It hadn't occurred me that we'd been living off of the funds provided in compensation for Mom and Dad's deaths until Imiki brought it up to me one day, just days after my fifth birthday.
"Futaba-chan, our funds are running low," Imiki said, beating cookie dough. I guess my humble birthday bash was a little pricier. "That means I'll have to go back to taking missions soon."
My heart sank. The idea of missions still made dread coil in my gut. "How long will the missions last?"
"The well-paying ones can last a week," Imiki said sadly. She seemed to read my mind as she added on, "But I don't plan on taking any particularly high-risk missions. I've just taken a B-rank, and I leave tomorrow but I'll probably be back on Thursday at latest." She gave me a smile.
"What about...me?" I asked meekly, fully expecting Imiki to slam some more ninja world realities down on me and tell me I was going to have to take care of myself for two days.
"I've talked with Michiko-san and she's OK'd you staying at the compound with Kouko and Shuu until I get back from my missions," Imiki reassured me.
"Oh." I blanched at the thought of being surrounded by Uchihas, but realized I had no better option. Hopefully Shuu would shield me from the overwhelming stoicism. "Should I go pack?"
"Unless you want to wear Uchiha-crested clothes for a couple days, probably," Imiki said dryly. I was finally getting old enough to be deemed worthy of her sarcasm. I rolled my eyes, leaving to pack.
That evening, I trudged along with Imiki towards the entrance of the compound, eyeing the crested noren that hung down in the outer gate. Imiki pushed it aside casually, looking comfortable in her surroundings—I wish I could say the same.
This place was huge. Decorative ponds here, zen-themed gardens there, God, they even had their own shops. The Uchiha District was bigger than I'd ever thought it would be, like a city within a city. And on our way here, we'd gotten these looks. Like under all the false pleasantries, they were somewhat wary of us. Outsiders.
Imiki either didn't mind or didn't notice the exclusive atmosphere, and she looked awfully familiar with the compound as she navigated us through it towards one of the smaller houses. Hadn't she mentioned once that one of her closest friends was an Uchiha? I wondered if I'd run into them here.
"Futaba-chan, Imiki-san, good evening!" Uchiha Michiko greeted us after answering the door. She noticed my awe-struck expression and quickly added, "Please don't be overwhelmed. This compound is a lot smaller than it was when I was your age." She turned from the door. "Shuu! Futaba-chan is here!"
Shuu arrived at the door, pulling me into the house. "Good luck, Imiki-sensei!" he exclaimed at the same time I called, "See you soon, Imiki-nee!"
As the door got farther and farther away from sight, I couldn't help feeling like I was being pulled deeper and deeper into a dark labrynth. But Shuu was very eager to show me something, so he tugged me along around corners and past different rooms until we ended up in his room, which was surprisingly neat for a boy like Shuu. Probably the work of Kouko, because even my room wasn't this neat.
"What is it that you dragged me through your maze of a house for?" I asked, shaking out my arm that had finally been released from the clutches of the eager boy.
He pulled something out of his dresser. It was a long wooden stick that curved smoothly towards the tip. "I got a bokken!" he elaborated gleefully.
"Oh, is that what that is?" I muttered to myself. "So they've finally started teaching you kenjutsu?"
"Yeah!" He grinned. "It's gonna be so awesome, just you wait!"
"We'll see if you can beat me and my bō," I taunted challengingly. He knocked me on the head with the bokken in retaliation.
"You're on!" Shuu made for the door, and I barely had time to drop my stuff and unfasten the training bō from my bag before he was out the door.
"Wait up! I'm gonna get lost!" I protested. Against my better judgement, I broke into a run in the thankfully relatively empty streets. I had no idea where the training grounds were in this place, but like hell I was going up to a random Uchiha stranger to ask for directions.
The shops and houses and Uchiha fan-branded flags started to blend together as I continued to run aimlessly. I stopped at the end of a road that split into two opposing paths, seeing if I could hear Shuu from either direction. Maybe he'd come looking for me if I waited long enough... but the longer I stood there at the crossroad, the more I felt like the shopkeepers were watching me wondering why I was there. I panted to myself, trying to decide which way I should go, then veered down the left path sharply.
"Oof!"
With a thud and a sharp sting in my forehead, I was knocked backwards. Losing my balance, I collapsed onto my butt and squeezed my eyes shut, rubbing at the offending lump on my forehead. After the pain receded, I opened my eyes and saw a sickeningly familiar boy mirroring my exact position, down to the hand pressed to a spot on his forehead.
Oh, god, no—
"Watch where you're going!" Sasuke barked at me as he dropped his hand from his forehead. Then, his eyes widened a bit in recognition. "Wait, I know you. You're the girl that's with Shuu a lot."
"That's me," I confirmed blandly.
Sasuke narrowed his eyes. "Why are you here? Where's Shuu?"
"That's what I'd like to know," I grumbled. I brushed myself off and stood up, still feeling kind of dizzy from the impact. Trying in vain to keep this exchange as brief and unmemorable as possible, I changed the subject with a question of my own. "Do you know how to get to the training field?"
"Which one?"
"Which one?" I asked incredulously. "Uh, I dunno…?"
Sasuke frowned at me. I could just see the judgement in his eyes. Then, he sighed and stood up too—surprisingly, we were pretty much exactly the same height—before starting to walk past me. "I'll bring you to the biggest one."
I trotted along behind him, both stunned and horrified that I'd ended up roping a kindergarten-aged Uchiha Sasuke into helping me find Shuu.
It thankfully didn't take that long, as apparently I'd chosen the wrong path to take at the split, going left when I should have gone right, and soon I saw a large open training field, perhaps bigger than any of the ones I'd seen littered throughout Konoha. I stood in the evening rays of sunlight as I squinted and looked for signs of Shuu. Sure enough, he was here in this garden-like training field, too, frantically darting around the edges of it to peer into the surrounding streets.
"Shuu!" I called out, waving my bō. Shuu whipped around at my call, instantly relaxing in relief and jogging over to us.
"You idiot, I can't believe you actually managed to get lost when I was like two steps ahead of you!" Shuu looked both stressed and endlessly amused at the situation.
I whacked him with the bō, not hard enough to do any serious damage, but definitely hard enough to be felt, and scowled at him. "You left me to die in your labrynth of a neighbourhood, you traitor!"
Shuu opened his mouth, likely to argue more with me, when he finally seemed to notice my unwilling companion. Shuu's face turned steely immediately. "Why is he here?"
The flames of intense familial rivalry practically licked at my face as I stepped between the two glaring boys. "He helped me get here after you ditched me."
"I'll leave now," Sasuke drawled, crossing his arms behind his head. His tone was spookily familiar to me—it was the boredly annoyed drawl he was known for in the series. Shuu glared after Sasuke as he went, the grip on his bokken white-knuckled.
"What's his problem, anyway?" he growled.
How much his rivalry with Sasuke affected him was starting to come off as ridiculous to me. I didn't know what exactly had happened between them, but I knew that dwelling on it would just ruin Shuu's mood even more, so I changed the subject, deciding to address this Shuu-Sasuke issue later. "Weren't we supposed to be sparring, Shuu?" I twirled my bō in my hand and stabbed it down into the ground.
"Oh, right!" My friend snapped back to reality, backing away from me and getting his bokken ready. "Let's do this!"
After some fooling around with his new bokken, during which I kicked Shuu's ass and had my own ass kicked in return, I was bored and sore and needed something, anything to do.
We were sitting outside on one of those wide wrap-around porches outside one of the buildings bordering a main street—Shuu insisted it was fine to just sit down as long as the shopkeepers could see the Uchiha crest on his back. You could probably fit a couch across the width of this porch, and I learned it was called an engawa. This entire place was so...grand, but in a traditional way. It was also nearly identical all throughout. I resolved to never let Shuu out of my sight for the rest of my time spent here because next time, there may be no Sasuke to help me.
"Shuu..." I groaned.
"What?"
"Shuu..."
"I said what?"
"Shuuuuuuu..." I drew out his name.
"Gah! What do you want?" he snapped, whirling in his sitting position to glare at me.
"Do you have any cards? Playing cards?" I asked. I was splayed out on the floor staring up at the ceiling of the covered area. It wasn't very interesting. The wood patterns grew old after the first fifteen minutes.
Shuu frowned. "Yeah, I think so. I'll go get them." He then left me alone to lie staring at the ceiling. I hoped that no one saw me and questioned why I, a non-Uchiha child, was lying splayed out in front of a closing tea shop.
Once he had returned with them, I leapt to my feet. "Good!" I said, clamping a hand on his shoulder. Shuu didn't even flinch at the sudden movement, already used to my antics. "Have you heard of a game called Speed?" I asked. He shook his head. I plopped down onto the polished wood, Shuu doing the same. "Okay, it's a really fast reflex-based game that relies on your adding skills and how fast you can slam a card down. The goal is to get all the cards in your hand in the pile." I started shuffling the deck, my pudgy fingers unused to the action. "There are lots of different ways to play speed. This is the one I learned though, because the other ways are too hard and not as fun. So this is Asagiri Speed." I started dealing cards to both myself and Shuu.
As I dealt, I continued my explanation. "So we start with a card in the middle, let's say it's an 8 card. Whoever has a 9 card has to put it down, but also say what 8 plus 9 is. Then whoever has a 10 card has to put it down and add ten to the total. We go up to 31 and start over. Whoever—"
"Stop, this is too hard," Shuu whined, gripping at his head. "I don't wanna play math games for fun."
I pouted. "It's more fun than it sounds! And it's just mental math!" Okay, maybe I was being a bit sneakily unfair—I technically had 14 or 15 years on Shuu, likely giving me a bit of an advantage when it came to mental math.
Shuu stood up, turning away from me. "I'm going to the bathroom. Have fun playing your stupid math games."
As he walked away into the tea shop, the sound of the elderly couple greeting him audible through the doors, I muttered to myself, "It's fun, not stupid." I continued to set up a game for two a little sadly.
"What are you doing?" a boy's voice asked, sounding a bit confused and maybe a bit wary too.
I looked up. Crap. Sasuke!? Again!?
Well, I was kind of in the Uchiha compound. But that was besides the point—two Sasuke encounters in one day was more than enough excitement for me. "Playing Asagiri Speed."
He focused his gaze (bit too sharp to belong on a kid's face) on me as I continued to deal the cards. I met his eyes without flinching internally or externally. Little victories. "What's your name, anyway?"
"Asagiri Futaba," I answered begrudgingly. Then, for the heck of it, "You wanna play?" Speed wasn't a single-player game by any means. Even if it was Sasuke, there was no one else I could think of asking. Kouko was at a sleepover at an academy friend's house again, and Itachi was just...no. And I was unbearably bored.
Sasuke frowned again, seeming reluctant but—surprisingly—not downright against it. Come to think of it, did Sasuke have many friends at this age? If he was anything like Shuu, it meant he, like almost all children of the Uchiha clan, was fairly sheltered from others. I may have avoided this guy with a passion before, but I couldn't keep my will steeled for much longer now I'd made this revelation. Before he went bitter, Sasuke was never the picture of social popularity, only gaining the attention of others after...after he became mean, for reasons I still couldn't remember. I found that a little sad.
"Fine," he replied at last, sitting down slowly across from me. I ran through the explanation once more, wrapping up the dealing process as I talked. Sasuke seemed to pick up the rules of the game a lot more readily than Shuu had, nodding every now and then with a look of intense focus on his face.
The game started when I flipped a card from the pile of cards in the centre. "Five!"
Sasuke was on it immediately, slamming down card after card. "Twelve! Eighteen! Twenty-eight!"
I fumbled with my cards, thrown off by Sasuke's sheer speed. "Twenty-nine!"
Sasuke smirked victoriously, slamming down the card I dreaded most—a two. "Thirty-one," he declared.
I gaped at him. So much for fifteen years more of experience.
It was at that moment that Shuu returned, seeing us and immediately balking. "Why's he here again!?"
"He's playing Asagiri Speed with me because a certain someone didn't want to," I explained matter-of-factly. Petty? Maybe a little. "Why don't you join us, Shuu? It's more fun with three. Maybe you'll be fast enough to beat him." I pointed a thumb in Sasuke's direction. "I sure wasn't this last round."
Sasuke gloated at the mention of his win, and that seemed to be all it took for Shuu to grit his teeth and sit down. "Deal me in."
After reorganizing the deck into three hands and a pile in the centre, we were good to go. I noted how tense the atmosphere had gotten and how quickly Shuu's attitude had changed once the idea of beating Sasuke was brought up.
I could see how it developed, being honest—Sasuke and Itachi were prodigies in a family of prodigies. Being the direct cousin of the brothers was bound to draw a lot of unwelcome comparison, leading Shuu to demonize his cousins and act out. Probably. I wasn't no child psychologist.
So then the key to helping Shuu overcome this was to help him get along with his cousin, right?
But I had made it a rule from day one that canon interactions were to be avoided, and that's where the problem arose. There was no way Shuu and Sasuke could coexist in one space peacefully if they didn't have someone to peacekeep. So it came down to whether or not I was willing to give up on my plans of a calm, non-canon-affiliated life in favour of helping my best friend overcome the problem that made his face twist up in discomfort whenever someone brought up his clan.
Was that really a question?
Staring between Sasuke and Shuu, seated in our little triangle of children, I flipped a card from the pile in the centre over. "Three!"
Shuu was quick to react. "Seven!" he cried slamming down a four.
Ack. "Eleven!" I slammed down a four too. I'd made the game a little easier for kids by allowing repeat cards. It also made addition more interesting.
Sasuke was the next to call out a number. "Sixteen!" He didn't pause there, though. He then slammed down another card. "Twenty-two!"
"Twenty-nine!"
Shit. I did some quick math, adding eight to twenty-nine and subtracting thirty-one from it. "Six!" I said, finally.
"Seventeen!"
"Twenty-five!"
"Twenty-six?"
"Dummy, that's not right! Someone call a penalty!"
The game went on, but I was always last. What did I expect, playing against two Uchiha geniuses? At least Shuu and Sasuke seemed to enjoy themselves, considering how they immediately started another game as soon as it became clear I wasn't able to put my cards in the pile.
It went on for an hour or so before Michiko found us slamming cards down on the engawa of a now long-closed tea shop. "Oh my, you three. I'm glad to see you all getting along now, but it's time for bed." The three of us groaned in unison. "Futaba, do you want to sleep in Shuu's room or Kouko's?"
"Shuu," I said. I didn't want to be alone. I could have another...dream. Experience. One of the most terrifying ways you could wake up from a nightmare was waking in an unfamiliar place alone. And no way was I spending the night in this place alone.
When I did settle into my sleeping bag, I reviewed my experience. Sasuke joining us had been unexpected, but judging from how much he seemed to enjoy himself and his off-handed whine about Itachi being on a mission, it wasn't...completely unlikely he would do the same again tomorrow.
Most reassuring of all, after we'd parted with Sasuke for the night, Shuu's face remained set in a frown, but he'd uttered no harsh comments or complaints about the other boy to me afterwards. He looked more conflicted than anything, and that seemed like progress to me.
With that in mind, I tried to recall some more games from my other life we could play before I drifted off to sleep.
I slept a dreamless sleep that night, to my relief. No Enma or past memories these days. I guessed the big red beast-man had had enough of me for now.
Throughout the following day, I played different games with Shuu, who went along with me like the great friend he was (deep down). Just as I'd guessed, Sasuke joined us in the afternoon in a version of Twister we'd been playing outside with a makeshift spinner and some quick chalkwork on the paving.
Twister ended in a dogpile, with a complaining Shuu at the bottom growling at Sasuke, who was in the middle, about his weight and Sasuke pinning it on me, who was blissfully weightless at the top. In retaliation, I dug my chin into the back of his head a little harder.
We'd also played hide-and-seek and Go Fish and had simply lazed about or splashed around in the ponds around the compound before we were called in for dinner, then bed.
Personally, I was very pleased with the day. It had gone a lot more harmoniously than I'd expected and Shuu had definitely been enjoying himself on more than one occasion.
Before we went our separate ways, Sasuke turned to us. "I don't like you," he started, looking at Shuu, "but you two play fun games."
I blinked. "Okay. You can play with us whenever." I raised a hand, stopping whatever Shuu was going to say before he could do more than squeak. "Games are always more fun with three people." I gave Shuu a pointed look, to which he sighed and muttered something to himself.
"Yeah, what she said," he said finally.
Sasuke looked a little miffed at the dismissive tone Shuu held, but the brightness in his eyes was unmistakable. My heart warmed a little. Kids could be pretty cute sometimes.
The next morning, Imiki returned unscathed to pick me up. "I hope she wasn't too much trouble," she said to Michiko.
"No, no! She was a little angel." Michiko beamed at me. I decided I liked her very much in that moment. "She even got my little Shuu and Sasuke-kun to get along for a day and a half."
Well, I wouldn't say they got along, but their relationship had evolved to something almost like a healthy rivalry. Almost. There was still a bit of spite and contempt in there. Okay, maybe more than a little.
When we departed, I noticed with surprise Sasuke was among the ones to see us off, peeking out at us in the shadows. He didn't wave but he was there. Had making a sort-of friend had that much impact on him? I guess I'd have to sit tight and see, for better or worse.
Shuu suddenly drew out his bokken and waved it around. "Futaba, bring your bō again next time! I'll definitely beat you!"
I grinned, calling back, "And I'll beat you at Asagiri Speed next time! Both of you!"
As we walked out of the compound that had frightened me so much, Imiki nudged me. "So, you had fun?"
"Yeah," I replied. "Lots." The smile still remained on my face.
little sasuke is an interesting kid to write ┌(˘⌣˘)ʃ
