A/N : thanks for the reviews! All are appreciated and gratefully accepted. Thank you for the support!
Disclaimer: i don't own Harry Potter OR Naruto.
For perhaps the first time in his living memory, Harry Potter felt a sheer joy in being alive. It was a curious sensation, to be unencumbered by all the messes and petty problems that the people around him were plagued with. he was above them all. Literally, he was lying on the top of a really tall tree in the little park that was once his refuge from his "family". It was wonderful really, to watch the clouds and relax, taking in the moonlight and the ever present, soothing wind. One could almost feel the whispered secrets of ages past floating by your ear, just out of reach.
Harry had taken his life in a much more positive sense after his unorthodox discovery of chakra. He maintained a constant, maniacal gleam in his eyes that had managed to subdue the Dursleys, if for a little while. It was fascinating, how suddenly becoming very very confident in yourself drove his tormentors to doubt themselves. After all, insulting and demeaning someone only really works, if the object of that treatment subconsciously at least considers the possibility that those words are true. if not well, it would be like insulting somebody in another language.
In Harry's case, he had absolutely no fear of the Dursleys anymore, and he was absolutely certain they were worthless little humans. They were just mindless idiots who really needed to get rid of their 'normal' fetish. He sometimes wondered if Petunia really was his aunt. Even if he ignored the 'love thy family' aspect of relatives, surely somebody like her could not possibly be related to him.
All questions about his family were brushed away when the moon once more reappeared as a cloud was swept away. It was a fascinating sight. At 2 in the morning, he could just make out the details of the moons crater riddled surface. He suddenly wished he had a telescope, or at least some kind of jutsu that served a similar purpose. For some odd reason, he really wanted to take a closer look at the moon and the stars. It was a singular feeling, one that he had never felt before. But it could wait. After all, even if chakra let him get out of the cupboard at night, he still need some sleep if he wanted to concentrate (albeit on his own 'studies') in class. He definitely did not wish to sleepwalk his way through school.
And so Harry pulled himself from his childish fascination of the moon and the stars to go home, a fascination that was perhaps fostered under the loving care of the Dursleys, and his resultant love of all spaces large and wide open. And what is space, but the widest of them all?
XXX
Harry of course was not an all knowing child. It was regrettable, but true. It was also the only reason he developed what the people from his beloved manga defined as a chakra core. For when he began all he had was magic. This was actually what Harry felt and observed during his recovery from his rather ill conceived plan to find if he had chakra. Of course, magic in its raw state was not chakra, and would not do the things that Harry "knew" chakra could do. After all, chakra was the very force of life, all encompassing, and deeply linked to the elements. Magic on the other hand was change, plain and simple. It was also everywhere, but did not have the delicacy that chakra had. No, magic was the force that changed anything it touched with force and subtlety of a sledgehammer. It could turn anything into anything else (within limits) and even create life out of raw energy or matter. So when Harry suddenly believed, in the absolute manner that only the young mind was capable of, his magic reacted in what some might call accidental magic. It gave him a new power, independent of his magic, but was created by it. It was just a spark of course, but as the boy began to manipulate his energies with his genjutsu attempts, his magic began to expand the chakra system, feeding it, until one fine day, both chakra and magic coexisted independently in a young boy. Such was the power of belief on magic. The rather hilarious thing was that if the Dursleys hadn't driven it into his subconscious that there was no such thing as magic (a concept he would later disabuse himself of) he wouldn't have managed to spark a chakra core into existence. Otherwise, his latent memories of childhood would have eventually and unconsciously supplied the concepts his real parents lived on and talked around him about when he still lived with them. Magic worked in weird ways after all.
But in the end, he was wielding chakra – true chakra, as he knew it. And it was fun to play with it. He spent hours climbing trees in the remote corners of the park (funny how they let him out after chores now) until he could safely walk up and down walls. He had also managed to get a hang of what some might call tree hopping. Surrey looked very difficult when you were traveling via rooftops. And the wind was not something he really wanted to miss.
But the most important little skill he was capable of, was lock picking. It was not difficult theoretically. You infused the mechanism with chakra, and then using the chakra inside, moved the tumblers to exactly the right position. He was getting quite good at it too, at least with the new locks that Vernon had put up at the beginning of the vacation. Of course, he swore not to use it for nefarious purposes – crime was not a road he really wanted to go down, even if his moral compass was a bit off after what he'd seen the Dursleys get away with - and child abuse was definitely up there in the horrible crimes list.
He'd not really tried to do any elemental jutsu, content to prank the Dursleys with genjutsu. It was really a question of having an understanding of what you wanted somebody to experience that determined the effectiveness of his illusions. Consequently, taste was the only difficult thing to stimulate, as Harry had not really eaten much other than leftovers till now. There was no doubt that without his healing ability he would have died, period. But in any case, there was definitely some amusement in making the Dursleys think that their room had a dead body in it, or that Dudley's hair had started to gray or even that Petunias face, dutifully caked with makeup had a giant mole that appeared to move every day. Once he managed to anchor the genjutsu to an object or person, he would really have fun. But alas, he had not developed the raw control necessary to do something of that caliber. He would need to find some open water soon, or at least a bathtub for his attempts at water walking. Eventually, he would settle on the closest public swimming pool, which was near the school.
Soon Harry was becoming quite well versed in the use of his quite inventive imagination in creating new, more subtle genjutsu on the Dursleys, things like smoke, fire, wet floors and stuff, simple and realistic reasons to get people to stay away from somewhere, as opposed to a giant Chinese dragon chasing after you, which, without the level of impressive detail that only years of practice and focus would take, nobody above ten would believe was real, even with that level of detail. Of course, it also lead to some rather hilarious incidents involving the fire department, which definitely disturbed any notion the neighbors had of their normality.
Petunia was left tearing her hair out, at the locally generated gossip that was beginning to head towards the conclusion that Vernon had either developed some mental disorder or that he was attempting to draw attention to himself for some unknown reason. Harry was quite amused when he found a little piece in the newspaper that pointed to a false alarm being given to the Surrey fire department.
XXX
July 31 was a date Harry did not particularly care about. This despite the fact that, 1. He was eight years old, 2. It was his birthday, 3. Eight year old kids love birthdays.
However, since his ever affectionate relatives preferred to celebrate his birthdays with even less joy than funerals, specifically with more work, he had not given cause to remind them either, by the simple means of showing not even a twitch out of place to any other day. Of course, internally he was reviewing exactly where his life had gone wrong, that he had to pretend his birthday never existed, a quite abnormal situation in an ultra normal home.
In the meantime, Harry quietly reminded himself that ninja were supposed to be emotionless uncaring assassins who did not let small childish things like the absence of birthday celebrations because of relatives who deserved to be bijuu fodder distract him from his life's greater purpose. Well, maybe not in so many words, but still.
One thing that he did do was find a rather disturbing fact about himself. He looked awful. It was true. A few weeks and immense gains in his ability to wield chakra simply did not translate to a change from the scrawny malnutrition afflicted skeleton that his body so disturbingly resembled underneath Dudley'ss cast offs. Even if he was now looking a lot better, thanks to his recently begun practice of buying take out with Vernons "misplaced"cash(which Harry felt he might as well be owed due to all his slave labor) his overall physical condition had not changed much from the beginning of the summer. And now that he was finally paying attention to his appearance, which his mantra of 'unseen and unknown' had driven clean out of his head, he was quite annoyed that he looked somewhat like the same concentration camp victims Richards had described with such horrified fascination. Harry was suddenly bombarded with the image of Vernon wearing an SS officer's uniform. Not exactly the prettiest of sights as anybody who knew the man would tell you. Even if it was oddly fitting.
Of course, such thoughts inevitably spiraled to the thought of what he should look like. It was a thought that deserved more thought, as Harry's newly-aged-by-one mind supplied helpfully. He strove to be ninja, so what did a real ninja look like? Indeed, what effect would he even attempt to achieve? The harmless fellow? The most intimidating person any had ever seen? Or the shadow that nobody in their right minds would ever believe they had seen? It was a thought for tomorrow. Maybe he could brainstorm with Richards. The thought of which went into an even more quirky direction. Just what would he tell Richards?
Harry as a rule trusted no adults. The exception of course was his librarian friend. But would that trust, built up over a year of mostly silent conversation necessitate that he tell the old man what his greatest secret was? Indeed, would he mention anything beyond reading the most important set of books he had read in his life? It was a struggle of the heart, something Harry understood subconsciously, yet could not bring himself to face. It took an hour, but eventually he decided. His friend/family/mentor, the aged veteran of the second world war, the great Daniel Richards, would be kept in the dark, even if it made him feel slightly guilty. It was the shinobi thing to do, and his first great secret, one he would have to carry for the rest of his life. Harry firmly turned his mind away from this train of thought. His roving mind, in desperate search of distraction, landed on a another problem, weapons.
Harry, for the second time that day, felt a pit in his gut, a feeling of horror as he realized that he had no ninja gear to speak of. No shuriken, kunai and nothing that could compare to a real sword, unless he counted his experience with the knives he used to chop vegetables. Harry literally began to bang his head on the wall, which was not the wisest thing to do in retrospect.
"What's that racket boy!" Petunia's high pitched, if strangled voice carried from the kitchen, startling the wannabe ninja from his bout of self imposed punishment.
"Nothing Aunt Petunia! Just a spider!" he answered, keeping a disinterested tone in his voice, adding one final whack for good measure.
"It's gone now!" he said, hoping that would be the end of that. Making the Dursleys think of him on his birthday was always a very bad idea. So when Petunia finally shouted one last time, Harry breathed a sigh of relief. Chakra or not, some cans were best left unopened.
XXX
Later, Harry sneaked out to the garage and began throwing nails into a wooden plank. It was an experiment, a very lousy experiment, but in 5 minutes he had figured some important stuff out. For one, he did not seem to be able to do the normal spinning throw that a traditional knife thrower would use. The nails simply refused to some much as twitch in any direction they were not pointed. They just went like straight like a bullet. no tumbling no wobbling and definitely no turning end over end
Also, he was capable of applying a lot of force to the measly iron nails, such that they unfailingly hit the board with a solid 'thunk' sound each time, leading him to conclude that his subconscious was responsible for this admittedly weird occurrence.
And the last thing he found, which he found was quite depressing, was the fact that his aim simply sucked. With his conventional throws, he missed at horribly at a 5 feet distance that he was practicing from. It was quite annoying. His makeshift projectiles simply refused to go within the one inch diameter circle he had marked out as his bull's eye on the arbitrarily chosen plank. After an hour with only slightly changing results, he called it a day – before Vernon would come home and get on his case.
Besides, he was not supposed to have even come outside of his cupboard after his chores. Some things were not worth fighting for, and in the grand scheme of things patience was the better path, or so Harry kept telling himself. His need to get a sword could wait. He was quite skilled for a gennin already, he could wait, besides, his incredible rate of progress had to mean something. So like his wish to learn Japanese, it could wait. If only the waiting wasn't so damn annoying!
XXX
The days passed slowly after that, drowning Harry in boredom's nefarious waters. There was only so much stuff one could do in his position without openly declaring his ability to do 'stuff'. It was quite amazing that in spite of the prodigy like quality like qualities he had, his attention span at times was woefully lacking. Something that was haunting him every single minute he spent these days.
There was one little thing that he really wanted to try, and that was a shadow clone, which unfortunately for him, stayed true to its counterpart in the manga by being very very chakra intensive. By the end of the vacation he ended up fainting eight times in eight attempts over the last two weeks. He seriously need to increase his reserves if he wanted to even think about trying that again.
If ever in his life Harry was truly frustrated, it was now. And he had been dreaming quite a bit of the all things he could do after leaving a shadow clone to take his place at the Dursleys. Why he could even spend all day training while his clone took care of his chores, which the Dursleys had very slightly decreased the difficulty of, as the days went by. It was like they were subconsciously realizing that he could not be pushed as far as they used to be able to. Or it could be that they had become more concerned about Petunias freakish mole and Dudley's unnatural early graying to worry about keeping his chores right up there with slave labor. In some ways, life was good.
XXX
The last day of holidays before school was always, quite the event. Kids screamed, parents teared up (and not always for the same reasons) and teachers let out weary sighs. Dudley was a normal kid. Harry was not. So while Dudley was quite content to be wailing that he couldn't spend all his time with his parents, which is always an admirably sneaky and heart rending tactic, Harry spent his day sewing up his clothes in peace. Whatever be the state of tomorrow, he was going to face it with more tight fitting clothes than last year. Even if it was really just bunching sections of cloth together to fit his form better, it felt quite good that he was finally taking back control of his life, his real life, outside the Dursleys and in the endless freedom that was the outside world. Yes, things were going to change this year, even if it wasn't in the confines of Number 4 Privet Drive.
Oh, it wasn't going to be easy, and he was going to be working a hell of a lot more than he ever had done before, but he was determined, and often raw determination is where it counts. As he fell asleep, Harry James Potter, slept with dreams of the remembered past, the wonderful present, and the promise of things to come.
A/N : another chapter! Huzzah! Its a wonderful feeling to set an idea into reality. And even more to see that people like it. Thank you all for reading and reviewing! And I hope you will keep doing so for the future to come!
Womgi