Ranma 1/2 in Konoha's Court
Chapter Four
by Lionheart
-oOoOo-
Bakamoto made the Sharingan into the ultimate cheat mode. Then, if he ever came up with a halfway reasonable explanation for why an entire CLAN of these people didn't rule all that they surveyed, I've never heard of it.
So, I gave him an explanation. And until he comes up with one I like better, the Uchiha clan will remain contortionist perverts. But, ok, I can focus in on making sure it's Sasuke, not the entire clan, that suffers humiliation in the future.
Well, mostly. There are some things that are so hilarious I've just gotta do, that might be interpreted by some as against the Uchiha clan, but really they're not!
-oOoOo-
Floating a leaf in the classroom (and unable to get the thing to stop wobbling), Nabiki spent some time fretting visibly, trying to contain her reaction and then fretting as she was unable to do that, torn as she was by a desperate hope.
She was the dope, the dead last, or nearly so. They didn't release the actual grades, so she didn't know for sure, only that she'd barely passed. Ranma, on the other hand, was the class top rookie.
It was easy to see where her hopes kept going. According to information she knew, they frequently made a habit of pairing up the lowest and highest graded graduating genin onto a single team.
She could be assured of passing any ninja test so long as her grade was tied to Ranma's performance. She could be confident of that. If Ranma was on her team, they would pass whatever test the instructor gave them and her heart wouldn't stop.
She could be sure of that.
Ranma, for his part, was sitting at a desk with his shoes off and hands splayed out before him, a leaf floating over the tip of every toe and finger - and one on his nose as well. They were each spinning in different directions and at different speeds, all deliberately controlled in clockwork fashion by the world's premier martial artist as he practiced his chakra control.
Actually, Nabiki could make out three different colors of energy in use, seven of each color among the twenty-one leaves he was floating. So she suspected that he was practicing with chi as well as chakra and... something else. Maybe a mixture between them?
She wished she knew more about this chakra stuff. She only barely knew how to use it. Ranma probably had the physics of it committed to muscle memory and the exact definition of the stuff, its composition and uses, memorized by heart.
He was like that with the martial arts stuff.
Ranma was just about to add a second leaf floating above one he already had, to see if he could levitate two over the same digit, one atop the other, each spinning a separate way, when the door opened and the jonin entered, the Hokage's meeting obviously concluded.
Students were trying to pick out their future instructors among a sea of unfamiliar faces when Soun walked in. He'd shaved off his mustache and he'd somehow gotten the same white eyes as Hinata and Mousse, but it was him, alright.
"Yo! Mr. Tendo!" Ranma shot up a hand and waved gladly.
"Daddy?" Nabiki raised her head, then her face erupted in gladness. "DADDY!!" she went rocketing across the room to engulf the man in a hug.
Hiashi Hyuga stayed stony, stiff and silent as the little girl hugged his chest, crying, "Oh! You don't know how good it is to see you, daddy! I was..."
Nabiki cut off as it registered on her mind that her father wasn't hugging her back. Looking up in a moment of doubt, she saw the stoic expression of a man who doesn't know what is going on, but was determined to pretend it wasn't happening to him.
'He doesn't remember me,' she thought, with a sudden sinking feeling in the pit of her tum.
"Sorry, my mistake," Nabiki choked back tears, faking a laugh. "You look so much like him you could be twins!"
Hiashi's eyebrow twitched.
Iruka cleared his throat at the head of class, holding a newly delivered paper in his hands. "If I could have your attention, please?" the chunin asked, hoping he was doing that poor Nabiki girl a kindness by drawing attention to himself so she could escape her embarrassment. "I have the team assignments. If you would all take your seats?"
Nabiki was able to escape the awkward situation in the general rush to get seated.
"Right," Iruka looked down and began reading, secretly glad Nabiki had taken advantage of the opportunity he'd presented. "There are thirty graduating genin this year, so that will put you evenly divided on ten teams. Team One will be composed of Rumiko Takahashi, Masashi Kishimoto and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. Your jonin instructor will be Gainax."
"Well, that's going to be an interesting team," Nabiki whispered to the girl beside her in an effort to conceal her own distress while she wiped away her tears. "A girl who hates boys, and the only boy who's more of an Uchiha fangirl than Ino and Sakura are, along with a guy who tried to commit suicide right before the genin exam."
"Well, their teacher is very popular," the girl beside her whispered back.
As two boys and a girl got up to follow out a jonin with jiggly boobs, Iruka read on, "Team Two will be Hinata Hyuga, Ranma Saotome..."
"YES!!"
The entire class looked at where Hinata had leapt up out of her chair and pumped a fist in joy. Blushing, the girl sank back down into her seat.
Hiashi scowled, sending a glare the Hokage's direction. He'd fought against that long and hard, but ultimately had not prevailed. But had he known this reaction was coming, he'd have fought harder.
Smiling, Iruka continued, unaware that Nabiki had practically risen out of her seat in her own eagerness and anticipation of being the third member of this team, "And Ino Yamanaka. Your jonin sensei will be..."
Once more the teacher got interrupted by a window flying open and great big balls (which were somehow immediately strung from the ceiling) exploding in confetti and celebratory streamers announcing, "Welcome Jonin Sensei!"
Ranma suddenly felt something, and leaned back sharply in his chair to kick a rampaging snowman in the face just as it was about to cut his pigtail off with a pair of clippers. When the snowman fell back and apart, inside it revealed a man in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses.
Iruka coughed into his fist. "Yes, allow me to introduce your jonin sensei, Madara Kuno."
"Kuno, huh?" Ranma leaned over the prone figure of the Furinkan High principal.
Principal Kuno sprang to his feet, and while trying to cut Ranma's hair started saying, "First ting, I NOO bein da Mizukage! So put dat tot outta yo minds. Me no settin da Kyubi on Konoha, no sar! An I no bein dis immortal head o da Uchiha clan edder! Mebbe I givin you a haircut or two, but I no being no traitor what been infiltrating dis town for da tird time or nuddin. Certainly I do nuddin like makin a criminal organization ta rule da world! Me jus a humble, everyday school teacher, ya! Ain nuddin suspicious about da big Kahuna!"
"Stop tryin ta cut my hair, ya freak!"
"HA! HA! Da Big Kahuna be habbin a genin test fo you tree! You got ten hours ta find da coconut wit a 'Pass da Genin Test' coupon in it! An Da Big Kahoona be fightin ya da whole way!"
As the fight moved outside, Nabiki hid her crushing despair and disappointment by turning to their academy teacher and asking dryly, "So, did the village of Hidden Mist suffer a war over strange haircuts recently?"
Iruka blinked. "Yes. How did you know about that? That's fairly obscure. It started out with some grumblings against the bloodline clans, but that quickly got swamped under by the decree of buzzcuts for boys and bowlcuts for girls across the entire country."
Nabiki turned a droll eye on the Hokage. "Tell me, do we have a problem with traitors infiltrating this town?"
Sarutobi blinked, honestly surprised as he took the pipe out of his mouth to answer. "No. Why do you ask?"
"We're doomed!" Nabiki's head struck her folded arms as she wept over her desk.
Sarutobi smiled assuringly. "Oh, pay no attention to Madara. He just likes to joke like that."
"Team Three," Iruka cleared his throat, "Gregg Sharp, Celeste Byrd and Jared Ornstead under the jonin instructor Kosuke Fujishima."
"Team Four," Iruka continued, "Nabiki Tendo..."
Nabiki groaned from where she had her head down on her desk. 'Figures the team with the number associated with Death is the one I'm on.'
"... Sakura Haruno and Sasuke Uchiha," Iruka rubbed his ears as he was interrupted by a fangirl's squeal, along with several groans from disappointed ones. "Under the jonin sensei Kakashi Hatake."
"Team Five," Iruka rushed on, "Hung Nguyen, Howard the Grum, and..."
-oOoOo-
"DYNAMIC ENTRY!! MOUSSE! YOU DID NOT APPEAR FOR... training?"
Gai snatched up the smoldering, broken form of his student. "MOUSSE?!! What has gone wrong? What happened? Who did this to you?"
"Hi..." the burned up boy coughed out a cloud of black smoke. "Hin... Hinata-chan..."
-oOoOo-
Slightly later, on top of the school building, Nabiki stared at her teacher unimpressed. The guy was over three hours late, but with all of the changes to the team structure worked out in a meeting, he'd been bang on time - minus attending the meeting.
So this Kakashi guy had told the wrong students he was unimpressed with them. Iruka had corrected him, and now here she sat on a roof with the broodmaster (freshly released from the hospital in new underpants) and his chief fangirl (after having gotten new clothes brought to her by one of the other fangirls, while she'd stayed safe locked up in the girl's toilet).
She'd rather be back in the classroom floating leaves. Ranma'd had a brilliant idea to get the academy teacher to show them some things while they were waiting, and chakra control was dear to the mercenary's heart now that her life could well depend on it.
Of course, the only technique she knew was the basic Clone illusion, and that only because the girl she was replacing almost knew it well enough already, and Nabiki herself had been told what to expect on the test, so had been practicing it exhaustively for a week.
No, she'd much rather be back in that classroom doing reviews on ninja secrets than be up here listening to the pathetic drama of the constipation magnet and the girl who loved him. Even her teacher... sigh. It was so hard to respect a grown man who'd read porn in front of a bunch of pre-teens!
Her slouching instructor didn't even look at them as he said, "Alright, why don't we introduce ourselves: likes, dislikes, hobbies, dreams, that sort of thing..."
"Why don't I go first?" Nabiki asked, leaning back in a vaguely hostile posture, her arms crossed and eyes half-lidded, a pose that would've screamed 'danger' to any resident of Nerima.
She pointed at her teacher. "You are Kakashi Hatake, the legendary Copy Cat Kakashi, graduated the academy at age five, promoted to chunin at age six. Currently, jonin, you had a brief stint as an ANBU captain. Most of your fame is because of the Sharingan eye of your teammate Obito, implanted as his last request as he died. With it, you have copied over a thousand techniques."
The guy's disinterested and bored look vanished like a switch got flipped.
Both Nabiki's teammates stopped squabbling and looked intensely interested.
But the Tendo girl scowled as she went on. "You are the son of the legendary White Fang of Konoha, Sakumo Hatake, who was respected on a level with the Sannin. He passed on his famous weapon to you, which you broke rather carelessly, I might add."
Kakashi's one visible eye narrowed toward her dangerously.
Nabiki was unimpressed. "Because your Sharingan is not your own, you often hospitalize yourself with over-usage; which is why you keep it hidden by your headband most of the time, seeing as how you can't turn it off, so it keeps sucking out your chakra. You made jonin at thirteen, signed the dog summoning contract, and were on the team taught by the Fourth Hokage. Despite this, you have never passed a genin team or passed on any of your skills - something that Obito would say made you worse than trash, and your father would have been disappointed in, to say nothing of your betrayal of your teacher's legacy."
Kakashi's pose had gone from aloof and lazy to hostile and stony.
Nabiki's cool exterior passed off this hostility as though it were of no consequence, though inside she was sweating, and her teammates, Sakura and Sasuke, were paralyzed with the emotions rolling off this intense display.
"You are also a broken, washed up, burned out, has-been of a ninja," she declared flatly, meeting his gaze with a level one of her own. "You have no friends, no hobbies, and no interests except for reading porn. Rin would've been ashamed of you. You are never on time, and famous for making up lame excuses - something that you copied from Obito. You spend most of your time staring at the grave marker with Obito's name on it, and have gotten yourself dangerously out of shape not keeping up with your training."
Sasuke and Sakura were now cringing away from the amount of killing intent manifesting.
But Nabiki was an excellent judge of character, and knew she hadn't crossed the line to where he'd attack her just yet, though it was getting close. And, now, of course, to the point of this whole rant, "You disguise your many failures by pretending you are no longer trying, but some of the best ninja of Konoha have had their part in training you, and you betray them all by refusing to pass on those skills to others. And," here she acquired a nasty smirk, "You compound your betrayal by doing something your father, both teammates, and your teacher would ALL have abhorred! As your teacher's last remaining student, his child is your responsibility as surely as if it were your very own, and you have ignored him since birth."
The waves of killing intent cut off in shock.
Nabiki smirked victoriously.
Both Sasuke and Sakura remained paralyzed, staring at the duo in amazement.
The middle Tendo daughter then waved a hand idly at the other two. "Sakura Haruno, a girl who betrayed her best friend, and the one to save her from being a social outcast, in order to become her rival for Sasuke's affections - a boy who has never shown any interest in girls, and seems obsessed with killing his brother, Itachi Uchiha, in spite of the fact that his brother graduated the academy at the age of seven, and was a chunin at ten, so obviously is far more advanced and powerful. Itachi also had competent teachers, while poor Sasuke gets stuck with you - until you fail us all, just like you did everyone else."
The silence stretched until it became almost unbearable.
"Meet me in training ground 7 at 8 AM tomorrow for survival training." Kakashi spoke in cold, flat tones. "Don't eat breakfast or you'll throw up."
With that, the jonin vanished in a swish of leaves, taking the killing intent with him.
Nabiki resisted rolling her eyes, quietly thinking the jonin could well be spying on them out of concealment somewhere.
She hoped Ranma appreciated this. Pricking that guy's conscience using data from her own briefing, and what she'd been able to turn up since, had been acutely dangerous for a know-nothing genin like her. Out of shape or not, that jonin could've beaten her like a rag doll.
But she'd had to do it, for two reasons: one, it was the only chance to get the guy to do any actual teaching. And she was on his team now, so her survival depended in large part on him for that. So she couldn't let him slack off and had to at least TRY to goad him into doing some actual instructing. For the other...
Well, Ranma ought to owe her a big one if what she'd said got the guy to go seek out the pigtailed boy and offer restitution for his previous neglect.
Of course, having offended the guy so deeply she could count on whatever his test was being worse, and she'd had no guarantees of passing anyway. Although... this had been a calculated gamble. By calling his worth as a teacher into question, as well as his duty to his own teachers to pass on the skills they'd given him... well, it stood a chance to give them all an opportunity to pass, because of his guilty conscience.
By challenging him on the teaching front, he might actually step up and teach. Of course, he was going to make them suffer for his humiliation. If they did pass, by some miracle or guilt of the guy's conscience, he'd make it worse than boot camp for them.
But that was better than having her heart stop.
-oOoOo-
Tertius had been reformed and was being employed by Ranma during the otherwise dead time of waiting for the Hokage's meeting to be over so they could get team assignments, scavenging discarded ninja tools from the various training grounds.
People left an appalling amount of equipment out just lying around. It would be a waste not to gather it, especially since he needed new gear anyway, and some of this was top of the line stuff, just left laying there after people finished practicing.
Some people just had no sense of the value of a good tool.
Of course, Tertius was a girl at the moment, after having gone swimming in a few ponds in order to retrieve the equipment on the bottom, but that was nothing a quick shower wouldn't fix. And the cheapest ninja tool she'd recovered was worth more than that!
There was also that lovely data downloaded from Secundus to consider. It was amazing how, with the same skills, just decent eyesight, Mousse was a much more credible threat. Even the faster rewind was, Tertius guessed, because the duck-boy no longer had to worry as much about his chains catching on something without his knowing as he was reeling them back in, and pulling him off of his feet.
It was delicious to consider stuff like that. It was most of what Ranma lived for.
Heading back to the academy so she could reequip the original with gear she'd successfully scavenged, the redhaired and female Tertius caught sight of Hinata falling through the air and reacted without thinking, leaping up to intercept and rescue her.
-oOoOo-
Hinata had been thrown into the air practically from Madara Kuno's (no way no how is da Big Kahuna an Uchiha, so put dat tot outta yo heads raht now!) first blow.
Ranko (Tertius) arrived in time to make an intercept, catching the other girl and landing on the school roof, pivoting as she did so to make an unassisted, one-armed block of four kunai with one of her own, kick high into the chin of the follow-up attacker who'd arrived (with hair clippers) right about as poor Hinata was to have struck ground, and followed that motion through to spin in place, inverting her own body to lay Hinata down gently on the roof, flip completely around and lift the still rising body of Kuno Sr even further into the air with a second kick under his chin while he was still reacting to the impact of the first one.
That double attack was enough to vanquish the water-clone, and that body of Kuno Sr exploded in a shower of droplets like a popped balloon.
The pigtailed girl then leap off the roof to go join Primus in his fight against the original Kuno...
... completely uncaring of the fact that she'd just done these amazing feats of acrobatics and skill not four feet in front of the genin of Kakashi's team.
Sasuke Uchiha rose out of his funk in a startled shock. When Sakura shook him, worried that something had gone wrong with him, the boy rose to his feet to better watch the not-so-distant fight of three genin vs Madara Kuno.
"Sasuke! What is it!!" The concerned pink hair girl shook her crush.
He shook his head, focused on observing the fight.
"SASUKE!!" Sakura cried out in real concern.
The boy met her eyes for one long, emotional moment. It caught her off-guard, and she was sure the moment had arrived at last. She'd never seen him look that way before. He held his emotions so close normally, but this time...
"Sakura, according to the medics I cannot delay any longer if I am to restore my clan. And I am... under orders to do so as soon as possible." Mostly so the medics could ascertain if that was still possible. They were unsure given the extent of the damage.
"HOTCHA!! One Haruno girl is going to get lucky tonight!!" the girl's inner voice crowed.
For the first time she could ever remember Sasuke-kun's face was raw with emotion, full of passion... and, for the first time ever, ROMANCE!!
The boy licked his lips.
Sakura prepared herself to receive a kiss.
The Uchiha swiped her hands away before forming a fist and waxing in poetic in rhapsody, turning back to gaze on the leaping motions of the trio of genin involved in the Kuno fight, "At Last! I have Found her! Look at how the beauteous pigtailed girl fights that jonin! It is as if they are on equal terms! I do not know her, so she must be new. To be a new genin yet fight like a jonin... Obviously she is the strongest girl in Konoha!"
A wave crested against the back of the school building and crashed, highlighting Sasuke in a moment of triumphal glory, as he stood, outlined by a sunset occurring during mid-day, fist clenched in testament to his holy cause.
The light of obsession appeared in his eyes as Sasuke watched Ranma's female clone do battle. "That makes her the best. And don't I deserve the best? She is the only girl in the village strong enough for me to consider using to revive my clan!"
Sakura broke down in tears.
Nabiki had to bite her lip and hold her gut to avoid exploding in laughter.
-oOoOo-
Author's Notes:
Forgive me, but one of the things that annoys me most about Naruto fiction in general is where they take the trouble to list out team assignments by rote, but somehow manage to skip all the ones not listed in the source material.
That just strikes me as A) Lazy, and B) sticking WAAAY too close to canon! It's like Harry Potter stories where they quote the original Sorting Hat song word by word. Pointless and ultimately frustrating as well.
So, by way of tribute to some of the last great authors of Ranma fanfiction from a previous era (some of whom are, luckily, still with us in one capacity or another), I gave them a brief cameo; like the great filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock always showed up in his own films in a brief, inconsequential background role - but he was always there!
No place in the plot, just a tribute to greatness.
