--
Yoshio rolled over in his bed and stared wearily at the dimly-lit ceiling. His ninja instincts weren't very highly developed yet, so he couldn't snap awake in the morning like his mother did on a regular basis. His mind was still in a fog. Something had woken him up, but he couldn't remember what.
He'd had a lot on his mind before going to sleep. Yesterday had seen his first meeting with his genin team. Team 9. Yoshio, Rikyu, Akiko, and Uzumaki Naruto. Today would see their first mission. Was that what had woken him up? No, he was pretty sure he had heard something…
Suddenly his bedroom door burst open. "Hmm?" he said blearily.
"Yoshio-kun! You must rise to greet the glorious new morning of your Youth!"
Yoshio blinked slowly while the horror grew inside him. Then suddenly he rolled out of bed. "No! Uncle Lee… I can't… today… mission…"
"I shall lead you on ten laps around Konoha to stir your blood for the challenges to come, and then we shall scale the Hokage monument to celebrate your inductance into the ranks of Konoha shinobi!"
"I have to meet my team at ten!"
Lee was silent for a moment, doing the calculation in his head. "Then we shall make it twenty laps!"
"But I can't… I have to…"
"Nonsense! Into your ninja gear, quickly! If you cannot leave within five minutes, then you must do fifty push-ups in the kitchen!"
"No I don't… I… oh man…" Knowing how his required calisthenics would add up if he refused, Yoshio reluctantly started rooting around for his clothing. He had tried refusing before, when he was young and naive, but his mother would just force him to humor Lee in the end anyway. Usually it wasn't bad if he gave in right off the bat – it was when he showed symptoms of "laziness" that the friendly training sessions became rather gruesome.
Sure enough, five minutes later he was in his ninja gear. Lee was standing outside his room with a stop watch. "Excellent timing, young Yoshio! If we run fast enough, we may even have a chance to practice our taijutsu before you meet with your team!" Rock Lee was seemingly oblivious to the groan he got in response.
Suddenly Yoshio was feeling rather vindictive. "Why not get my mother to come with us? Perhaps she would like to share in this 'glorious morning' of training as well," he suggested.
"What an excellent idea, Yoshio! Perhaps Tenten would care to join us on our youthful conditioning spree?" he said loudly, looking pointedly at Tenten's closed bedroom door.
A few moments later Yoshio heard his mother's voice. "I'd come out, but unfortunately I'm fast asleep."
"Ah! Another time, then!"
"If she's asleep, she can't be talking!" Yoshio pointed out grumpily.
"Quickly! The young day waits for no man! We shall train your body until you reach the very pinnacle of ninja agility!" Lee cried, ignoring him. He made a dash for the door and held it open impatiently.
Yoshio silently vowed revenge before following.
--
Tenten waited to hear the door slam before letting out a giggle, which was muffled by Neji's shoulder. "That was cruel," Neji said.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she said, feigning sleepy innocence.
"You didn't even try to stop him."
"It's good for Yoshio. It builds character. I don't want him to grow up to be lazy like his mother."
"How very noble of you," Neji said sardonically as he lifted the arm that was lying across his chest and started to trail delicate kisses across the wrist. Tenten watched him with dancing eyes.
"I didn't see you trying to stop him," Tenten pointed out.
"That's because I'm not technically here," Neji said.
Tenten grinned while he pulled more of her arm into the reach of his lips. "You feel pretty here to me," she said. "I'm fairly certain that's not someone else's mouth."
"Only fairly certain?" he asked, bemused.
"Well, I can't be sure. Let me check." With another giggle she crawled on top of him and kissed him fully on the mouth, straddling his stomach, and then pulled away from his lips with a very satisfied look in her eyes. She had always liked to be in this position, looking down at him. It reminded her of the few times she had actually beaten him when they were sparring during their first few years on team Gai. Those moments had been rare, and when it happened he would always stare up at her with that perplexed, offended, condescending look on his face, as if he were saying: You got lucky. So what? It was a far cry from the look he gave her now.
This open love between them still felt so new she hardly knew what to do with it, even though they had been more or less together for almost two years now and he'd been practically living with her for the last few months. She didn't think she would ever be used to this intimacy from him – which wasn't so strange, she reflected, considering how long it had taken them to get this far. She'd changed a lot over the years – they'd both changed. The man lying below her on the bed now certainly wasn't the iceberg she'd met as a genin or even the cool and clinically perfect shinobi of his ANBU years. She grinned down at him. "Mmm. It's definitely you. No one else has that morning breath."
He feigned a look of offense and rolled his white eyes. "You're one to talk…" he mumbled.
"What's that? I didn't quite catch that."
Instead of answering her, he pulled her down by the arms and drew her face down to his and drowned out her giggles with one long kiss. And he didn't give her a chance to tease him for a while after that.
--
She made breakfast for him. It was becoming one of their habits – at least when Yoshio wasn't home. It wasn't really breakfast so much as warmed-up leftovers from her fridge, but he never complained about her cooking. If he wanted fresh food at every meal, he could go home to the Hyuuga compound and make demands of the kitchen staff at his disposal there. Even though he was only a Branch family member, he ranked high in his household. It was because of his status as one of the top ninja of the village, but it was also because the Hyuuga clan had changed so much – especially over the past five years, the lines between Main and Branch families were beginning to blur. At the moment, though, his mind wasn't on his own household, but the woman who sat across from him at her kitchen table with the whole of her being totally concentrated on the sharpening of one kunai. "When are you going to tell him?" he asked her, picking idly through his bowl with his chopsticks to fish out the bits of meat.
She continued to hone the blade without looking at him. "I don't know," she finally said. "He just made genin, he's got plenty to deal with right now."
Neji knew an excuse when he heard one. "You don't give him enough credit," he said. "Or maybe it's not him that you're worried about…" he added.
"What's that supposed to mean?" she asked sharply.
"Maybe you're afraid. Maybe you're having second thoughts."
This time she stopped and put down the kunai on the table. She folded her arms and looked at him darkly, and he met her gaze. He always gave her the plain truth, because she was one of the few people he had ever met that could deal with the plain truth. That was one of the things he loved about her.
"I'll tell you what I'm afraid of. I'm afraid he's twelve, and in about a minute he's going to be thirteen. He's already a genin and I don't doubt he's going to be a chunin as soon as his team is whipped into shape. All in all I think he's old enough to make up his own mind about whether he wants to come with me."
After a moment of seeing his confusion, she added, by way of explanation, "He's not a Hyuuga. He won't fit in there. Most chunin move away from their families. Maybe…"
She left that sentence hanging for a minute, and when she said the last word he noticed her pupils drift off to the side, as if thinking of things to come that she didn't look forward to with pleasure. So that was it. She didn't want the boy to grow up and get away from her. Ironic, considering how she had barely known what to do with him when he was a baby.
"You're afraid he's going to leave you?" Neji said, not bothering to hide his amusement.
"I'm afraid he'll think I'm deserting him," she said.
"You're afraid he's going to leave you," Neji said more certainly.
She shrugged her shoulders with a sigh. "Maybe," she said. "Anyway, you could hardly blame him if he did. No offense, but the Hyuuga don't exactly welcome outsiders with open arms."
"That's not stopping you," he said.
"That's different," she said with a wry smile. "I've got you. You're something of a consolation."
--
Tsunade was bent over her desk filling out paperwork on chunin mission statistics when Shizune walked in with her day's schedule of missions and the new genin rosters. "Naruto's team has their first mission today," Shizune said brightly. "Have you thought about what to give them?"
"Are there any missing cats?" Tsunade asked, not looking up.
"…Not today, no."
"Anyone's roof need mending?"
"Er, no, but there's an old man in the southeast district who wants to lay bricks for a path through his front yard."
"Well, there we go then," Tsunade said with a smile.
"I wonder how Naruto will like doing D-rank missions again."
Tsunade dropped the pen on her desk and stretched back in her chair. "One thing's for sure. Like it or not, I'm going to keep that team on D-rank missions for as long as I can. And Naruto will not be allowed to argue."
"He, uh, doesn't usually ask permission first," Shizune noted.
"Shizune, have you looked at the dossiers on those genin?"
Shizune nodded, looking a little crestfallen. "I read Nobu-sensei's comments too." Nobu had taken over Iruka's position at the Academy after the latter was promoted to jonin. Shizune seemed to be searching for something positive to say. "Well… at least Tenten's son looks promising…"
"Why Nobu wanted to put the other two with him, I'll never know."
"But it's standard to put the genin with good grades on the same team as the underachievers…"
"But those two are both clearly career genin," Tsunade said, "and given who his mother is, I had higher hopes for Yoshio."
Shizune bit her lip. She hated to hear anyone called a "career genin." That was the informal classification given to all those ninja who spent most of their lives on guard duty on the village walls, message delivery runs, or on missions that required more numbers than skill and usually entailed taking orders from chunin half their age. These were ninja who were given the most ignominious work that adult ninja could be given, and who never tried – or were simply never able – to rise above their station. They were the genin who usually dropped out of the chunin exam during the first test.
Who, when worse came to worst, were typically the first to be sent to the front lines. "Cannon fodder" was another term for it.
"But you assigned Naruto to them." Shizune said helplessly.
Tsunade shrugged. "You want to know the truth? I decided on impulse two days ago to make him a jonin sensei, because I wanted an excuse not to send him out on any S-class missions for a while. I'm sure you know why."
Shizune nodded again. Naruto had been a little reckless of late – even for him. Which was understandable, given the events of the last year…
"The only reason he was assigned to this team, specifically, was that they were the only ones left without a sensei," Tsunade said, with a hint of amusement. "At the time I didn't even think of the fact that this will be the first official team he's been on since Sakura was killed."
--
It wasn't a fact that the ninja of Konoha paid much attention to, but there were at least three neighborhoods in the city where anyone could tell, just from the look of the houses, that the people who lived there were, to put it gently, not as fortunate as the rest. There was the street that made up Konoha's one and only red light district, which was fairly innocent by most cities' standards but still had a reputation to live down to. A step below that was the southern corner, which was well-known for being full of people who had never made it as ninja and tended to resent the people who had. It wasn't a happy place to live. The poorest area of town, though, was the street that curved below the eastern limits of the civilian sector, so close to the outer wall that it was hardly in Konoha at all. The houses were all run-down, the street itself was usually scattered with refuse, and the businesses when they survived at all did so mostly through under-the-table transactions.
A middle-aged woman stuck her head through the doorway in one of these domiciles. She had an infant on her hip and a sour look on her face, and her clothing looked as though she'd been wearing it for over a week and it hadn't been washed. A pair of screaming children raced past her in bare feet. "Keishi! Mamoru! You better get back here and eat your breakfasts! If you get caught stealing food again I swear by all the gods I'll let Ibiki take you in for questioning!" She looked cross and sounded worse. Her voice was the hoarse voice of someone who'd spent too many years chain-smoking and yelling. One of the boys looked over his shoulder and flung a vulgar gesture at her; she threatened a beating and he disappeared along with his brother.
"I swear, if they get caught, so help me…" she mumbled. The baby on her hip started to whine and the woman quickly pulled a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches out, lighting one as she began to bounce the unhappy baby. Inside, another young child's voice rang out, calling for attention. The woman turned sharply to the girl who sat, unnoticed by all others, on the doorstep with her head firmly planted in the pages of a book. "Akiko! Go help your cousin."
The girl's eyes didn't waver from the text she was reading. "He wants breakfast," she said without looking up.
"I know he wants breakfast! Get him something to chew on for now!"
"He doesn't need something to chew on, he needs something to eat," she said calmly.
"Well I would give him something to eat if I had it, but since your uncle took all my grocery money and gambled it off, I don't have anything a kid without teeth can eat, so I guess he's stuck!" she cried. "Now go in there and pick him up, or so help me…"
"I'm not afraid of you," Akiko said. "I'm a ninja." Her face remained buried in the book and her voice remained even. There was nothing especially ninja-like in her appearance, except that she wore tight black pants underneath her green dress in the style that many other kunoichi used out of practicality. The dress itself was cheap, old, and fairly hideous, and the color set off the blatant red-orange of her hair in a startling way. If she was a kunoichi, a passerby might have thought, her specialty was surely not stealth.
The woman looked furious. But she turned her back on Akiko and headed into the house. A few moments later there was a sharp slap, and the child inside stopped its crying. Akiko raised her head at the noise and turned her head toward the house, looking a little pale, but she didn't say a word about it. She closed her book and stuck it in her pocket, and then she got up off the step and brushed off her dress. It was time to go and meet her team. She turned her back on the house without another glance at it and started walking.
"Where do you think your going?" the woman snapped from inside the house.
"I have a mission. I won't be back until late," Akiko said as she walked away.
"Oh no you don't. You need to help your uncle at the shop today. You're not going anywhere." Her aunt was quickly back out on the doorstep minus either child, and inside you could already hear their whines beginning to build in tandem.
"It's not my fault he's too stupid to do anything for himself," Akiko mumbled.
"What was that?"
"I have to go now."
"Have to go? What do you think you're doing?" If the woman was starting to sound like a broken record, she would be the last to care. Her eyes were sharp and accusatory, augmented by the stress lines radiating out from the corners. She might have been in her thirties, but she looked much older. Gray hair was already streaking from her temples.
"I'm a ninja," Akiko said, not bothering to glance up at the woman. "I have a mission."
"Wait right there, young lady. You can't just sleep under our roof and eat the food we put on your plate and then walk off whenever you feel like it…" Her aunt marched down the steps and started to walk down the street after her. Akiko picked up her pace until the woman behind her was huffing. She tried to ignore the stares they were getting from curious neighbors.
"I have a mission," Akiko said over her shoulder while she walked.
The woman gave up in exhaustion and put her hands on her hip, watching the young girl walk away – she was already pulling a book out of her pocket and burying her face in it to avoid the staring of the spectators on the street. "Well, that's gratitude!" the woman shouted. "We take you out of your useless father's hands and this is how you thank us? I'm ashamed to be related to such a worthless little girl."
"I'm a ninja," Akiko mumbled to herself as she walked. Then she tuned everyone else out and all she noticed was her book. This was unfortunate for the people who had the luck to walk in front of her.
--
The Matsumoto clan had a small enclave in Konoha. It was much smaller than the Akimichi or Hyuuga compounds, but it was a step above what most ninja families had. There wasn't a lot of decoration – the houses were sparsely furnished, and the family dojo looked just as bland as the one at the Academy. The Matsumoto clan seemed to take pride in its lack of distinguishing features.
Although by no means a noble clan of Konoha, the Matsumoto were an old family with deep roots in the village. They didn't possess any special jutsu, but every male Matsumoto – and most of the females – had carried on the family tradition of becoming obedient, reliable shinobi ever since the villageof Konoha had been founded.
In the dojo that morning, Matsumoto Rikyu was busy practicing his taijutsu. He seemed to take great enjoyment in this, even providing the necessary sound effects as he pounded the practice post. His new headband was wrapped around his black-haired head, worn in the style of his new sensei, with the ends trailing down his back.
He was visualizing the post as his least favorite classmate, the one who always placed first in the tests and sneered at everyone who didn't. He then visualized it as the Academy instructor who told him he needed to work on chakra control every day of the term in front of his entire class, then all the stupid giggling girls he knew – one after the other, then his cousins, then some more of his classmates, and finally Yoshio, who he imagined taking several well-placed kicks to the head and putting his seldom-used voice to good use begging for Rikyu to stop.
He was so intensely busy with beating this practice post down he didn't notice the other ninja drop down behind him and land a chop on his upper arm until the arm started throbbing. He turned to face his two attackers: his brother and his least favorite cousin.
The pain tempered his rage a little, but not when he saw the face of the ninja who caused it. "Get lost," he snarled, turning back to the practice post, letting go of his arm, and trying to pretend that he couldn't already feel the large purple bruise forming on his arm.
"Aw… poor little Rikyu. Did the big bad post beat you up?" his cousin said.
"Shut up," Rikyu said.
His brother's smile didn't change, but his body moved faster than Rikyu's eyes, and Rikyu felt the impact before he registered what had happened or recognized the pain.
"Don't tell me to shut up, you little shit," he whispered harshly.
Rikyu clutched the side of his head, wincing, but then he opened his eyes again, firmly looking away from the looming presences of the two older boys. "You're not any better than me," Rikyu said. "I'm a genin now, just like you, and I'm going to make chunin before you do."
Something about these words set the older boy off. With a snap his fist connected with Rikyu's stomach, and the force was so great that the Rikyu's legs gave out. He crumpled onto the floor with a groan, clutching himself. For a second he forgot how mad he was, distracted by how much it hurt.
The older boy grinned, looking down at him. "You'll never make chunin. I can't believe they even made you genin. Stop kidding yourself. Idiot."
Rikyu kept his eyes closed while he listened to the other two jump away. When he was sure they were gone, he opened his eyes again and slowly stood up, and then, ignoring the sting of the welt that was starting to form on his stomach, he returned to his taijutsu forms and directed his attention back to the practice post. Only now, instead of the faces of his classmates, he saw only one. It was much more like his own – just a few years older.
The practice post was in pieces by the time he was done with it.
--
Yoshio had escaped. He knew he'd have to pay for it later – he knew there were many, many, many laps around Konoha, one-armed push-ups, and speeches about youthful energy in his future – but honestly he had to meet up with his team soon, and he was starving. If he didn't eat before their first mission he was going to be in trouble – especially if it turned out to be a difficult one. Probably it was just something easy, like guard duty or an escort, but you never knew. And even guard duty could get messy sometimes, he knew from listening to his mother's stories. He wanted to be ready for anything on his first mission. More importantly – and it surprised him that it mattered to him – he didn't want to embarrass himself in front of Rikyu. The boy was annoying, cruel, and arrogant, hardly worth the time it took to think about him in Yoshio's opinion, but the last thing Yoshio wanted was to look weak compared to him. The slight against his mother still stung, maybe because he hadn't had the chance to retaliate.
He was now dashing back to the apartment he shared with her. If he was fast enough, he could even get in a shower and a change of clothes so he wouldn't meet the others looking completely disgusting. He had a brief mental vision of the sweat stains under Rock Lee's armpits and shuddered deeply.
Halfway up the stairs, however, he met someone else coming down.
The Hyuuga had been lost in thought and clearly hadn't expected to see him. Yoshio realized a little guiltily that he shouldn't have been so preoccupied himself – he usually had more presence as a ninja, at least enough to listen for another set of footfalls.
After the moment of recognition, the man smirked at him. "Still alive, I see."
Yoshio stared at him stonily. There were a lot of things he could say in response – about how the Hyuuga had known what he had been doing this morning, or how he was even now walking down the stairs from – which apartment now? Let's think…
It was fine with Yoshio that his mother wanted to keep up whatever pretenses she wanted, but Yoshio wasn't going to play dumb when the evidence was standing a few stairs in front of him.
Hyuuga Neji didn't seem too concerned with pretenses either.
"Are you hungry?" Neji asked him.
He nodded.
"Come on, then," Neji said, and continued down the stairs, completely nonplussed.
Yoshio paused for a few seconds. The food in his apartment was physically closer, and he didn't especially love awkward silences with the Hyuuga, but he had a feeling there was a reason behind this gesture, and now he wanted to know what it could be.
--
Neji didn't even eat; he sipped tea while Yoshio blindly shoveled food into his mouth. There weren't too many other people in the restaurant this time of day, since it was too late for most shinobi to eat breakfast and too early for most civilians to eat lunch. "You wanted to talk?" Yoshio asked between mouthfuls. It was true that he didn't talk much, but when he did he generally went straight to the point.
"What makes you think that?" Neji asked.
"You bought me breakfast and you weren't even hungry. There's no other reason why you wouldn't just let me go home to eat." He silently added, to himself: and you don't exactly have to spoil me to get on my mother's good side.
"Analytical. A good trait in a ninja," Neji mused.
When the man sipped his tea and didn't say anything else, Yoshio started to feel slightly nervous. It was hard to deal with someone who was even less talkative than he was, and he knew from long experience that Neji was just that. As much of a father-figure as Neji had been to him, they didn't speak all that often, and when they did his mother was usually there, and even when she wasn't they never talked about anything… personal. Still, Neji had helped him train to be what he was. It was Neji that had explained to him how chakra worked the first time he had ever tried to mold it, and the it was the Hyuuga who had taught him kawarimi no jutsu and how to create a clone.
Plus, when he was little, Neji used to look after him every once in a while, just like Lee did. Yoshio had preferred them to the babysitters he got when Team Gai went on long missions together, not just because they were always willing to help him practice his taijutsu, but because they would let him eat whatever and whenever he wanted. He hadn't needed a babysitter for years, though. Even when he was very little, he could pretty much take care of himself. The worst trouble he ever got into as a little kid when his mother was away was kicking a hole in the wall one time when he and Isamu were sparring inside the apartment. Neji had seen this, had raised an eyebrow at him in such a way that he wanted to melt into the floor, and then had taken two minutes and wordlessly mounted a picture over the hole. To this day his mother had never even noticed.
Suffice to say, even though they were on friendly terms, he and Neji had never had what you would call a heartfelt conversation.
Suddenly a thought struck him. He knew almost immediately that it was stupid, but he was so excited by the idea that he couldn't keep his mouth shut long enough to rethink what he was saying. He blurted it out before his brain had a chance to intervene. "You're not going to tell me that you're my father, are you?" he asked.
Hyuuga Neji didn't have a wide range of expressions, so it was impossible to tell if he was surprised by this, but Yoshio was watching his face for any indication of it. His senses were acutely sharpened. Neji just gave him a vague smile. "Sorry to disappoint."
"So you're definitely not my father," he said, wanting to leave no uncertainty on that point.
"No, I'm not your father."
Yoshio felt deflated, suddenly. He had always known that Neji wasn't his father, right? Why should it bother him so much now to hear someone say it out loud? He suddenly had another sickening suspicion… "It's not Lee, is it?"
This time the Hyuuga's expression actually did crack, and his mouth crooked into a familiar smirk. "Certainly not," he said.
Yoshio saw the laughter in Neji's eyes, but he didn't feel any of it himself. "Uncle Neji," he said, "can you tell me who my father is?"
The smile fell off of Neji's face slowly and his expression went back to its usual opaque state. "I can't do that," he said. "It's between you and your mother."
Yoshio wanted to tell the man that every time he'd tried to bring it up, his mother changed the subject, but he felt like he had already said way too much. With great frustration he looked down at his plate and started violently digging into his food with his chopsticks.
"Why is it so important to you when you've never even met him?" Neji asked.
Yoshio personally thought that was a stupid question. "Wouldn't you want to know?"
"I would trust your mother," Neji said. "If it were important, wouldn't she have told you by now?"
Yoshio shrugged. "She's funny sometimes about… some things."
Like you, for instance, he wanted to say.
The rest of the time in the restaurant went by with little conversation. Yoshio ate as much as he could hold so that he wouldn't have to talk. The food did the trick: by the time they left, he was in a much better mood. "So you're not my father," he said again before they parted ways back on the street.
"No."
"You want the job though, right?"
He sent Neji's own smirk back at him and left to meet his team before Neji had a chance to respond.
--