Reaching
LilacLilyFlower © 2009
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Unfortunately.
Credits to my friend (codename: Scuro) for playing beta!
-O-O-O-O-
Chapter 1
Her brother wasn't in her class.
She had checked the class postings, finding her name under a teacher, Hayashi Ichirou, as "Hikari". Her surname wasn't written, so she assumed that it had to be kept a secret too.
When she realized that her brother's name wasn't under the same teacher as her, she had searched the other classes for Naruto's name, and had finally found him listed under Umino Iruka. She had sighed, disappointed.
I don't suppose I'm allowed to transfer classes.
-O-O-O-O-
The morning passed quickly. Ichirou, a stocky Chunin with spiky purple hair and a prickly demeanor to match, ordered the students to introduce themselves and say their age, reason for attending the Academy, and the area they felt most confident in.
When it was Hikari's turn, she said with a placid face, "My name is Hikari, and I'm six. I'm here to learn how to be a shinobi, and I'm confident in chakra sensing and Fuinjutsu."
The others tittered, and a boy with sandy hair tied into a limp ponytail yelled, "Girls don't become shinobi, they become kunoichi! And I bet you don't even know what Fuinjutsu is!"
Her eyes narrowed slightly, but she sat down without a word.
"Oi, Strawberry! I'm talking to y-"
Ichirou interrupted, "Since you're so excited, why don't you go?"
The boy stood with a disdainful "hmph". "I'm Kurosawa Takahiro, seven years old. I'm attending to teach little girls to stop playing ninja, and I'm the best in Taijutsu!"
Hikari bristled on the inside. I am not little! I'm taller than that brat!
The other students finished, and Ichirou stood before clapping his hands.
"Right, you can call me Ichirou-sensei, and I'm 28. I'll teach you all how to not get killed on your first mission outside the village. Right now, we're going outside so you can demonstrate your best areas," he smirked.
...What.
Seal, seal, seal. I need a seal. Which seal? Strengthening, sharpening, silencing... I know!
While she took some ink and paper out of the little bag she had brought, she furiously tried to remember the layout for explosive tags.
Explosive tags tended to come in hexagonal arrays condensed into a rectangular area. The kanji characters surrounding the main character determined the blast radius, intensity, and type of explosive. For this, she would need one confined to at most one meter, but in exchange for size, she could ramp up the intensity, which would also mean pouring in more chakra.
That, she had plenty of. Hikari had noticed that her reserves were much larger than her peers, and most Chunin, even a few Special Jounin. She would have to research why later.
The Taijutsu "experts" were paired off and slated to go first. Takahiro won his match, unfortunately.
Ichirou then turned to Hikari. "Try and find me." He disappeared in a shower of leaves.
Hikari closed her eyes to concentrate. Her range had increased somewhat, spanning across most of the orphanage (which she no longer stayed in because she got an apartment for starting the Academy), so as long as Ichirou stayed in it, she would be fine.
Earlier, she had memorized the feel of her sensei's chakra. It was smooth and thick, like clay, and reminded her of damp earth.
There. On the roof.
"Roof," she stated shortly. Her peers looked up, and sure enough, he was there.
"Hmm," Ichirou said. "What if I... do this?"
He disappeared again, but before he whooshed away, Hikari caught his chakra balling up.
He's compressing his chakra!
She carefully scanned her surroundings for the slightest hint of clay. When she pinpointed the smallest speck on the edge of her range (after several minutes and amidst giggling and jeers), she smiled slightly and said, "Tree."
Ichirou appeared in front of her, and raised his eyebrows. "Impressive."
"Senseeeeiiii," Takahiro complained. "We've spent too much time on the girl."
"Shush. She's not done," Ichirou reprimanded.
Without further prompting, Hikari set down the ink and paper she had brought out, then looked up. "I need everyone to move back by at least two meters."
Ignoring all mutters, she kneeled on the ground and set to drawing her seal. Again, she took several minutes, but this time, no one teased.
Point, kanji, point. Seal.
Placing her hand on the array, Hikari pumped as much chakra as she could before jumping back.
Three, two, one.
FWOOOOOOOOOOOM. A hemisphere of heat and white fire oh Kami too much chakra shook the ground, dislodging some of the rocks.
Hikari smirked, completely satisfied, before registering the silence. She turned to see stunned faces gaping back at her.
Slightly unnerved, Hikari searched for Ichirou, finding him behind the students. They made way for him as he strode to the front.
"Well, as great as that was, we need to carry on, so Ninjutsu, come up."
To Hikari, he said, "See me after class."
-O-O-O-O-
Hikari toed the floor nervously, disappointed that she wouldn't find her brother today. She would have to search for him after tomorrow's class.
"Hikari," Ichirou beckoned. "The Hokage was made aware of what you did today."
Her breath stuttered.
"What you did was very impressive, considering your age. Most people can't do what you did. Most people can barely copy preexisting seals. The fact that you came up with your own array is astounding.
"Since you seem to have a natural inclination for Fuinjutsu, I decided to appeal to the Hokage to get you a Fuinjutsu teacher."
Her breathing, which had steadied, completely cut. She couldn't believe what she was hearing.
"Fortunately, Hokage-sama approved and assigned the best Fuinjutsu user we currently have in the village to you."
"Who? Who is it-ttebana?" she blabbered, disregarding her so annoying why do I have it verbal tick.
"Hatake Kakashi."
-O-O-O-O-
Meet at Training Ground 3, he said. Be there by four, he said. Don't be late, he said.
Hikari was ticked.
She was at Training Ground Three. She had been there by four. She hadn't been late. And what does her sensei/mentor/babysitter (because really, that's what he was; a babysitter to make sure she didn't blow anything up) do? He doesn't show up for three. Whole. Hours.
And counting.
You know what? No. I am not putting up with this, Hikari thought as she swiveled to leave the training ground.
"And where are you going?" a low voice drawled.
She stiffened. I didn't sense him.
No. It wasn't that she didn't; she couldn't, because he hadn't let her.
She was dealing with a very, very dangerous shinobi. (Of course, this is regarding the fact that her chakra sense wouldn't always work; he was dangerous either way.)
So, the first thing she did when she faced him was to shoot him a cold, unimpressed look.
"Yo."
She leveled a flat stare at him.
Her new sensei was very...uninspiring. She knew how lethal he could be; the library had contained many texts about him. But somehow, the overall impression she got from him was a harmless, slouching, albeit tall, man with gravity defying silver hair. And a book.
Like I said, very, very dangerous.
"Can you speak?" he intoned, not sounding the least bit interested.
"Yes."
"Okay."
There was a beat of awkward silence, in which he flipped the page of his book. A very bright orange book with a red circle that had a slash through it; a book she had seen before once, at the orphanage, when Ami had hidden it under her shirt with a flushed face.
"I'm a six year old, and you're reading plotless stories about gross things in front of me,"she stated rather calmly.
He looked highly affronted. "This is not a plotless story. It's high-quality literature with suspense and foreshadowing around every corner, and sensitivity to its readers."
Hikari quirked an eyebrow. "Uh huh. Anyways, Kakashi-sensei, aren't you supposed to be, I don't know, teaching me?"
Crap. Crapcrapcrap. That was too mean.
She gave him a tentative smile to show she meant no harm, and gave him a watered down version of the Puppy Eyes of Doom no Jutsu.
He was quiet, looking at her with an unreadable light in his visible eye, before he hung his head.
She got the strangest sense that he was pouting.
"I don't like you."
Double crap.
"But I suppose I'll have to teach you. Let's see what you know."
Hikari beamed brightly at him, not noticing his slight flinch, and bounced over to pull out some books.
"Well, I've been learning the different structures and arrays-ttebana, and I've tried adding a spoke to the hexagonal one without combining a three point with a four point, but it never works!"
She heard a sharp inhale, and looked over to see Kakashi snatch her seven point seal designs.
"Do you realize," he began in a quiet voice, "That if you had inked these, you would have lost at least an arm?"
Her smile faltered, and he elaborated. "There's a reason that most seals are evenly pointed. Each spoke is balanced by another. If you add a seventh point without a counterbalance somehow"-here, he pointed at the seventh spoke and slid his finger directly across to the blank space between the opposing two spokes-"you get an unstable seal."
He inked the seal he held and finally unmasked his chakra to infuse the seal, which he threw to the other end of the clearing.
The resulting explosion was rather scary, especially since the seal wasn't supposed to be explosive, but Hikari didn't take much note of it. Her mind was in shock from disbelief.
Unbelievable. His chakra is...
"Jumpy."
"What?" Kakashi gave her a strange look.
"Your chakra. I remember it. It's jumpy," she said slowly, still in shock.
Kakashi remained silent.
That means...
"You really are a pervert, aren't you, Sensei," she said. He had brought her back to her room in the orphanage all those times she had fallen asleep in the library. Who knew what he could have done?
"What? No, not in the way you're thinking. How do you even know what that means?" Kakashi denied sheepishly.
"Ami, from the orphanage, " she replied, with a weirded out expression.
"I'm not a pervert," he insisted.
"Sure."
"Really, I'm not."
-O-O-O-O-
(Kakashi's POV)
Five times. His heart had been tugged painfully five times today.
When the Hokage had called him into his office, Kakashi had been expecting something simple, such as an A-Rank assassination mission. Instead, he had been told to instruct his dead sensei's child, in Fuinjutsu, no less.
Tug.
He was familiar with the girl. He had been instructed to watch over her and her brother when he had been in ANBU. He had even carried her home over his shoulder like a bag of rice (and he did not do anything to her).
Kakashi had arrived to the meeting on time, chakra compressed, to test her awareness. She had paced for three hours without registering his presence, pigtails flaring in a familiar shade of red that had brought painful memories to the surface.
Tug.
When he had dropped down from the tree he had been reading in, he had kept his eye on his book to avoid seeing her eyes.
Her demeanor had thrown him off, because she wasn't anything like her parents. She was rather blasé, and too composed for a six year old girl, which had finally convinced him that she wouldn't remind him of her parents, and he had worked up the courage to meet her eyes, only to see his sensei's eyes staring back. They even had the same teary touch.
Tug.
And when he had reluctantly told her that he would teach her, her smile was so Sensei that he had flinched, remembering how his sensei had given him that very smile before charging off to his death.
Tug.
He had found out that his little (tiny) pupil had inherited her mother's verbal tic as well as her hair and skin. The "ttebana" had taken him by surprise, and was too much after the eyes and smile, so he had inhaled sharply to clear his head.
Tug.
He had also learned, he noted with humor, that for all her calm and maturity, his adorable little pupil was really just a kid.
He sighed, standing in his regular spot in front of the Memorial Stone, and ran a hand through his hair. The memories had brought him earlier than usual to the stone today.
I don't think I can do this.
-O-O-O-O-
A/N: Because of the nice reviews I got, I decided to post Chapter 1, even though I was planning on updating every other week...
Kakashi has been introduced! I spent so much time planning out the scene, but it ended waaaay differently than from what I intended. I like how it turned out, though!
And I know Hikari might seem too young for Fuinjutsu, but she's spent most of her time in the library up to this point. Plus, she's an Uzumaki. It would come easier to her than most, I think.
Uzumaki=seal masters.
To my reviewers: Oh. My. Kushina. You guys made my day. I didn't think that reviews could make me feel so happy and warm inside, but they did, and I appreciate you guys so. Damn. Much. I actually teared up, I was so touched!
And to those who favorited/followed: No way, you would favorite/follow a story that's just starting out? (The outline has been in planning since 2009, but the actual typing started in 2014. And the plot will probably change.) The fact that you decided to stick with this story after one chapter makes me so happy, I can't even sleep.
Much love to you all!