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Chapter Fifteen

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"Itachi-sama?"

I froze, turning to face the hesitant—blushing?—girl. "Good evening," I said politely, not wanting to risk using the wrong honorific.

Kiyomi's eyes dropped to the ground, showing her (rather apparent) nerves. "I apologize for my intrusion, but have you seen Wakana-san recently?"

I told her that no, I—well, not recently. I had heard her say something earlier about buying seals, though.

"Oh," said my Uchiha friend. "She was probably headed to Akatsuki Weapons. Thank you, Itachi-sama."

As she bowed and walked away, I realized that I wanted to tell her that I'd really spent the last hour at the shop, and that she'd only seen me during the minute or so I'd put on a henge. I decided to abstain.

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While Itachi didn't exactly have hordes of admirers following him everywhere, he did seem to get called "Itachi-sama" by all the girls. And it wasn't too hard to pick out the more obvious admirers, either—I might not be able to see past a henge, but it didn't take my hearing to see that the "five" girls walking by all used the exact same gait.

If I were him, I would probably henge into anonymity the moment I saw my doppelgänger . . . which, for all I knew, was precisely what he was doing. For all I knew, he was one of the girls.

"Itachi-sama?" my newest acquaintance asked, shining her eyes at me. "My kitten is still stuck in the tree."

I wondered if she'd thrown it up there herself.

The girl I'd met last week had.

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"How much can you hear right now, Kana-chan?" Kato asked one day, tilting his head to the side. "I know it's a lot, because I was right after you during the aptitude tests today, and they were still glaring at their machines. I don't think kicking machines helps very much."

I smiled. "Well, I can always hear a few people. I can hear your friend Kōta running home."

Kato interrupted. "How do you know that it's him? What if it's some other person who bumped into him and now you have the wrong one?"

Um. "I can hear people's heartbeats. Haven't I ever told you that before?"

Kato's intense gaze caught mine, and I found myself estimating how long it would take the lonely young ladies to notice him. "Everyone has a heartbeat, Kana-chan. They can't be that different."

I shrugged. "I'm not a chakra sensor. What else could it be? I just always know people by their heartbeats."

Instead of complaining that I was hiding something (which I wasn't. He was always perceptive of my telling the truth), he asked, "Aren't you even curious?"

Well, um. Shoot. That was my question, not his. He was supposed to be slowly working his way through residual kidnapping trauma. He wasn't supposed to have listened to whichever ANBU had oh-so-cheerily reported that Deer was off on a long mission. On the other hand, I didn't want my adorable baby brother realizing that his rescuer had, by all logic, died. "It doesn't really matter," I mumbled.

Perhaps a gentler wording would be better. Deer had completed his final mission? Deer had moved on to join a different herd? One could know where he was and yet never find him?

"It does too," Kato insisted, eager to shake me out of my indifference. "Maybe you do sense chakra! Maybe that's why you always know who it is."

If I could sense chakra, I would at least know what the kidnapper's chakra was like. "It doesn't matter," I said. "Besides, Yamanaka-san said I wasn't a sensor. And you can't hear chakra networks. Nothing pumps chakra. It's not that cool."

Distinguishing people was quite an accomplishment, really. It was worth more than just being able to hear well. It just wasn't chakra sensing.

Kato frowned. "It's super cool to know where Kōta is right now."

I nodded.

"Super cool," he assured me.

I couldn't shake the thoughts that I'd never be able to hear Deer again, and that it would absolutely be a mistake to mention that to my baby brother.

Said brother continued to stare me down with an odd look in his eye.

I retreated. "Um, I'm going to feed my fish."

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"What are you doing? It looks complicated," Kato said as he wandered over to sit on the floor in front of the couch. His fingers splayed over the worn rug.

"I'm knitting," I replied, folding my bare feet under myself and away from his hair. "It's actually easy and quite methodical."

He nodded and began his daily chakra exercises. I continued lurking and knitting, reaching over occasionally to unravel my ball of yarn.

Daddy walked in the back door and glanced at us briefly as he continued—he paused and frowned. "You're knitting. With senbon."

Well, they weren't poisoned (probably). Everything was very safe and ordinary.

Although the yarn was supposed to be knife-proof. And maybe, maybe, dog-proof, and maybe my next scarf would hold up to that nasty puppy Bull.

I wasn't going to hold my breath.

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It was probably a bad sign when I hopped over the Academy fence one day and nearly ran into the Hokage. "Good afternoon, Wakana-chan," he said amicably, as if this were some sort of prearranged meeting. In all fairness, it essentially was, since he'd been the one to arrange my schedule in the first place. That didn't stop me from having a miniature heart attack.

"Hi," I replied, not very amicably. I hadn't heard him standing there. I did now, but my hearing had completely, utterly failed. Should I be silently horrified, or should I ask him how his trick worked?

"Walk with me," he ordered, and yes, I decided, this was definitely the best thing for me to be doing at this moment. I fell into step beside him, trying not to stare. I could hear him now, all old and strong and Grandfather. It was easy to trust his heartbeat, even if I were still a little bitter and disoriented.

"How are you liking school?" Grandfather asked, raising his voice slightly as a breeze caught at his robes.

Well, to be perfectly honest— I turned and looked at him. There were any number of answers I could give, but I wasn't certain exactly what he meant. It could have been a jab at my refusal to skip ahead. He could have been referring to my conveniently escapable lunchtime, or perhaps the escape-inducing kunoichi class. I could be overthinking the question, but that was hardly possible when he was the Hokage.

"Wakana-chan." Grandfather met my eyes and shook his head. "I'm not asking for a commentary on the structure of the classes. My son Asuma did enough of that when he was young." Ouch. I could picture that moment, resentment bleeding into the son's voice every time his father the Hokage tried to make small talk. Something of the memory leaked into Grandfather's face. "But that's in the past," he said wryly. "Are you making friends?"

Making friends was about what I spent half my time doing. Friends for children and sealmakers everywhere, that was me. "Not really," I said. "Most of our classmates think I'm stuck up."

"And are you?"

"Yes. Grandfather, did you just snort?"

He didn't reply.

I smiled, happy to have made him laugh. "Kato didn't understand why I didn't want do a lot better than our classmates. They admire him, but they don't really like to talk to me. I guess he's just better with people."

That statement hung in the air for a second until it fell flat. But hey, it was true. Kato attracted our peers without making any effort at all. He was magnetic, somehow. And I was not.

I couldn't stop myself from manipulating.

"How about friends from other classes, then?"

It was too easy to ignore the one person he was probably asking about. "Well, I've known Shikamaru my whole life." (Somehow, I could hear his amusement at the fact that said lifetime hardly made for a long friendship.) "And Chōji. And I met Kiba before, too, although he calls me a little kid. And a girl."

"Oh?"

I glanced at him again, not caring which streets we were navigating when I knew them all by heart. "Well, it's the truth. I don't see why he keeps repeating it." It wasn't the worst thing to be repeated, either. Being female wasn't an insult, especially when Kiba's own mother was the head of his clan. He'd have to try a lot harder to insult me.

Grandfather looked like he had a different opinion, but as usual, the more I talked, the less he said.

Lest he decide I had a thing against fighting, I continued on. "I made a friend in kunoichi class, though! Her name's Kiyomi. We're friends because Hyūga-sensei hates both of us." For one brief, horrifying second, the thought occurred to me that Grandfather might well have meant for us to have been forced together—but his eyebrows reached for each other and that was definitely not the case.

It also occurred to me that a nobler person might decide to stop talking at this point. This was, after all, my problem to deal with. "She says Kiyomi will never be a medic," I tattled. "She gives us the hardest questions. She doesn't threaten other girls with senbon."

"Hyūga Hi—" interrupted Grandfather, but I was faster than his placating remark.

"And," I said, "she says my handwriting is ugly." For some reason, this last statement really did distress me. My school handwriting was supposed to be uneven, not calligraphic. Trust Hyūga-sensei to single me out for anything short of perfect.

Grandfather didn't say anything else until we reached our destination: a place Daddy wouldn't have touched with a five-foot pole. Daddy was so relaxed these days. By the time he got a genin team, he might even eat the evil ramen himself.

Grandfather didn't say anything after we sat down at the ramen stand, either, because he was overridden by the world's loudest blonde fuzzball. Any worries I might have had about my hearing—say, what if it had simply failed to hear Grandfather?—died instantly. My hearing, sadly, did not die instantly. I cringed, which was doubtless why Naruto noticed me.

"Hey, I know you!"

I blinked. I hadn't exactly forgotten my encounter with him and Sakura. For him to have remembered a tiny, redheaded girl was a bit more surprising. Maybe he'd seen me eating with Shika and Chōji.

"But uh, I don't know your name."

While Naruto scratched the back of his head sheepishly, Grandfather took pity. "This is Wakana, Naruto-kun."

I nodded politely. Naruto nodded, too, but got stuck half-way by another customer's getting a bowl of ramen. I could practically hear the wheels in his head turn. "Hey, Gramps!" Demanding blue eyes stared down my grandfather. "I want ramen."

"Would you like ramen as well, Wakana-chan?"

Yes, please, I would, thank you. Hmph. Was it so hard to be polite?

As I sat on my little pedestal, Naruto's head cocked ever-so-slightly. I wasn't being too sneaky in my pointed use of manners. He noticed. He filed the information away in his brain. And promptly continued his lifetime rant on the manifold benefits of ramen, which really boiled down to the singular fact that ramen . . . was ramen.

He only paused this lecture to scarf down several bowls of the stuff.

I only paused my incredulous staring to exchange silent questions with Grandfather, who was sitting between Naruto and me. When did this start?

Grandfather replied, You think this is bad? You should have seen his mother.

These conversations never really worked out. They were too similar to the days before I'd known Japanese and resorted to entertaining myself with ad libs. Back in the days when I'd loathed Kakashi. Which were coincidentally the days he'd been a stick.

I turned away from Grandfather and our failed conversation to watch passersby on the street. The majority were mothers with very young children. I didn't recognize very many of them, and knew even fewer by name. Still, spying on them was more interesting than watching Naruto eat. Perhaps not as horrifically fascinating, though.

"How are your classes going, Naruto-kun?" Grandfather asked during one of Naruto's infrequent breaks for air. A better question would be if the boy actually paused to breathe or simply kept inhaling his food. I couldn't find a difference. I continued my resolute staring at pedestrians.

There was a very odd silence as Naruto decided that he did not want to answer the question, and that ramen was consequently harder to eat on an uncomfortable stomach. He settled for the happy medium of finishing his bowl and asking the proprietor for another. This of course did not negate Grandfather's inquiry.

"Um," said Naruto.

I turned toward him and met a very reluctant expression. I smiled. "Didn't your class just start sparring? I heard that you won a fight."

Naruto's face drooped and then lit up. "Well," he said, and his face brightened until it was pretty evident that he'd forgotten whatever had made him uncomfortable. "One of the older kids was making fun of me." At this admission (plus the knowledge that Naruto's age group had a year before spars actually started), Grandfather's gaze sharpened. Naruto continued, oblivious. "He said my name was dumb! And then he said he hates ramen, too. So I told him he was stupid, 'cause ramen's the best food in the world and my name's awesome because of it. And if that's not cool enough, the hero from The Tale of the Utterly Gutsy Ninja is named Naruto, too!"

Now Grandfather was smiling.

"He said, 'That's a dumb book, just like you.' So I punched him. And then we both went at it until one of the teachers found us." The subsequent scolding had drawn Academy students like flies to honey, with the exception of Shika's posse. It's pointless to be curious when one can hear a verbal dressing-down enunciated so loudly.

After the fresh ramen came, I shared a few of my own opinions. Mainly that thrown weapons were useless, which Naruto didn't agree with. According to him, tests and quizzes were the only truly useless thing we were given. I said I wouldn't mind them if the lectures were worth listening to. He agreed. Grandfather said nothing and listened.

Grandfather dropped us off at the Academy a few minutes before our next classes began. "Thank you for the meal, Grandfather," I said.

"Yeah," agreed Naruto, "thanks!" He turned to me. "See ya, Wakana-chan!"

I didn't quite know what to think. But I did know that he walked straight past his classroom and out the other end of the hall.

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~I feel so pathetic. Eep.

This chapter is fondly dedicated to the time I glanced at some previous lines and met my new friend Naruto-Kim. . . .

I'll also dedicate this chapter to any of you who find the idiom/proverb I changed just to see if anyone would notice. Bonus points if you already found it.

Does anyone else think the summary could use a revamp? If any of you have suggestions, I'm definitely open to hearing them. Howza 'bout if you come up with a summary that I really like, I offer you a build-your-own character appearance? You know you want to! Honestly, I don't know what makes a good or catchy summary. If any of you want to help, I'll be in your debt.

In case you haven't noticed, I posted a new SI story! Although it's not really a "self" insert, which kind of amuses me. You guys should go see if you like it! It's called "The Eyes Have It." And yes, thank you, I have been kicking myself for the last week because apparently I'm not the first person to use that title. Anyway, shoo. I need to ignore my responsibilities and get started on the next chapter.

Did you know this story will have hit 100,000 views by now? And has close to 1,000 follows? Wow. You guys. Wow. I still don't believe anyone actually likes this. Moving on.

Thanks for reading! There's a poll on my bio, if you don't feel like reviewing. ;)