When I recovered from my temper tantrum (because really, what else was I supposed to call it?), Tou-san was waiting for me with a freshly skinned and gutted something. I stared at it, my jaw hanging. Clearly it had once been alive, and it wasn't the beef or pork or chicken (or fish) I was accustomed to eating in the Before. (Is that what I'm calling it now?)

I really couldn't tell what it was, so I continued to stare at it as if expecting it to somehow magically tell me what it was and what to do with it. It was a hunk of meat, so I guessed it would be cooked.

"Otou-san, what is that?" I asked when my speech came back to me, pointing at it.

"Dinner," he replied. "You're going to cook it."

I shook my head. "Okay, I got that. But what... was... it?" As soon as the question left my mouth I kind of regretted it. Too late though.

"Ressaa panda desu," he said.

Obviously it wasn't a panda bear, as it was too small even for a cub, and the only other animal I knew of that had "panda" in the title was the red panda. But if it was red panda, it wasn't a perfect cognate - wouldn't it have "aka" in it somewhere? And "ressaa" didn't exactly translate into "red" as far as I knew. Either way, my heart sank a little - I was afraid that our prey had been cute.

Oh well. I could at least sort of comfort myself with the idea that it was for survival, not for trophy or prestige.

"I hunted, skinned, and gutted it today," he continued. "And I'll help you cook it, since you don't know how to cook anything yet." Not true, but he didn't know that. "As we keep doing this, you'll be taking on more of the task until you can hunt and kill the prey yourself."

So I'll be hunting and cooking every day then. I suppressed a groan, which Uchi Naru Kizuna ate for breakfast. I didn't hate cooking, but it wasn't something I had wanted to do every single day in either life. Now I didn't have a choice - Tou-san was serious about this survival thing, even if I didn't know why and he wouldn't explain it to me.

(Well, I did have a choice if I bothered to bring up that convoluted stuff from a seminar I had been in in that other life. The same stuff that should have prevented the birth of Uchi Naru Kizuna, who was already leeching off me, and she wasn't even a few hours old.)

Tou-san unfurled one of his scrolls, slammed his hand down, and a sizable stock pot poofed into existence. I had seen that pot a few times before when we had been lucky enough to run across easy prey while walking. I wasn't a stranger to eating game meat, but until this point he had allowed me the ignorance and spared me the sight of our food before it had become food and wasn't just a dead animal.

He handed me the pot and pointed me to a nearby creek. "Can you fill this pot halfway with water?"

"Hai," I responded and waded down to the creek. Several minutes later I stumbled back, the pot balanced on my head, doing what I could to not spill any of the precious water. If we were getting water from creeks now, then we were really doing survival.

Why not take the extra step, and break rocks to make stone knives so we can carve our own plateware, Uchi Naru supplied. Or make mud pots, that would work too.

I told it - that voice - her? - to shut up, and my jaw tightened just a little.

No, I told myself as I set down the pot. I was okay with this. We had to survive and apparently this was the way to do it. Survival in the shinobi world was hard. This was hard. Ergo, we were surviving. I nodded, content to let that convoluted piece of logical fallacy sit and stew.

Tou-san was kindling a fire in a fire pit (had I really taken that long to get the water?), but stopped to hand me a kunai. Holy shit, I was holding an actual kunai! It was large in my grip and the metal looked freshly sharpened. What else did he carry in those scrolls? And did he have shadow clones working for him or something?

He set down some of the vegetables he had bought yesterday between us and picked up a carrot. In his other hand he held another kunai. "Watch," he said, and he began slicing the carrot in his hand, dropping the bits into the stock pot. It was a knife technique mostly familiar to me - I was accustomed to having a cutting board and a single-edged knife, not my hand and a double-edged blade, but still close enough. "Cut all of these," he further instructed. "Try to keep them all the same size."

"Hai," I said and began slicing through the vegetables.

Yu no Kuni must have been one of the more westernized countries Kishimoto had designed - the vegetables were all familiar to me, things that I wouldn't find uncommon in the vegetable-and-meat soups my mother had made in the Before. Carrots, potatoes, celery, mushrooms, even a bit of corn.

And the meat was the probably-a-red-panda Tou-san was cubing nearby.

One potato was particularly difficult to slice through. It had probably been dug up too early maybe (or maybe not, I had never grown potatoes so I didn't actually know). I forced it, and hissed as the kunai pushed through, slicing my hand in the process. I dropped the potato, which now had blood on it.

Tou-san was at my side in an instant, my bleeding hand in his. I looked away, puffed my cheeks and clenched my jaw, trying to bite back childish tears. Then strangely relaxed as the pain went away and a whirring noise filled my ears. I looked back to find my hand encased in the glowing green chakra of iryo-ninjutsu, the cut gone. Who knew! He actually could use it effectively.

"Th-thank you," I mustered.

I looked away again, only slightly stunned, as he let go of my hand and directed me to finish the vegetables. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him pick up the bloody potato.

"Um," I started. "Why are you adding that potato to the soup? There's blood on it."

He looked back at me. "Waste not."

That's definitely not sanitary, I thought, but I nodded anyway. And kind of morbid.

It wasn't like there wasn't still blood in the meat anyway. (It would cook out.)


Once the meat and vegetables were simmering in the pot, Tou-san took me aside.

"I know you're angry at me," he started, and that got my attention immediately. I had pulled an Eisenhower and delegated my anger away - expressing it was urgent but not important to me, so I had dumped it on Uchi Naru. And now it - she? - was clawing at the chance to raise hell. I pushed it-her down and maintained my blank stare.

God, I really am turning into Kasa.

"- and we have a lot of time before our stew finishes. So we're going to kill three birds with one stone. Or punch, as it were." He grinned slightly at some joke I didn't get yet and held up his hands. "I want you -" he pointed at me - "to punch my palms." He lightly fisted one palm.

"Uh, okay." I formed a fist and fell into a stance.

"STOP, stop stop," he said, stopping me. "Didn't your mother ever teach you to form a fist?"

Maybe? I stared at my fist, opened it, and closed it again, this time taking care to curl my knuckles and squish my fingertips (or at least that was what it felt like). I left my thumb loose while I tested it against my own palm. Best to curl it under but not grasp it, so maybe I wouldn't break it. Especially if I aimed to hit with the parts of my fingers between the second and third knuckles. Like a wall.

"That's a better start," he said. "See how it feels."

"Like I'm squishing my fingers with a hydraulic press."

"Haidorooriku puressu?"

"It's nothing."

"Try not to clench it so much."

I loosened my fist, and immediately tightened it again as I threw a punch at his hand.

"Stop! Ugh, didn't your mother ever teach you to punch? Didn't she give you any physical conditioning?"

"Physical conditioning, yeah," I replied.

Silence.

"What did she do?"

"She trained me to be strong enough to lift two of me and taught me that -" I paused, searching for the exact words Naomi-kaa-san had used - "interrupting the governing vessel the right way can force shut down someone's chakra."

"And chakra manipulation is flat handed," he finished, visibly suppressing a groan.

"I haven't really needed a fist until now."

"Not even when you were being bullied at school?"

"No." Because I knew that fighting with fists said that I was looking for a fight, while fighting with flat hands said I didn't want to fight but would if I had to. And that little detail could and often did make the difference between whipping and flogging as punishment for unauthorized fighting in the hallways. (If I thought about it, the disciplinary system at Yukigakure Ninja Academy was akin to the parental philosophy of punishing all the children to make sure they punished the right one. Which was also a thought I held about some forms of socialism.)

Bunshirou exhaled audibly. "Okay. I was planning on letting you beat my hands to a pulp, but we have to fix your form first."

"Hai."


The next few hours saw me slapping the trunk of a tree at all angles until well after my hands started feeling like they were going to fall off, then my hands being wrapped so I could slap the tree some more. It was well past dark by the time I was allowed to stop, my hands tingling painfully for a good hour afterward. I gathered my clarinet performance career was ruined. Brain surgery was probably also out.

The soup had been mostly delicious, savory with an intense gamey flavor that overbalanced the vegetables, even if it hurt almost too much to pick up the bowl and even though it would never be as good as pho or ramen. The air was full of the aroma, which was terrible for stealth and not being found, but I guessed we were waiting to refine that.

Which we did, over the course of the next five months, along with a ton of other things worthy of a training montage.

Like running the heck away from the battles that erupted at random between Kumo and Konoha and occasionally the Yu-nin when the big fights got too close to the tourists. And while that was exciting (a term I use very loosely), it didn't happen often and was punctuated with long periods of boredom, relocating from formerly undestroyed parts of the forests to parts on some cosmic unwritten plan for destruction, and practicing most of the same things ad nauseum.

Okay, so not the same things, a lot of building on concepts he had already introduced to me, such as his promised lessons on finding food for survival. You'd think learning how to kill and butcher animals and forage different plants for food would be at least a little interesting. You'd be mostly wrong.

At least I was allowed to practice meditation again, though Bunshirou had me staring at a candle flame for hours on end in what was otherwise a sensorily deprived area. Something about lowering the absolute threshold, whatever that was. This kind of stuff occasionally gets thrown into montage scenes, right? Naruto meditating to attain sage mode, anyone?

The whole time though, I never sat in front of a scroll for more than five minutes, even my own scrolls that contained merely the markings of my mental meanderings. Wasn't I supposed to be learning to read and write or something? Not that Before and Naomi-kaa-san hadn't tried, but that was a long time ago.

It was easy to forget the circumstances when I was accomplishing my objective of slapping and later kicking the shit out of trees. Meditation slash stare-at-a-candle time was, for obvious reasons, mostly different. I'd get into total sync, become one with the flame and that junk, suppress Uchi Naru, and question my existence.

No, none of that existential stuff. Or how I got there aside from the obvious discussion I was sure to get as an almost-five-year-old - "Well, when a man and a woman love each other very much." Actually I didn't know the answer to that question, the one that parents would tell their kids in this world at this age. But I'm distracted now.

What was the point of all this training?

I got it, I needed survival skills. We weren't financially well off - we couldn't be, since Bunshirou spent all of his time with me and therefore couldn't be working a job. We were literally living in the woods, near but not in civilization.

I was clear that Bunshirou would start teaching me actual ninjutsu when he thought I was ready for it, and maybe also genjutsu.

But why?

We had no village. The Imanara had never had a proper village. Who knew where the Hamauzu had come from. (My best guess was Uzushiogakure, which, unless we were early in the timeline, something I still hadn't established for myself at this point, had probably been destroyed already.)

We had a clan name but, as far as I was concerned, we had no clan.

We had no allegiances but to ourselves and to each other.

So what were we fighting for? What was I training for?


One bright day in September, while meditating in Hollow Tree Number Twenty-Three (how do so many of these exist in forests composed of evergreens and bamboo?), I heard Bunshirou's footsteps, which was something because one does not simply hear shinobi approaching on pine needles, nevermind be able to identify them with as much certainty as I did just now. If I had cat ears I would have perked them toward him, but I didn't have cat ears, so I settled for a slight nod in his direction.

And that's when it hit me.

The sweet, doughy, cold scent of mochi.

I couldn't stop my breath from hitching, hard as I tried to force it back to normal. Pavlov's dinner bell had rung and I was panting like a dog in need of my sweet, sweet mochi. It was all I could do not to sway in place.

"This will never do," I heard behind me, which after hours of near-silence felt like a long-range metronome at the back of my head.

My breathing quickened more, as the extra sensory stimulus and agitation from not being able to rock woke up Uchi Naru, whom I had nearly completed suppressing for the day. I clenched my fists (properly formed now, happy to say), digging my nails into my palms.

"If you're still sitting there, how am I supposed to give you this mochi?"

That did it. I whipped around, facing him with wide eyes that were all for the mochi in his hands. I used up my last bit of impulse control to keep myself from outright eating them out of his hands. I cupped my hands and held them up, he dumped the balls of dough into my hands, and I plopped a whole one into my mouth.

Red bean. Not my favorite, but it had been so long that I didn't care. It was doughy, almost gelatinous on the outside and creamy on the inside, and sweet, and that was all I needed.

"You should really take smaller bites and savor your food more. It's more feminine."

I swallowed the treat whole and gave him a look, but I was too excited over the rare treat to be really annoyed. I grinned and, never taking my eyes off of him, plopped the entire second one into my mouth.

Matcha green tea. My third favorite. This one I savored as long as I could. I might have made those obnoxious noises and faces that girls in anime or people in cooking shows often make when eating something delicious.

"Happy birthday, Kizuna-chan."

He reached down and hugged me. I was only a little annoyed that I couldn't eat my third piece of mochi right away, but I couldn't resist the rush of oxytocin that flooded my body when the hug lingered past the point of awkwardness. I patted him with my free hand.

Then he let go and I ate the last mochi.

Maybe, just for today, I could be okay with this life.

(Sakura-cherry. My favorite flavor.)


A|N: I honestly didn't mean for the first part of this chapter to turn into an instruction manual. It's kind of hard to write things like this when there are no clear structures for what and how to learn like there are in other school-age fics. It's kind of like the entire Academy arc of the Boruto anime, but worse because it's just her and her father and the occasional stranger whereas Boruto at least has a large and varied cast and a school to dictate what they're learning, and I've decided not to include other-character-POV in this story (that's for side stories).

Oh yeah. There will eventually be side stories.

Anyway short month equals short chapter for y'all who are reading. Whoever y'all are.

Note: Uchi Naru = Inner.