--
Yoshio was halfway to the Hokage's tower when he thought of it.
Why is it so important to you when you've never even met him?
Neji would never tell him anything that his mother didn't want him to know, but what if he thought Yoshio had a right to know? Wouldn't he find some sly, indirect way to tell him? Neji was like that.
…when you've never even met him?
So obviously all the people that Yoshio knew were ruled out. Furthermore, all the people he'd known earlier in his life were ruled out, too. It certainly wasn't Neji or Lee, and even without the clue he would be equally sure that it wasn't Maito Gai, who had died when Yoshio was seven, but who Yoshio had certainly met – and after a brief bout of nausea at the thought of his mother and Maito Gai, Yoshio kept thinking. It couldn't have been any of the Rookie Nine, because Yoshio had met all of them at least once in his life – except for Uchiha Sasuke, but he was out of the question for obvious reasons.
Chances were good his father fell into one of two categories: one, he was a foreign ninja, or two, he had died before Yoshio was born. Or potentially when he was only very young.
Of course, Konoha was a large village, there were many shinobi he'd never met…
But then, who said it had to be a shinobi?
Yoshio didn't know how he felt about that. He'd always had a vague mental picture of who his father must be, and mostly it looked like Neji without the white eyes. Whoever it was had to be a shinobi, right? His mother was kind of an odd woman – he'd heard a lot of people say it – but she was proud and very strong. Respect was very important to her. The idea that she could have… with anyone so unlike her…
He had to cut off that train of thought at the quick, because it made him decidedly uncomfortable. No, it had to be a shinobi. It just had to be.
"Hey!"
He suddenly had to focus his eyes on where he actually was – in Konoha, walking straight to the Hokage's tower, and having just bumped into someone and knocked them over. He blinked and glanced down, and he was slightly annoyed to see that it was his kunoichi teammate, who was staring at him with much annoyance. He held out a hand to help her up. "A shinobi should watch where they're going," she grumbled, ignoring the hand he held out and getting to her feet on her own.
Like you were, he thought. Her eyes were scanning the ground around her, and then she suddenly darted down and grabbed the book that she'd dropped. In a few seconds she was walking and reading again as if she'd never even crashed into him. The only thing that gave her away was that her ponytail of ghastly red hair was slightly messier than normal. Yoshio found himself walking beside her, if for no other reason than because she was walking toward the Hokage's tower, where their team was meeting. Out of curiousity, he let his eyes wander over to the cover of her book. Oniji's Guide to Advanced Combat Tactics, Vol. 6. He blinked in surprise, then quickly looked forward again to avoid being caught.
He felt disappointed. For how obsessed she seemed, he'd expected a romance novel at least.
They were probably the two quietest people in their class; left to their own devices, conversation was just not going to happen. They walked to the spot outside the Hokage's tower where the team was going to meet, at which point Akiko promptly sat down on the ground with her back against the wall of the tower, folding her legs under her, and became so engrossed in reading that Yoshio was actually kind of embarrassed for her. People who walked by probably thought that he was just waiting by himself, and she was a weirdo that just happened to be passing time in the same place.
He crossed his arms and leaned back against the tower, closing his eyes and trying to sharpen his other senses. He could hear the murmur of passersby on the street around them and the chatter of birds, the barking of a dog, a baby crying – someone was carrying it back and forth across a window. He could smell the disturbed dust of the street and a vendor frying fish nearby. The sun beat down on his lightly freckled skin and made him sleepy.
Even though he was trying to hone his shinobi senses, he found his mind wandering to the problem of his father. For some reason he was stuck on the image of a brown-eyed Neji, even though he knew it was illogical. Who are you, where did you come from, and where are you now?
Before he could get much into that, however, he was interrupted by a sudden outburst.
"Why the hell are you always reading? What's wrong with you? You need to hide your face behind a book because you're so ugly or something?"
Yoshio opened his eyes a fraction and looked over at his teammates.
Akiko raised her eyes above her book and fixed them on Rikyu. Rikyu had appeared out of nowhere, and he was slouching in front of her and glaring hard. He obviously wasn't going to forget the bump on his head that she'd given him yesterday. Yoshio had to look twice at Rikyu – the other boy was dressed differently now than he was yesterday. He wore gray taijutsu pants and a loose gray cotton shirt belted at the waist in the style of his clan, and his hitai-ite was tied around his forehead with the ends hanging down his back just like Naruto-sensei's.
"Come on! You're such a lousy ninja. Don't you ever do anything but read? We're never going to get any good missions unless you can do something useful. We've got to train hard, that means getting off your ass and actually doing something, not just sitting there with your… hey, aren't you listening to me?"
She certainly wasn't. Her nose was pointed back at the page; he might as well have been yelling at the wall.
"Cut it out, Rikyu," Yoshio said.
He regretted it almost immediately. Rikyu turned on him with sharp eyes. "You know, I'm obviously the leader of this team, and I think you might be an okay ninja if you wanted to be," he said magnanimously, "but if we don't whip this kunoichi into shape we're never going to make it to chunin. You should be on my side."
Yoshio hadn't really paid much attention to Rikyu at the Academy – he was a passable ninja, but not enough of a threat to warrant observation. He was starting to wish he didn't have to pay attention to him now, either. He couldn't imagine anyone more obnoxious. Did he actually expect Yoshio to agree with him?
Rikyu turned away from them both when Yoshio failed to respond and crossed his arms grumpily. He faced the rest of Konohagakure with a scowl. "Our team sucks," he said.
It occurred to Yoshio that for the first time, and probably the last time, he and Rikyu were thinking exactly the same thing.
Suddenly Rikyu had to jump away, because their sensei landed right where he had been standing. The blonde jonin was smiling so hard his eyes were squinting, and his hands were on his hips. "Okay, team! Are you ready for your first mission?" he asked.
In spite of Naruto's sudden appearance, Akiko still hadn't looked up from her book, and Rikyu was still scowling at the world. Yoshio tried to imagine them accomplishing anything together. He felt that the definite answer to his sensei's question was no.
--
Yoshio trudged up the stairs to his home and tried to ignore the fact that every time one of his feet hit the ground he was leaving a gigantic muddy splotch. His mood was black. It was early evening, and he was just returning home from the bad dream that was Team 9's latest non-adventure. They'd spent the entire week helping a family on the outskirts of Konoha plant rice.
D-rank missions? They'd had a few of them.
He thought back to that first day. He'd noticed that after she announced the scope of their first mission, the Hokage and her assistant watched his sensei very carefully, as if looking for a reaction. Naruto had actually opened his mouth to say something – maybe protest – but had closed it quickly and said, through gritted teeth a few moments later, "Great! What's the old idiot's address? We'll finish and be back for another mission before the end of the day!"
Brick-laying some geezer's front walk would have taken a normal team at most an entire day. Not so for Team 9. Three days of arguments, incompetence, aggravation, and brow-beating later, they were standing back in front of the Hokage and getting another D-rank mission to fulfill. Then another and another. Dog-chasing. House-painting. Gardening. Bat extermination. And no matter how stupid or pointless the task, they always managed to take at least twice as long to finish it as an average team would have. Rikyu would gripe about the mission and refuse to take orders from Yoshio, who was honestly just trying to get the work out of the way as fast as possible. Rikyu didn't listen to anyone but Naruto-sensei, and even then he usually complained about whatever was said. Yoshio knew that if they did a good job with the stupid missions they'd eventually get decent ones, but if Rikyu wouldn't cooperate at all then it was hopeless. It didn't help that Naruto-sensei usually left them to their own devices, having no taste for D-rank missions himself and not feeling any obligation to help them. Rikyu usually tried to tell the other two what to do and wasted no time in pointing out that he was the only one of them who was a natural leader. When they didn't obey him – which was basically every mission – he ignored them and did whatever he wanted. Meanwhile Akiko didn't do much of anything but read, and Yoshio was left to get frustrated and increasingly short with the other two. He didn't have a whole lot of ambition as a ninja, but he at least wanted to be on a real team that got real missions. At this rate his team would never get anywhere.
Their training sessions weren't much better. Naruto-sensei always set them impossibly high goals, which they never reached, and somewhere along the way Rikyu would invariably start yelling at Akiko for not trying harder or at Yoshio for whatever stupid excuse he could come up with. Sparring matches were a nightmare. Akiko was pathetic, Rikyu just mean. Yoshio didn't really feel that it was fair to beat up Akiko and always got chewed out by Rikyu for going easy on her. Rikyu had no such hesitation when he fought the kunoichi. After only one match together, even Naruto-sensei had the sense not to pair up Rikyu and Akiko again. Yoshio usually beat Rikyu when they were paired off with each other, and Rikyu would get more and more brutal and desperate as they fought. By the end Yoshio always had more dark bruises than he was comfortable admitting, and Rikyu hated him more than ever. He found lots of colorful ways to express it, too.
After only one week of this, Yoshio had asked his mother if she knew whether it was possible to switch teams.
She'd looked a little distraught and had asked him if Naruto-sensei was really that bad, and Yoshio'd had to confess it had nothing to do with Naruto-sensei. In the end his mother told him that you literally were not allowed to switch teams until one of you made chunin or you'd served a year together. Yoshio had nearly given up all hope. Certainly none of them were making chunin anytime soon at this rate, and he doubted they'd make it a year without killing each other either.
He'd sort of thought it might get better with time – he'd imagined they might learn to work together or something – but nothing of the sort had happened. They were just as miserable a team now as they had been at the outset.
He managed to shake off some of the weariness of their latest mission, if not some of the mud, by the time he got to his own door. As soon as he was in the door he made sure to take off his boots so his mother wouldn't murder him. While he was struggling with them – the laces were still soaking wet – he noticed her walking through the kitchen with a purposeful stride, wearing her favorite mission gear. "Rough day, was it?" she asked him.
"I thought we were ninja, not farmers," he said darkly.
His mother only smiled at him slightly. She never seemed to have trouble finding the humor in his many D-rank missions. Yoshio did not quite feel the same way, and he scowled to show it. She only responded with dancing eyes and the words, "Dinner's on the table."
He trudged over to the table and sat down at the place she'd set for him while she continued to weave in and out of rooms. After he'd stuffed himself sufficiently and could stand to slow down, she collapsed into the chair across from him and made a last inventory of her pack. Even though it was obvious, he asked between bites, "You have a mission?"
"Team Gai. River Country. It's ten days at the outside. Hozumi will stop by tomorrow morning. I didn't have time to get groceries but I left money in your drawer…"
"I'm a genin. I don't need a babysitter," he said.
She paused only momentarily and smiled at him briefly. "Of course not. You're offering to do your own laundry, then? Thank god, I never thought I'd see the day…"
He would have protested if his mouth weren't full of food at that moment.
"Well, try not to kill any of your teammates before I get back. I'd hate to miss the drama. And don't let the D-rank missions get to you – every ninja has to go through them, it's a…"
"Rite of passage, I know, I know," he said tiredly, filling in the speech he'd heard from her before.
"I left something on your bed for you," she said as she tied up her pack. "I know you're just starting to master it, but I thought it might help you keep that Matsumoto kid in line if he starts to get out of hand. Just try to keep the bloodshed to a minimum, please, unless you're actually after enemy nin."
Having just finished the last of his dinner, he went to see what she was talking about. Lying on his bed was a kusari-gama.
She'd been teaching him how to use this weapon but hadn't let him take it with him for missions or team training, as if she didn't trust him to use it without her supervision. He picked up the sickle by its handle and noticed immediately that this one wasn't his mother's. Hers was typically sealed in one of her scrolls when she wasn't using it, its handle was old and well worn, and he was familiar with all its nicks and scratches. This one seemed to be brand new.
He picked up the chain carefully with his free hand and gave the weighted end an experimental swing. He then brought the weapon back out to the kitchen with a question in his eyes. She was already at the door and strapping on her own boots. "I figured it was about time you had one of your own," she said without looking at him, "now that I know you can use it without killing yourself. Remember, it's not your friend in a forest."
He thought with a cringe of the afternoon when she had demonstrated that particular lesson by taking him down to a bamboo grove on the training grounds. She'd told him to choose the weapon his opponent (she) would be using, and of course he'd chosen the sword – that had been the right answer every other time he'd had the kusari-gama. If he'd analyzed the situation and the terrain a little bit, in hindsight, he would have seen that the main advantage of the kusari-gama against the sword was almost completely nullified in an environment where there was no room to swing the chain.
"It's great. Thanks," he said, at a loss for better words as he stared at the thing in his hands.
She smiled at him and bent to kiss him on the forehead quickly before opening the door. "Just remember, no killing of teammates. I'll see you in a week or so."
He looked up and tried to think of something else to say – it felt like a moment where you were supposed to say something more than thank you. Even though he'd only had it in his hands a few minutes, he could tell that this was not a weapon you'd run into every day. If he knew anything about his mother, he knew she didn't buy a weapon unless she really believed it was worth the money. She'd probably gone through a lot of trouble to find this.
But what he ended up saying was, "Who was my father?"
She had actually already opened the door, but she froze in her tracks and turned back to him. For a minute she just stared at him without saying anything.
He didn't know exactly why he'd said it. Maybe because it had been on his mind these last few weeks, and with both of them having missions he hadn't had the chance to talk to her about it before. It didn't help that Neji was around half the time, either.
It was a rare moment when his mother was at a loss for words. He was afraid at first that he'd done something horribly wrong, and then he was embarrassed about the whole thing and wished she'd just leave for her mission, but the longer she stood in the doorway without answering him, the more he felt he had a right to know.
"It's that important to you?" she asked him.
Of course it was! Wouldn't anyone want to know who their father was? What was wrong with her? Neji had said almost the same thing. He felt like shouting at her, but he kept his mouth shut.
She was appraising him then, and he wondered what she was seeing – who she was seeing. "We'll talk when I get back," she said.
A moment later he was staring at the closed door.
He wished she had stayed there a second longer so that he could talk back to her. Yoshio didn't often argue with his mother, but in this case he knew exactly what he'd say. Sure, maybe you'll talk to me when you get back. Or maybe you'll keep avoiding it like you always do.
He gripped the kusari-gama and clenched his teeth. She wasn't going to tell him? Fine. He'd figure it out on his own.
--