Disclaimer: Don't own anything, just borrowing.

Sore ga Ai, Deshou?

Chapter Two: Settling In

Shiranui Hanzo arrived home latter that evening to find his granddaughter curled up in a corner of the sitting room on a time out, a common occurrence in the Shiranui household.

"What'd you do this time, kitten?" He asked.

Mai gazed up at her grandfather, her eyes welling up with tears. "Ojisama!" She latched onto his leg and cried into the material of his hakama. "I think I killed him! I didn't mean to, he snuck up on me and I hit him and he fell!"

"Who?" Hanzo asked, unable to think of anyone he knew that could be KOed by an eight-year-old girl.

"The hakujin that 'Touchan says is going to be living here from now on."

That was right! Today was the day that Jeff Bogard's son Andy was supposed to be arriving from America. So Jubei had already arrived with the boy and the first thing that Mai had to go and do was beat the poor bereaved boy up.

"I'm sure he's not dead." The old ninja assured his granddaughter, picking her up so that he could look eye to eye with her. "Why don't we go look for him together, then you can apologize."

The little ninja-in-training nodded and latched on to her grandfather. Hanzo balanced the child on his hip with his arm and set off to find either Jubei or Kazutaka.

…

"Don't fall asleep!" Kazutaka slammed a wooden fan down on the floor making a loud thwak! sound to punctuate his command. "You have a concussion, are you so anxious to see your father again?"

Andy's head snapped back up, the ice pack that now sat atop his crown of golden hair teetered precariously. "I can't." The boy said, one hand reaching up to steady his ice pack. "Not before I avenge his death."

"It's a noble goal," Kazutaka began, "but you're a bit young to be thinking of revenge. You're, what, ten?"

"Nine." The boy corrected.

"Nine. You're young. I know you're hurting now, but you have your whole life ahead of you. Do you really want to spend it consumed by thoughts of revenge?"

The boy glared at him. "My dad was murdered out on the open street in broad daylight and no one did anything. If my brother and I don't bring his killer to justice, who will?"

"Children shouldn't have to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders." Kazutaka insisted.

"Leave him be, Kazu." Hanzo had just entered the room with Mai in his arms and Jubei following behind.

"Chichi-ue."

"Ah, you're alive!" Mai jumped down from her grandfather's arms and rushed to the foreign fighter's side. "I'm so glad! I'm sorry I hit you. But you surprised me I don't know you and you're so pale and you're hairs so light that I thought that you were an Oni from the mountains or a youkai or another one of those creatures that they always tell us kids to be carful of! And you really shouldn't go around sneaking up on people! What if I had killed you? What would you tell Enma-sama to get into heaven? 'Sorry, I was hit by a girl'?"

She said all of this very fast and, of course, in Japanese and so Andy had no idea what she was saying.

"Um, what?"

"She said she's sorry." Hanzo translated and paraphrased for him. "So you're Jeff's son." He stood, arms crossed, apprising the boy that sat before him.

"One of them, yeah." Andy said meekly. He didn't know why but the imposing form of Shiranui Hanzo was very intimidating. "My big brother wanted to train somewhere else… so that our styles would be different."

"Smart." Jubei commented to Hanzo. "So that when they confront this Geese Howard person together he'd have to adjust to defending against two different techniques. Not a bad plan."

Hanzo nodded then turning his attention to Kazutaka he said, "Kazu, go do something with your daughter for a while."

Kazutaka obediently stood and, taking Mai by the hand, pulled her away from the fascinating foreign fighter that she was threatening to start fawning over (his shiny blond hair was quite fascinating, after all).

Andy heaved a sigh of relief when the girl was out of the room. When he had first seen her he had been fascinated by the grace of her technique, but now, after experiencing her company he furiously hoped that he wouldn't have to spend much time around her during these next ten years. The house was big, they should be able to avoid each other easily… right?

Hanzo and Jubei both sat down across from him. "Are you badly injured?"

"Its just a bump." The boy insisted. "Kazutaka-sama thinks that it's worse than it is."

"Kazutaka… sama?" Hanzo raised one quizzical eyebrow.

Andy blushed sheepishly. Master Tung had given him a brief lecture on Japanese honorifics before leaving and that he should never say a person's name without one. He had, however, forgotten most of which ones were appropriate for which situations, relationships or status.

"Oh, he'll love that." Jubei chuckled.

"I'm sorry." Andy said, thinking he had accidentally insulted his host. He didn't know what he would do if Hanzo became angry with him and sent him back home with not so much as a day of training beneath his belt to show for all the trouble this was.

"Don't be." Hanzo laughed. "It'll be something I can tease him about." Then his demeanor changed and he became more serious, business like. "Now, tell me, how much training did Tung give you before your father passed away?"

"I was taught various stances and some basic forms." The boy dutifully answered. "We were about to begin lessons in balance before… um, we were about to begin the balance lessons." He finished somewhat subdued.

"Hmm…"

"He's very behind." Jubei whispered in the Shiranui master's ear.

"He hasn't had the luxury of being trained since birth as we have." Hanzo reminded his friend and colleague.

"Well, puppy, you're going to have to work hard if you want to train here." Hanzo announced. "I don't suffer slackers here and if you want to be ready to avenge your father's death ten years from now you can't afford to slack off."

"I know." The boy said.

"This summer we'll pick up where Tung left off." The old ninja continued. "You will practice and you will learn until everything is second nature to you. Since you will be here for a decade, you will apply for citizenship. In the Fall you will attend school with Mai-chan. That is not a excuse for you to neglect your tarining, however. I demand nothing but the best from my students and you will give me nothing but your very best! Is this understood?"

"Yes, sir." The boy bowed low, touching his forehead to the floor and sending a lance of pain through his skull to remind him of his earlier incident with the girl, Mai-chan.

"One more thing." Hanzo added. "If you're going to live here, you had best learn the language. This is the last time we will speak English in my house. I suggest you learn quickly."

"Yes, sir."

"'Hai, Sensei'." Jubei corrected. "You will address Hanzo-kun and myself as 'sensei'. When you understand what we've told you, you will say 'hai'. When you don't understand you will say 'wakarimasen'. Do you understand?"

"Hai, Sensei." The boy nodded.

…

Hanzo-sensei had made good on his promise to accept nothing but the best from Andy. He was expected to rise on his own just before dawn and report for calisthenics with Mai and Kazutaka as instructor. If, for whatever reason, he failed to wake and be ready on his own then Hanzo-sensei would come and drag him out by the ankles and throw him in the garden pond, startling the fish and covering Andy in the algae and slime that grew there.

After calisthenics they would all sit together for a simple breakfast of rice and miso. During this time both Hanzo as well as Kazutaka would quiz him on what Japanese he had learned, occasionally giving praise when he mastered an irregular verb but mostly just correcting what he said wrong.

After breakfast Mai went to train with her father while Hanzo-sensei worked with Andy to improve his balance. The old ninja would place a bowl of water on his head and give Andy the simple instruction of "Do not let a single drop fall."

It sounded easy enough. But the bowl was completely rounded on the bottom with no foot to steady it on a level surface, let alone Andy's round golden head. More often than not his master would return to find the bowl upturned on the ground with Andy looking sheepish and shamefaced with his white shirt soaked through with the water.

After a few days of this, Hanzo changed his tactics. Taking Andy into the mountains behind the dojo to a strait in the river where the water flowed fastest. The old ninja set a small wooden raft in the water, anchored to the bank by a rope tied to a stake driven into the soil. Hanzo then instructed Andy to stand on the raft in the water and simply "Try not to get wet."

A few days after this, Andy started training in swimming trunks.

Lunch was usually onigiri (rice balls) served with freshly sliced fruit. Hanzo preferred to eat outside during the summer and as the head of the household his word was law. And so, Hanzo, Kazutaka and Mai would eat under the shade of the porch by the garden while Andy sat out in the sun in an attempt to dry himself (this was a difficult feat when one considered Japan's humid summers), and Hanzo would shout bits of conversation to him from across the courtyard to keep him in almost constant language practice.

After lunch Mai was given some free time to do as she please while Andy was marched inside to hit the books and cram as much hiragana into his brain as he possibly could. He would be attending school one year ahead of Mai come the fall, yet he was worlds behind.

By his age most Japanese children were expected to know both their Hiragana as well as Katakana and a few of the most basic and/or common Kanji (such as the numbers, days of the week and their own names). But it was all lines and gibberish to Andy. "Sa" looked just like "ki" and as far as he could tell "re", "ne" and "wa" were the same damn character.

He was always overjoyed when he was called away from his toils over the writing systems for dinner. Dinner it seemed was the only time meat of any sort ever appeared on the table. The main course was always rice but served over it would be a few slices of beef, pork, chicken or fish.

Andy also loved dinner because it was the only meal where Hanzo or Kazutaka didn't grill him on his studies, be it his martial arts or his Japanese. Instead, Mai took center stage, engaging her father's and grandfather's attention fully with stories of what she and her friends had done while Andy was slaving over his books. How exited she was over the up coming school year and other common concerns of a girl her age. Hanzo and Kazu would listen with polite indifference while the little girl happily chattered away.

Thus, Andy's first summer in Japan was passed.

…

Late in August Kazutaka took Andy and Mai out to buy new uniforms for school. Mai fit into the navy-blue sailor suits easily with the only hassle being a disagreement over the length of the skirt. Mai wanted to have her skirts hemmed above the knees "just like the big girls", Kazutaka wanted her skirts to cover all the way down to her ankles. The sales woman smiled sweetly at their antics and offered Kazu some advanced sympathy for when the girl entered high school and her skirt length became the least of his worries.

Andy, however, had a bit more trouble finding a uniform that fit. Due to his martial arts training he was overly muscular for a nine-year-old and neither he nor Kazutaka could find a black button-up coat that could fit his broad shoulders without having extra material that billowed around his stomach. In the end Kazu decided it was best to just buy the closest fit and sew it into a better fit at home.

…

The first day at a new school… Andy liked to think that he was used to them by now. Back in South Town, every time the foster agency sent him to a new home that family would enroll him in a new school. After he and Terry had run away they stopped going to school. After Jeff had adopted them they had had another "first day at a new school". And now here he was again at yet another new school having to suffer through yet another first day. It seemed that Andy had had more first days than actual days of schooling.

But this time it wasn't just another depressingly underfunded public school, it was a surprisingly well funded public school in a foreign country half way across the world where they taught in a language that he was only just barely starting to master. He wished feverently for something familiar that he could latch onto, something he could draw comfort from like he and Terry had comforted each other back on the streets. Sometimes it felt like the wild streets of the concrete jungle were safer than the ordered play-yard with its hierarchal structure of bullies and submissives.

Andy had long since learned to deal with bullies back in South Town (both the child kind as well as the adult kind). You don't survive long on the streets without growing some balls as well as brains, at the last school he had attended with Terry, the school Jeff had enrolled them in he had been closer to the top of the play-yard hierarchy, most of the big bullies left him and Terry alone but neither of them ever had to stoop to the same level to get their space. Here, however, Andy feared that he was already on the bottom rung with little to no way of climbing up.

Back home he was looked upon as different by the other kids because he was an orphan, he didn't have parents of his own, he borrowed them. Here he was different because he was foreign, the other children all looked so alike with their ebony hair and dark eyes while he stood out like a lamp post on a dark street with his golden blond hair, alabaster skin and pale blue eyes. Add that to the fact that he was still learning to speak the language and couldn't write it to save his life and you had the perfect recipe for ostracizeation and ridicule.

The teachers were nice enough, very understanding and patient with his lack of knowledge and understanding. One of them, after learning that he was a ward of the Shiranui family, had even offered a way to combine his martial arts training with his studies of the written language and he promised to pass the suggestion on to Hanzo-sensei.

He was one year ahead of Mai and so, naturally, didn't share any classes with the overly peppy ninja girl but she was the only person he knew there and so he developed a habit of sitting close to her at lunch, if for no other reason than she was more familiar to him than anything else in this school. So long as he was outside of the Shiranui dojo she was his anchor, she kept him sane. She, of course, had no idea of this.

"Don't walk so close to me." She said one day on their way home.

"Sumimasen." He apologized and stepped to the opposite side of the sidewalk from her. There was now enough space between them to fit a whole other person and a half.

"People are gonna get the wrong idea about us." She continued. "You always eat with me and my friends. Don't you have any of your own? In your own year? And you always walk so close to me on the way home?"

"We live in the same house." He reminded her, perplexed by this sudden burst of conversation and the seemingly random subject matter. They usually walked in disinterested silence together, neither one really having anything to say to the other. Andy was fine with this, he found he to be a bit irritating at the best of times and downright insufferable at the worst of times.

"But you can avoid me just fine when were at home. Why do you have to give me your boy-cooties at school where people can see?" Her lips formed into a pout that would have been cute had they been of an age when Andy could appreciate a good feminine pout. "Do you like me or something?"

"No!" He said quickly, his mind jumping back to their first meeting and his embarrassing knock-out by a fan.

"Then stay one hundred and fifty centimeters away from me when we're in school from now on. Ya got that? One hundred and fifty centimeters." She commanded imperiously.

Andy paused. Up until this point she had been apathetic to his presence at her table during lunch. What had happened to change that? Her friends all knew that he was living at the Shiranui dojo with her but that shouldn't be that big of a deal. He had grown used to her presence at school and had drawn comfort from her familiarity, obnoxious as indefatigable personality was. He didn't want to louse his security blanket just yet.

'Don't get attached, don't get hurt.' He reminded himself of his old motto. It was better to distance himself from her now before he became to dependant on her for comfort. He would eventually leave to go back to America and she would most likely stay here.

"Um… so, how much is that in feet or inches?" He asked.

"I don't know. Just don't sit next to me at lunch and don't walk so close to me on the way to or from school."

"Fine." Andy was about to inquire further as to what brought this on so suddenly. If someone had said something to her, maybe teased her about him but then reminded himself that he was detaching and shouldn't care. Her friends were her concern, doing well and not disappointing Hanzo-sensei's high standards was his concern, he didn't have time to waste worrying about a girl he didn't even like.

…

Hanzo was very impressed with Andy's teacher's idea of combining his training with his studies. There was an old way of grappling practice used in China where two opponents would face off atop a field of solid wood polls as their fighting stage, the first fighter to fall lost.

Hanzo altered this by writing one character on the top of each poll in chalk ordered Andy to hop from poll to poll in the order that he called out the characters. This was a great way of not just improving his reading skills but his speed, agility and balance as well. (The old ninja made a mental note to send that particular teacher a large gift basket next Teacher Appreciation Day.)

After a little over a week of training like this Andy had completely mastered his Hiragana and Katakana and Hanzo-sensei erased the simple phonetic characters and replaced them with a selection from the 1,945 Joyo-Kanji. This exasperated Andy to no end because some of the characters ha more than one name or the same name as another Kanji and now, every time he got one wrong Hanzo-sensei demanded that they start over from the beginning.

"Sen!" Hanzo shouted.

Andy gracefully hopped from the "Mei" poll on which he was now balancing and landed, teetering slightly, on another poll a few feet away marked with the Kanji for "kawa" or "river".

"No." Hanzo shook his head. "Start again."

"But-" Andy caught himself before he could say that they'd already been going at this for an hour. Hanzo-sensei would just remind him that he would never avenge his father's death if he didn't practice and this was still martial arts practice as much as it was writing. "Perhaps if you specified if you wanted the number Sen or the river Senor the future Sen, Sensei."

"Oh?" Hanzo raised one quizzical eyebrow. "If that is the problem then why don't you just ask me which I want before you leap?"

"I…" The boy paused. In all honesty the thought of asking hadn't even crossed his mind. The point of the exercise was to improve speed and balance, how would his speed improve if he was constantly pausing to ask questions? "I hadn't thought of that, Sensei."

"Let's try this one more time, then." The old ninja smiled.

The boy nodded.

"Sui!"

Andy jumped from the river pole on which he stood to the one marked with the character for water.

"Do!"

From water to earth…

"Ichi!"

…From earth to the number one…

"Ji!"

…From number one to… Andy paused just before he jumped to the pole marked with the character for ear and asked, "Ji ear, Ji self, Ji affair, Ji temple or Ji time, Sensei?"

The old ninja smiled wickedly. "The number ten."

"But the number then is Ju, Sensei."

Andy's quibble did nothing to diminish his master's smile. "Well, then, I guess we'll just have to study a bit harder and come back tomorrow then, won't we." By 'we' he, of course, meant Andy. "Go inside and get cleaned up for dinner."

The boy did as he was told but paused at the porch. "Sensei?" he began.

"Hm?"

"If the point of this exercise if to increase my speed, why tell me to stop and ask? Why not just tell me right off?"

"You always leap without looking?" The old master shot back.

"No." Back in South Town on the streets before life with Jeff, jumping into a situation before you knew what you were getting yourself into most often got you killed. Neither he nor Terry survived by being reckless.

"Then don't start now. All the training in the world won't be worth squat if you rush in against a stronger opponent without thinking."

Andy thought about that for a moment. "But if you had all the training in the world you could beat anything no matter what."

"No matter how good you get, there will always be someone stronger than you." Hanzo reminded him. "Don't let your training or a few successes go to your head."

Andy stared at the old ninja for a moment longer. He had sounded so much like Jeff when he said that, so much like his dad when he would take him and Terry to the park and show them the basic forms while explaining his own code of honor and rules to live by. He missed him, at that moment Andy really missed him, he wanted nothing more than to just be hugged by his dad. But his dad was gone, murdered by Geese Howard.

He looked back at the field of polls silhouetted against the evening sky. He knew exactly what he was getting into by planning revenge on his father's killer. He was no stranger to the cruelties of adults and knew what happened when combined a cruel heart with the strength to hurt others. He would kill Geese Howard and he would avenge his father's murder. He knew exactly what he was getting into.

Hanzo placed a comforting hand on his pupil's shoulder. "C'mon, puppy, we better get some food in you before bed, it's a school night."

…

(A/N: Reviews are the air I breathe. Don't let me suffocate, tell me how I'm doing.)