"The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions."
-Madeleine L'Engle
While we don't necessarily spend much time together during the day, Shikaku always makes it a point to spend our evenings, particularly dinners, together. And if he happens to be eating dinner at the Akimichi's, he makes sure I am there as well.
It's really nice. In my Last Life, even when my father was alive, my family would rarely eat dinner together. We were often busy running around town between some sports practice, Boy Scouts, or who knows what. It's probably the one thing that didn't change in my family when my father died. Whether one would consider that good or bad, I'm not really sure.
But it's nice that Shikaku does this. Especially because I can only see this happening less and less often once he graduates from the Academy. And with the way graduation and promotions are happening now, I can see him graduating in the next couple of months, even if he doesn't put that much effort into the final test.
The thing about eating dinner together, at least when we're eating at home, means we have to cook dinner together. And apparently microwave meals aren't really a thing here. It kind of sucks. I survived on microwave meals well into my adulthood before. It kind of sucks really, do you know how many things you can cook in a microwave? Just about anything.
"Here Kotaro, cut this tomato," Shikaku says to me as he hands me the tomato. I glare down at it. If there is one individual food that I absolutely hate, its tomatoes. Don't ask me why, but I just hate them… with a passion.
Holding the tomato in my small hands I start to wonder. Just how did Konoha get a hold of something like this? The access to different foods and technologies in this world really baffles me sometimes. On one hand kitchens will have refrigerators and microwaves, with electric ovens, but on the other hand there are no telephones of anytype. Or street lamps for that matter. Now I really wished I had read up more on the history of inventions before… not that it would be much help to me now.
But back to the tomato. Where did this plant come from? How did the trade and growing of crops change and evolve in this world?
"Are you okay there?" Shikaku asks me as he holds his hand out for the tomato. "You look like the tomato hurt you."
"I'm fine," I say. "Just thinking."
"Thinking?" Shikaku hums. "You should change your thinking face. It looks like you're about to have an anueism."
"Don't you mean aneurysm?"
He sighs and shakes his head as he starts to cut the tomato. "What were you thinking about?"
"Where do tomatoes come from?" I ask. If I'm ever going to find out the mysteries and inconsistencies of this world, I have to start somewhere. Shikaku is supposed to be a genius, he has to know something about everything, right?
Instead, I see his eyebrows just scrunch up. "What are you talking about? You know they come from farms right?"
"Yes," I nod. "But where were they originally from?"
Whatever the answer is, is something Shikaku must have never thought about, for his face only grows even more confused.
"You think about the weirdest things sometimes, Ko," a smirk crosses his face. "Go back and finish your math homework, I'll call you when I finish dinner."
"I already finished it."
"What about-"
"I finished yours too."
Xx?xXx?xXx?xX
It's not that in my Last Life I was ever bad about the physical training aspects of my job. In fact, I was pretty decent in all areas. I consistently scored in the high ranges in any fitness test I took, coached others who were in danger of failing, played on multiple sports teams here and there, and even grudgingly ran a couple half-marathons (key word: half) when bribed by things like "it will look good for the upcoming award" or "you don't want a paid trip to Hawaii."
But I never would have guessed it would ever be so easy for me to do the crazy acrobatics they do in Naruto fights.
I grew up doing Tae Kwon Do and wrestling, dabbled in MMA, and won a couple of the tournaments I competed in, so I liked to think I was fairly competent in my fighting abilities.
But when it came to performing crazy flips and cartwheels? I was literally the opposite of a gymnast. After getting a concussion when I was eight after trying to do a backflip, I gave that shit up.
I'm not sure if there's less gravity in this world, or shinobi bodies are just naturally evolved for greater physical feats, maybe it has something to do with the addition of chakra, but a human body should not be able to jump that high.
"You guys need to be able to complete the obstacle course in less than four minutes," Hajime-sensei calls out to the class as he stands in front of the course.
The obstacle course itself isn't too hard in theory. Compared to the other obstacle courses I completed in my Last Life, it would be about the same in difficulty. Maybe a little harder if only because it requires higher jobs. This should be the bare minimum a shinobi should be able to do.
This also isn't the first time we're doing it. We've probably been doing parts of it every other day for the past couple weeks now, So we know how to do each obstacle individually, we've just never been timed on the entire thing.
But when Hajime-sensei makes a big talk in the classroom before he walks us around the Academy building the long way, it's enough to make any young child's nerves grow worried.
We've all been training at the Academy for a month now. Next week will make it week five, it's bound that they have some sort of progress test at this point, especially if they need more shinobi for the ongoing war. It's actually pretty surprising they're taking the time in our days to teach us stuff like history and not just strictly things we need for the field. But I guess they don't want completely incompetent soldiers.
Anyway, this is probably only the first of many weeding out tests they will give us here. Any decent initial training program for a military will have an attrition rate of about 25% from start to finish. Higher if it's for a more elite unit.
It's good that they are starting this now too. The military of this world doesn't work at all like the one in my Last Life. Clan kids are put at an advantage. You don't necessarily need to be born into a clan, but if your parents aren't shinobi of some form or another, you put yourself into a severe disadvantage. That's not to say the military of my old world wasn't like this, but the disparity wasn't at all to this extent.
So, being a clan kid, I should probably do well on this test. In the previous training sessions, I had been able to do each individual obstacle easily. But I don't want to be too confident. I hate overconfident people.
"How do you think you'll do, Kotaro?" I hear Chojiro ask next to me.
"Hmm," I hum, thinking of a way to phrase my answer. "Probably decent, You?"
"Hmm," he hums. Although his hum doesn't sound like a thinking hum, more of like an 'I'm unsure of my own abilities hum.'
"Don't worry," I assure him as I wrap my arm around his shoulder. "You've been able to do each thing during practice. You just gotta do it again now." I really need to help this kid with his self-confidence. I never had the best, especially in elementary school, but I was still better than this kid.
"Okay, first up! Uchiha Fugaku!" Hajime-sensei yells out.
The small conversations going on among the other students slowly die out as we watch the Uchiha's attempt. As expected, he completed the course pretty fast, he probably has some type of similar course to train on at the Uchiha compound. His time ends up reading 3:24. He made a few mistakes in the completion of his run, but the only major one I caught was the rough landing after the Wall Climb and High Bar. Overall it's pretty good for a first year Academy student, but he still has much room to improve.
"It took him over three minutes Kotaro, how am I going to be expected to move fast enough," Chojiro whispers in my ear.
I sigh. "Don't worry Chojiro. If you saw correctly, he made a couple mistakes on his landings. You had good landings in practice, just make sure you can do them now."
"You act like you aren't going to make any mistakes," I hear someone cut in from behind us. Turning around, I see that it's the little Mikoto-chan who sits in front of me.
Oh, so maybe this is when she starts developing feelings for Fugaku?
"I'm not saying that, Mikoto-chan," I tell her. "I'm only trying to reassure my friend here that he will do a good job."
She squints her eyes. "Don't call me chan," she grumbles.
"Why? You don't like it?" I goad her.
She huffs, stepping closer to me. "You talk as if anyone can beat Fugaku. He's an Uchiha, you're nowhere near us."
Oh, so maybe it's not that she has a little crush on him, she's just intensely proud of her clan.
"So, what if he's an Uchiha?" I ask. "That doesn't mean he's perfect. Thinking like that will just get him defeated."
The scowl between her eyes only increases, and now I can't tell if she is squirting or glaring at me. "Let's just see you try to beat Fugaku," She says.
Great, I wasn't planning on trying that hard on this test, but now that she is saying all of this, I guess I have to teach her a lesson. "Fine, then. I guess I'll have to show you."
"What?! Kotaro! What are you saying?" Chojiro exclaims next to me. "Fugaku is one of the best in the class, you can't just go around saying stuff like that."
"Sure I can, Chojiro," I tell him. Then, to give him a bit more of a confidence boost, I add. "If I beat him, that means that you can beat him too. After all, you try way harder than me in practice."
We wait for the next couple people to finish before my name is called. While waiting, Minato is one of the people to go. He finishes with a time slightly slower than Fugaku, at 3:31, and makes a couple more mistakes than he did. But overall, Fugaku still has the fastest time, and Minato has the third fastest, out of a class of twenty-eight.
Standing before the beginning of the course, I think I might have taken on a bit too much to chew.
It's not that I can't do anything on here, because I can do all of it. But when you're only five years old, and the shortest kid in your class of five year olds, obstacle courses become significantly harder.
I swear, if I was only two inches taller this course would be ten times easier. For the first few obstacles, as long as you can jump high, height doesn't make that much of a difference.
The first obstacle is a high bar. I easily manage to jump and grab a hold of it and swing myself over. Second is three low logs, two you crawl under, the middle one you jump over. If anything, height is probably a disadvantage there. Next is the high wall, which again is mostly dependent on your jumping capability.
But the one after the wall is where height becomes greatly needed. The obstacle is situated as a highbar, with inclined bars leaning on top of it. To complete it, you need to first jump up and grab the bar. Then, swing your legs up on the inclined bars, one leg per bar. Pushing your body up so you are above the bars, slide down until you reach the ground. The first time you try it, It's about as hard as it sounds confusing. What makes it harder is that the inclined bars are pretty far apart. Far enough that for my sure legs, I pretty much need to stretch them as far as possible for them to reach each bar.
Still I manage to complete the obstacle. I figure if anything, that obstacle will be the one to slow me down, which it did. But with that finished, all I need to do is crawl under and over a few more low logs and climb up a rope that's about thirty feet in height. Those are both easy.
"3:19," Hajime-sensei says when I jump off the rope and land on the ground in a crouch. Standing back up, I make eye contact with Fugaku. He's scowling. I only quirk and eyebrow and smile at him before I make my way back over to where Chojiro and Mikoto are standing.
"See, Chojiro," I say. "It's not impossible to beat that stupid Fugaku." Even though I say it to Chojiro, I make sure Mikoto can hear me.
Before she can say something, she's called away to run the course herself. She ends up making a decent time, 3:32. Which is still significantly faster than most of the class, whose times are in the 3:45 - 3:55 range.
Xx?xXx?xXx?xX
In addition to the physical test they gave us yesterday, today we will be given our first of, what will be many, written exams.
I honestly don't know how I should take this test. On the one hand, this entire class is made up of five year olds, so the test is… how do I put this… extremely easy. Add in the fact that I've finally started understanding the writing system so I can finally read what's written on the paper. And just from a first glance at it, I can answer all the questions easily.
But on the other hand, I'm a Nara, and we have a … reputation to uphold at the Academy, according to Shikaku. One that, as my brother says, I follow, but I follow it too weirdly. Plus I'm really tired, I've barely found any time to take naps during these classes, and now that I finally have some undisturbed quiet time, I feel like I should really take advantage of it.
Plus even if I fail, I doubt they're going to kick out the second-born son of a major clan head.
It just seems that before I'm even able to piss off the instructors with my napping, I piss off little Mikoto-chan sitting in front of me.
"Nara," she taps me on top of my head with her pencil. "Wake up, we're supposed to be doing our test."
And what the hell? Don't these five year olds know anything about test taking etiquette? If you see someone blowing off the test by taking a nap, you leave them alone to their future doom.
I try to wave her hands off my head. That only causes her to poke me in the head harder. Eventually I lift my head and squint up at her. "Don't you have a test to worry about? Mikoto-chan. You'll run out of time at this rate."
With that statement I see her face visibly redden up. Geez, I hope she isn't forming a crush on me. She's supposed to fall for the other Uchiha across the room. And there ain't no way I'm going for a canon character, and an Uchiha to boot, that's way too troublesome.
She quickly turns around and focuses back on her test. Meanwhile I go back to my nice blissful nap.
This bliss is only to last a couple more minutes however, when I can suddenly feel a powerful stare bore into me to my left.
"Nara," I hear the voice of Hajime-sensei grunt out my name. Shit, guess I was caught. I lift my head and turn to look at him. He has his arms crossed against his chest, and his face looks… grumpy. "This is a test, if you can't sleep in class you should know by now that you can't sleep during a test."
I frown, and then a thought comes to me. "If I finish early, can I sleep?" This question obviously ticks the man off. But do I care? Not really, that was kind of the goal.
He puts a hand up to his forehead, and I know that if we weren't around a bunch of other kids trying to take a test he wouldn't stop to laying into me about my "attitude and effort" as he usually says.
"If you think you can finish early, you can sleep when you finish," he says, before he turns around and walks back to the small desk at the front of the room.
Well, then, I guess now I have to show him I can finish early.
Looking down at the paper, I see it's made up of fifteen questions from various topics we have covered in the last month. None of them are too hard and for a five year old it probably would take an hour to complete. But I'm far from a five year old.
I take five minutes to fill out all of the questions, purposely leaving two blank solely because I'm too lazy to read the paragraph proceeding and detailing the question. It shouldn't matter in regards to me failing or not, we were told at the beginning of class we needed to score at least twelve out of fifteen to pass. Finished with this, I return to taking my nap.
Not even thirty seconds into putting my head on the desk I can feel the presence of Hajime-sensei leaning over my shoulder.
I lift my head up, and before he's able to say anything, I hand him my test paper. "I finished it, sir. You can grade it now."
He tsks before taking my paper. I watch him take it down to his desk and angrily grade it as I put my head back down to go to sleep. Man, I love messing with that guy.
I don't realize everyone else finished and has left until Chojiro wakes me up.
"Yo, Kotaro, we can leave now," I hear him say as he nudges my shoulder.
"What? Really?" I ask as I sit up and rub the sleep out of my eyes. Man, that was a nice nap.
I gather my things and then start to head home with him. Over the last month, I've started hanging out with him in the afternoons while Shikaku… does whatever Shikaku does in the afternoon. For all I know, he's two houses down from Chojiro's house hanging out with Chouza and Inoichi. But not to worry, we always hang out with each other for a couple hours in the evenings anyway. Even if that 'hanging out' is him forcing me to play Shogi.
Sometimes other kids will join us, like Minato or Kenji, a kid from the Sarutobi clan who somehow joined our little group. He hasn't told us it yet, but I suspect he's the Hokage's son, or one of his close relatives. For he's never able to hang out with us outside of class and he knows just a bit too many personal details about the man. And I mean like, details you wouldn't let anyone outside of your household know. Like the fact your parents don't sleep in the same bed. Only a five year old would accidentally let his friends know that about his parents.
It looks like Minato is joining us today as well since he just popped up beside Chojiro, that kid can really sneak up on you when you're not looking for him. Maybe that's the real secret about his super special jutsu in the future, he's just able to quietly sneak up on you before you notice him.
"Hey, Kotaro, how do you think you did on that test today?" Minato asks me. Of course he would, the nerd. And that's something I quickly learned about him. He is a giant nerd. And it feels like besides lunch, he is always studying something. I almost feel bad that I was quite literally born with all the knowledge I need for these little Academy tests.
"Oh, I got two questions wrong," I answer him.
"You got two wrong?" Chojiro asks. "Did sensei already tell you your score?"
"No, I just didn't answer two of the questions," I say simply.
"You just didn't do two?!" Minato says, disbelief in his voice. "But that means you'd only get thirteen at the highest. We need to score twelve. Isn't that a little risky? What if you got another wrong?"
"Well, I didn't get any others wrong," I say.
Minato doesn't say anything about that. Probably because he knows that I'm right. During the second week of classes I started tutoring him in the math section. Simply because I felt bad that he was trying so hard studying but couldn't understand what Hajime-sensei was teaching. So Minato knows, or has an idea, of just exactly how smart I am.
Well, maybe he doesn't have a full idea. There's not really a comparison of 'studied to get away from all my family problems for the first eighteen years of my life and then went to the top university in my field and was third in my class' to this world's shinobi academy students. For all he probably thinks is that all Nara are just gifted with this intelligence.
"So, what about you?" I ask. "Did all that tutoring I gave you help? Please don't tell me I wasted my time."
"What?! No! Your help was a great help! Really!"
"Well, that's good," I say as I give him a joking smile. "I might have had to drop you as one of my students if you did bad."
Xx?xXx?xXx?xX
"You have to teach it to him." When I walked back into our house after hanging out with Chojiro and Minato all day, the last thing I expected was to witness Shikaku and Hiroto-ojii-san in an argument.
What's it about this time? Probably me. What about me? I have no freaking clue.
"Why do I have to do it? Can't you," Shikaku complains. Oh, so I guess Shikaku has to do something with me now.
By this point I've walked into the kitchen, to find the two males in some sort of standoff, if you can call it that. Shikaku is sitting at the kitchen table leaning back on one of the kitchen chairs with his head almost parallel to the floor below. Across the table, Hiroto is standing with his arms crossed, a displeased expression on his face.
It's weird, really. I've never seen an expression like that on a Nara's face in my five short years here. Their spouses, sure, Kiyoko often gave me that look when I spent the day with her, an actual Nara, it didn't happen too often.
"Oh, Kotaro," Hiroto greets me when he sees me walk into the room.
I can tell just from the tension in the room that this is probably a conversation that I'm not supposed to hear. But I also know, even if they didn't say my name, that they're talking about me. After staring at them blankly for a few seconds, my mind catches up with my body and I let out a soft, "I'm home."
"How was your day, Kotaro?" Hiroto asks, his voice is still a little rough. Ah, so they're going to ignore the elephant in the room.
"It was good," I answer and follow up with. "What were you two just talking about?" That's the joy about being five. I can just ask any insensitive question I want without getting in trouble.
Hiroto sighs. "It doesn't concern you right now."
Oh really?
"Why don't you just go up to your room and finish any homework you have? I have to talk to your brother about something."
Knowing they wouldn't continue this argument while I was still in the room, I do as he says, even though I have no intention of doing my homework, because other than the math I don't do it anyway.
Once I make it to the top of the stairs and enter my room, I leave the door open so I can still hear what they're saying.
"I didn't even start learning it until I was seven," Shikaku argues.
"Yes, but you didn't start the Academy until then. Your brother's in the Academy now, in his first year. Which means just like you, he needs to start learning this jutsu during his first year." Hiroto argues back to Shikaku again.
At this point and from the sound and volume of their voices I can feel the argument growing very heated. I feel like one of them is going to explode in anger in the next two or three exchanges. I don't really want to see, or hear, it happen. I had enough of it in my Last Life when my mom and younger brother would argue about stuff. It's interesting and funny the first few times. But after a while you just start to wonder if your family will ever truly recover from the source of the arguments and go back to being normal.
The source of my family's arguments in my Last Life was my father's death. And to be honest, we never did fully recover from it, we just moved on and did whatever made us forget about it. For me it was joining the military, for my mother it was moving us to a new city and just going about how her life was before (just minus my father), for my brother it was getting into trouble at school, leading him to almost dropping out a couple times.
My joining the military didn't make me forget about my father. But it did make me forget about his death. I often would wonder if this is the kind of stuff he went through. In a way it made me grow closer to him.
So I had to get out of this house right now. I sneak out of my bedroom window. Out to one of my (not so) secret spots around the compound.
It's right on the edge of the Nara controlled forest. In a tree that I only have to climb up a couple of branches to reach. It's not much, but the branch is the perfect size to fit my small body. And while just about any trained shinobi would be able to spot me through the leaves, in the mind of a five year old, it would seem like the perfect hiding spot. Which is really all that matters when you're trying to get away from the world.
I sit out there for a while, well after the time it takes for the sun to go down. Eventually, I hear footsteps walk up and stop underneath me.
"How long are you going to sit up there?" I hear Shikaku ask me.
I don't say anything for a while, and a comfortable yet awkward silence settles between us.
Eventually I say something. "You guys were arguing about me, weren't you?"
"Figured you would figure that out," Shikaku says, as he jumps up to sit on a branch next to me.
"Did you guys come to a decision?" I ask. Not that I really cared what the decision was. It's not like I had been going out asking if anyone would teach me jutsus. All I cared about was that they weren't fighting anymore.
"Yeah," Shikaku says as he leans back on the branch. For a second or two I think he fell asleep, until he says, "it looks like I'm gonna have to teach you ninjutsu now."