time, which was effectively a fiery death.

Did you know there's a TvTropes page for this? It's shiny! And awesome. Really, wow. I did not expect to see one for this, ever.

I'm running out of things to say, so here are some of my statistics for this chapter. 2768 words. 88 go-back-and-edit marks, many additional changes. I don't know how other people do longer chapters, considering my editing process takes over a day.

Say, do you happen to have a favorite OC? I feel like I've been creating more every chapter (which is generally a bad idea in fanfiction, but most of them are important to the plot), and I know that can get old rather quickly. If I know what you guys prefer, I can try to make them less of a chore.

I kinda miss having up a poll up. Any suggestions?

Oh, and the fun's about to started. By which I mean writing this is about to become a major headache. As if all my random additions weren't bad enough.