I hissed as I applied a disinfectant to my skin which burned as my immune system forced blood and heat to the deep cuts marking it, flushing out dirt or whatever and trying to scab so nothing could get in there. Now that we had money for such things I didn't need to rely on Bunshirou's patchwork medical ninjutsu as much and could use more chakra for actual training. Unfortunately the disinfectant stung like a bitch. At least iryo-ninjutsu had a mild analgesic effect.

In the trees around me, shuriken. About half of them made it to the edges of immaculately carved targets in the trunks. The rest were on the ground at my feet, a few of them bloody from when I hit things at the worst angle and the spinning pinwheels of doom were launched straight back at me, moving far too quickly for me to dodge completely. I was lucky I wasn't dead. Probably. Or at least severely maimed. Maybe I should have spent more time practicing instead of making the targets perfectly smooth and round and creating games to motivate me to do better only to get distracted by the making of said games.

I couldn't see Bunshirou's expression when he came home to me that night, as I nursed the fire that was heating our stew and reflecting off of his glasses in that way animators like to draw when they don't want you to see that character's emotions. I could only imagine what must have crossed his mind as he saw me, bloody bandages and in my old, torn clothes despite the winter chill, and making dinner like nothing had happened.

I could see him tense, like he wanted to rush forward and fawn over me and my injuries. And I could see him holding himself back - I was six and I was a Big Girl now, just like Junie B. Jones. And I wasn't in any immediate danger.

"What happened?" he managed to splutter finally.

"Training accident," I replied shortly.

"Nothing else happened?"

"No."

"Oh thank kami-sama," he heaved in obvious relief.

I turned away from the stew to stare at him. I had been under the impression that Bunshirou did not subscribe to a doctrine of faith and divinity, and he rarely if ever invoked the term "kami-sama." His "religion" was to restore power and integrity to the Imanara name, whatever that meant. I wasn't sure he'd achieve enlightenment that way, or that he'd achieve that goal by doing what he was doing now, but what did I know about any of that.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Hmm. Nothing spectacular," he responded, and I didn't believe him.

"...Hear any interesting rumors?" I pried.

Suddenly he was very fascinated with inspecting the cuts underneath my bandages, mostly limited to my arms and shoulders. And the iryo-ninjutsu he was applying to them was definitely welcome.

"I'll take that as a yes," I said.

"How do you know me so well?" he lamented. "I have grown soft and expressive. I must retrain my face not to make such revealing expressions."

It wasn't really his face that revealed that to me, but whatever. "You do that," I said, "after you tell me what you heard."

"Okay," he said, easily defeated. "There are peace negotiations being conducted between Hi no Kuni and Kaminari no Kuni. One happening in this area didn't go so well and a fight broke out between the attending shinobi."

"Tou-san," I said. "You know they probably didn't do this in the middle of the forest, right? Don't these things usually happen in buildings? And not in scattered parties?"

"Normally yes, but they have separate meetings for the nations and for the shinobi villages. Capital staff do attend the officiated meetings between shinobi villages to try to keep the shinobi from fighting there but that doesn't always work. They are civilians, after all, and there's usually some backdoor communication happening between the shinobi villages anyway."

I nodded. "Interesting. Thank you for telling me; this is stuff I should know."

"Why do you need to know? You're six."

"Uhm." That set the hamster wheel spinning. "Because. I. Um. It's. Important? For. Um. Not dying, you know. Definitely not because I want to go join a hidden village when I'm old enough or be in politics."

I gulped as Bunshirou stared at me, trying to swallow back the suspiciously specific denial and paper thin defense. I had no idea why he tried so hard to protect me from everything in the world around us, especially the less physically violent portions like politics. It was true, I had no desire to be in politics - I had seen enough of that in my past life to know I didn't want any part in that. Being part of a hidden village, on the other hand, was in line with my desire to not live in the middle of nowhere where the daggers of my mind were aimed at me for lack of anywhere else to aim them. (Fortunately, Uchi Naru had been quiet this month.) Heck, I didn't even care which hidden village at this point. Except Kirigakure. If Karatachi Yagura was still Mizukage then I wanted nothing to do with Kiri.

As far as I knew, politics were what drove us out of the Land of Snow, and possibly what kept us living away from people in general. Just because we weren't directly involved didn't mean they didn't affect us anyway. And wasn't that reason enough to at least be aware of what was happening?

Of course while I had all of these great reasons, my tongue refused to cooperate, still reeling over my poor defense from earlier. Maybe Uchi Naru wasn't so dormant after all.

...Tou-san's lips were moving. Shit, I missed his reply. I'd been so busy thinking that I hadn't even been passive listening.

I stared at him blankly, back in the present moment.

Tou-san burst out into laughter. "I see you already have the necessary skills for it!"

"For what?" I gaped. "Politics?"

That just set him laughing more.

"But I don't actually want to be in politics!"

"You have the perfect cover story!"

"I just want to understand it."

"I don't think most politicians understand politics."

I gave up.


The good news about the peace negotiations was that the forest stayed quiet and relatively battle-free, and we got to stay in one place for the entire winter. By the time spring rolled around I began to have hope that we could keep living our peaceful hermit lives despite the glaring inconsistencies it had with the life goals of Imanara Bunshirou.

I was wrong.

No, not because of another battle. It happened a few days before I was supposed to accompany Bunshirou into town to replenish my sewing equipment. Both of my fitting sets of clothes were patchworks of their original selves thanks to endless shuriken training, and I hadn't grown enough to need an entirely new set just yet. What stung was that I wasn't getting much better at throwing shuriken, and even though I could see where the shuriken were going I wasn't fast enough to get out of the way. How had I survived any of those battles before? Adrenaline. It had to be.

I heard Bunshirou long before I saw him, which in itself wasn't unexpected, especially since I was in the middle of candlelight sensory training at the time. That was probably the only thing about it that wasn't unusual. It was just past high noon, and the gap between hearing him and seeing him was much longer than usual, which meant either he was moving slowly or he wasn't masking. Either could have been for any of a number of reasons, and I didn't like any of those reasons.

When he did finally appear, he was shaken but not stirred, eyes scary and temper flaring. I silently compared my injuries to his as he sealed away our camp and demanded that I follow him and keep up.

When we got to our new destination, after the silencing perimeter seals went up, he went on a blue streak.

"Pointless! Everything is so pointless!"

"That's my line," I muttered under my breath. I wondered if the eternal boredom that accompanied living in the forest all by ourselves was finally getting to him like it had broken me a long time ago, but he was bordering on Kaa-san levels of stark-raving mad while I had surrendered my feelings to the matter.

"No matter what I do there's no way I can protect you and provide."

Okay, I could work with that. "What happened?" I asked. "Did they cut your pay?" They had been threatening that ever since he got the job on the principle that Bunshirou was a foreigner to Yu no Kuni. But they hadn't been able to backfill the position due to the war.

"Not yet," he replied, seething and barely able to force the words through his clenched teeth. "Thanks to the peace efforts, tourism is up and Yu-nin are returning home."

"Um. Okay?" That last bit was a slight surprise. The Yu-nin were neutral in the conflict between Konoha and Kumo, so aside from making sure skirmishes didn't erupt in the civilian resorts, I had not thought that they'd be involved in the war at all.

"It's the cultists," he continued. "You probably don't know what those are. Let's just say they're trying to really screw things up."

I knew what cultists were. I'd seen enough shows on crime networks my dad had become so fascinated with (out of boredom with everything else on cable television) in the last years of my old life that I could've rattled off a handful of facts about the scarier ones if I thought I remembered them correctly and if I didn't think Bunshirou wouldn't have me hauled off to a mental hospital for knowing those kinds of things without having once heard about them in this life. And there was something that told me that I knew something about these cultists too. Only I couldn't figure out what.

It almost sounded like a cheap plot device to me, the fact that I couldn't remember anything about these cultists. But if it made my life even a fraction more interesting, I'd take it.

"That doesn't tell me anything," I said finally.

"They're violent. They're making it really hard for the company to operate because the company supports the upcoming peace. And I just found out today that they're crawling all over the countryside looking for victims."

"Oh. I get it now."

"And I know you can defend yourself, but these guys are something else. You can't face them and expect to win. Hell, I can't face them and expect to win."

"So let's train together?" I suggested.

Bunshirou wouldn't have it. "Why? It's pointless. If I leave you alone to train you could hurt yourself worse than you already do with the shuriken. If I leave you alone at all they can find you and I couldn't come help you fight them off. And we can't move because I can't quit my job because I can't afford for us to live otherwise."

"Tou-san, it's okay, if we have to go back to hunting every day I can live with that. It hasn't been that long. And I can patch my clothes with animal skins if we soak them first. I've done it before."

"That's not it," he whispered, looking away. I stared and waited, but he made no move to clarify.

Resigned and accepting of the fact that he wasn't going to expand on his comment to me, I slowly busied myself with finding and digging out the jerky I had managed to pack away before being whisked here. I handed a piece to Tou-san, which he took with a mumbled "thank you" and we ate in silence.

"So," I said finally. "I'm no good at aiming shuriken."

"No," he said, agreeing. "You're not."

"But I can throw kunai."

"Yes, you can."

"Will you teach me something I can master?"

Bunshirou stared at the last piece of jerky in his hand and heaved a sigh. "Yes."


"I will be guiding you through the steps to master the Imanara hiden jutsu."

"Please instruct me," I said, bowing, out of respect but also to hide my internal squeeing that finally, finally I was going to learn something useful and that which the Imanara clan had held and protected as their own for as long as they had existed.

"We will begin with the achievements of our ancestor, Nara Masayoshi."

"Nara?!" I exclaimed, breaking form in my bow.

"Yes," Bunshirou said. "This is important. Listen."

"Hai."

"Nara Masayoshi-sama was unable to fully master the Nara hiden jutsu. What he was able to master is a foundation in what would become the Imanara hiden jutsu. What the Nara do is manipulate shadows and through them manipulate people's bodies. Nobody knew why Masayoshi-sama was never able to manipulate the shadows, but he was able to manipulate the people. Like so."

He put out his arms, humming almost inaudibly, indicating that I should do the same. I raised my arms in front of me, parallel to the ground. He took my hands, and the humming was suddenly in my ears, louder, and a familiar sensation filled me.

The same sensation that had me learning to walk on water for the first time.

It was chakra. A chakra infusion of sorts, but it bypassed my chakra network and anchored itself into my muscles, all but my face which was left to react. Into areas around my undifferentiated chakra vessels. It flowed strangely inside of me as, without my input, I stepped forward with my right foot, mirroring his step backwards with his left foot in perfect sync, almost as if we were dancing with no lag indicative of one reacting to the other. We took several more steps together before he let go and his chakra flowing through me spilled away without him to keep it in place. I stumbled as I was shoved back into control, managing to regain my balance before I could fall.

Wha… what was that?!

I knew what it was. Still, I found my mind blown at the sensations and idea that that was what he was doing to me. (Somewhere in a corner of my mind, I also kicked down the adult in me making that reaction into something it most definitely wasn't.)

"What I did," Bunshirou was explaining, "was I infused you with my yin chakra through direct person-to-person contact. And I manipulated my yin chakra inside of you in order to have you mirror my actions."

For lack of a better expression,

Damn straight!

"There are, ahem, a few side effects, and some caveats," he continued.

No kidding.

"It requires a strong chakra flow and can only be maintained for a few minutes if the recipient doesn't resist. It tends to leave people stunned and can leave you stunned as well if the other person is particularly strong. And aside from learning this jutsu, teaching someone physical skills, and in torture sessions which I hope you never get into, it's absolutely useless."

And the euphoria died a sad, quiet death. "Oh."

"And finally, it can't be used on clones."

"Not even on shadow clones?"

"How do you know what those are?"

"Yukigakure no Academy." The lie rolled off my tongue automatically.

Bunshirou stared at me. "Sounds like the education was exemplary, even if the discipline was outrageous. Maybe we should have kept you enrolled there."

"Yeah, maybe," I murmured, not really agreeing but also not wanting to continue this vein. "How do I practice?"

"Normally we would start with animals but we need animals for food and it works better if they're alive, so we'll have to skip straight to human training."

"O-okay," I said.

He held out his hands. I stared at them for a moment, then built up yin chakra into my hands and reached for his.

I didn't anticipate how difficult it would be to shunt my chakra into a being already full of his own, despite his previous use of chakra and his best efforts to remain compliant, or at least non-resistant.

I didn't anticipate how mentally exhausting it was and how much I was suddenly looking forward to bed later that night.

I didn't anticipate how heavy my arms suddenly became, heavier and heavier as I channeled more chakra to override his will and the humming got louder in my ears.

And I didn't anticipate the wealth of sensory information that came in through the contact. The wear of his hands after a long day's work and the way his chakra lazily flowed through his hand meridians that I tried so hard to avoid the way he had mine.

Bunshirou shook his head and drew his hands away from mine like it was nothing, and I was thrown back into my own head. "Try again."

"Not gonna tell me how to make it better?"

"Just jump back in. What you did was fine, but not what we're going for this time. Do something different."

"Okay."

This time I focused, ignoring the story of his hand and work and just trying to get into his muscles. And was unceremoniously thrown out again.

"Ugh," I groaned as I anticipated the headache that would soon onset from straining the chakra flow. "This is harder than I thought. You did it so easily; I thought I could get it."

"You've only attempted it twice," he pointed out. It seemed he was also reminding himself somehow.

"How do I even know it's working though? You could just move your hands at the same time as mine by yourself. It's not like I have a Sharingan to notice such a small delay in that."

"True, I could, but then you wouldn't learn anything."

"... I'd learn to up my sensory skills I guess."

"Maybe."

"How many times can I do this in a day?"

"At your age and ability I'd estimate somewhere between three and five," he said.

"Okay," I said. "I'll give it another go."


"Does the hiden jutsu actually have a name? Like… 'Imanara art: dance with me no jutsu'!"

"No."

"Well that sucks."

"You've seen what kind of technique it is. Even if calling your attack does help you focus and increase effectiveness, this technique is best executed when the other person doesn't know about it."

"Okay I get that, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't have a name."

"How about you name it then when you master it."

"Hmm. Maybe. Except, we're descended from the Nara; don't they suck at naming things? Maybe I shouldn't be trusted with such an important task."

"Kizu-chan."

"Fine, fine. I'll think of something. Eventually. Maybe."


A|N: This chapter has been ready for a long time. I've struggled so much with the upcoming arc but now I have a solid outline for it and so, pending real life interrupting things as usual, I hope to be back to my once-a-month update schedule. Thank you for your patience.