We eventually managed to get permission for Sasuke to take funds out of the clan vaults to use to live outside the compound on accounts of upkeep being too much for one small child. If he happened to pick the apartment directly beside mine and straight across from Naruto then what a coincidence. We still spent most of our time in the apartments in mine, seeing as I still was the one who cooked.
Our return to school was filled with well wishers latching on to Sasuke and Naruto leaping to his defense to beat the girls away so he could make his escape. At lunch that day Shikamaru hunted me down, Choji following close behind him. He flopped onto the grass beside me, not saying a thing for a little while. The air was filled with the crunching of chips until Shikamaru finally decided to talk.
"My dad said that you were there."
I nodded, not volunteering any information.
"But no one is asking about how you are."
I shot him an exasperated look.
"I'm obviously fine, and Sasuke is the one who lost everything."
"Don't buy that. Well, that he lost everything yeah, but you're far from fine. For the first thing, you missed just as much school as he did, I heard you were in the hospital too. For another thing, if you keep rubbing your neck like that it's going to bleed."
I jerked my hand away, only just noticing what I had been doing. I shot Shikamaru a withering glare that he gracefully ignored. Stupid child geniuses.
"So I'm going to ask, since no one else will. How are you?"
I was going to fire of the general 'fine' and change the subject by challenging him to shogi, but the look in his eye stopped me. He is entirely too smart for a six year old. I wonder what the Nara put in their water. And where can I get some. I sighed, sitting back against the tree fully.
"I'm not okay. But I'll get better."
He continued to stare at me for a few seconds before finally accepting the answer, nodding.
"Good."
After a bit of silence there was a shuffling and Choji put his bag of snacks under my nose.
"Chip?"
I smiled at him, taking one gently.
"Thanks."
And that was the end of it. Ninja in training, but still children in the end. Class went on as usual, with Naruto and I helping Sasuke rush to catch up. Of course, Sakura and Ami had gotten cocky about their grades in my absence, so I quickly shot right back up to the top despite the gap, to their obvious displeasure. Kunoichi classes, the stupid as hell things, started the second semester, so I was behind in that as well. I knew the flowers and information from the year before, but that didn't mean that I didn't hate having to go. Oh, it was useful, and interesting even. But being surrounded by that many young girls dreaming about prince charming and just not getting that they weren't signing up for a Hollywood love story, but a cheap horror novel. I almost always ended up stalking home in a pissy mood afterwards. It was after particularly rough classes that Sasuke and Naruto would gang up to spar with me. Oh, I couldn't win against the both of them, but the strength of my ire meant that I put up a good fight and everyone got a decent workout out of it.
It didn't take long for them to pick up on the fact that I spent half the time unintentionally rubbing at my throat. One day when I found a light green necklace on my kitchen table I assumed it was from them. A choker necklace, fitting precisely where I usually rubbed. I wore it from then on, and whenever I started to fall back into my bad habit I would fiddle with the necklace instead of accidentally hurting myself. It was a thoughtful gift and I was happy with it right up until Naruto asked where I'd gotten it, and Sasuke had looked interested in the answer. That meant several things. One, someone had been in my house. Two, they weren't trying to kill me or the thing would have poisoned me by now. Three, someone noticed something was wrong, and cared enough to procure the necklace and leave it anonymously. Most likely also taking measurements in my sleep or eyeballing it with hella skill if the fit was anything to go by.
After a bit of thought on the subject I kept wearing it. If it were going to kill me it would have done so by now. And there weren't any seals on it, I would have been able to feel the latent chakra. As it was the chakra of the one who'd given it to me was faint, barely there, mostly replaced by my own signature. I sat on the couch for about an hour holding the plain white box it had come in, trying to figure out where I knew the feeling of that particular static from. I gave up after a while, putting it back on the shelf and filling it once again with random things. I'd be on the lookout for it in the village.
The rest of our first year of the academy (official one, at least) was easy, just like we had assumed it would be. We kept up with our Taijutsu practice, as well as the weapons and hand signs. While Sasuke and Naruto were studying things like Math or theory that I either already knew or understood immediately I dabbled in various things. Of course I couldn't actually do anything with it yet, no active chakra system, but I could very well start theorizing so I had a laundry list of tests to run once chakra was at my disposal. My first stop was seals. One, it was like bullshit ninja magic. There were seals that worked as barriers, much like devil's traps in Supernatural. How sweet was that? Then there were time-space seals, like storage scrolls. Bigger on the inside. Time Lord tech, anyone? It was sweet and I wanted to dabble. But without chakra I was on hold. I read all I could get my hands on in the library and for a distraction from the latest trouble they'd gotten into the boys searched out and found books and scrolls from the Uchiha library. It would have been difficult for Sasuke to do, but he insisted that he'd rather me put them to use than for them to gather dust. So I had some high level shit that a small child really shouldn't be trusted with, but it was Sasuke's to give so no one could stop him, even if they knew about it. The only ones who knew were our occasional ANBU guards. One of them was replaced a bit after the Massacre, and I was willing to bet money is was Kakashi, being forced by the Hokage to retire from the shadow forces. I made a bit of a deal about it the first time they showed up with the replacement, giving him a hard stare through the window, sitting wedged on the seat with tea in hand. I was still small enough to fit there so I made the best out of it, reading in the fresh air. This time the book lay open in my lap while I stared at the new guy. Finally I closed the book without looking down, grateful that the boys had retreated to the kitchen for the moment, their shouting still at the edge of my hearing.
"House rules, you have your run of the leftovers in the fridge, but God help you if you don't leave your dishes in the sink."
With that I unfolded from my position, setting the book down on the table, shutting the window and sneaking up on the boys to find that they were trying to figure out how to fix lunch themselves. After that followed an impromptu lesson on how not to burn rice. I was just grateful that they didn't seem to notice I always made extra that seemed to just disappear. It probably should unnerve me that I was feeding our ANBU stalkers but they were the good guys at the moment. None of them had seals under their tongues, so they were golden. As it was I knew the one that had stuck so close to 'probably Kakashi' was most likely Tenzo. I had to wonder when he would bail on us too. At the end of the day if there were a few extra dishes in the sink then I just did a mental victory dance and went on with it. It was probably hella against the rules for them to interact with me like this, even so indirectly, but I was grateful for it. It's not like they weren't actually human, as much as they weren't supposed to let on about it. They probably couldn't resist forming some sort of opinion about us, with as much time as they had to spend here. I think they sometimes dropped by to guard Naruto randomly, just to confuse anyone watching as to what the watch schedule actually was. Plot twist, wasn't one.
I usually waited for the boys to go to their respective apartments to sleep before getting out most of my real research. This was mostly because the ANBU guys would split and follow them rather than someone staying with me. I wasn't important enough to guard, just some orphan that had managed to befriend to the Kyuubi Jinchuuriki and the last Uchiha. My work with seals was at a standstill mostly, because I needed chakra to activate them and turn them into actual seals. Of course I could work on my handwriting and theory until I got the rest of it. As it was, there was a rather interesting concept I wanted to test. The reason the particular symbols held power. What made that go 'boom', how did those put together mean a certain thing, what gave them importance over others? Belief. It basically said that if you could confuse yourself into thinking dark was light, then a 'light bomb' could instead produce shadow. It was a difficult technique and the bane of seal masters existences. If someone managed it then determining the purpose was near impossible. Doing it large scale was nearly impossible, though, so the Curse Marks definitely meant what they said. But I wasn't interested in confusing myself and others, putting the wrong character and accidentally getting the right result, which was what the phenomena focused on mainly. What I wanted was to turn my home languages into seals. Imagine, if I could use Sindarin, or Circular Galifreyan. I had so much more mastery in English and French than in this language, so many ideas that this language just didn't have the words and understanding for. Plus, it would make it mostly uncrackable. But doing it completely in another language wasn't what I was going to aim for, neat as it might seem. What I wanted was to augment seals with it. Most seals had the function part, and then random lines and such to detract from the business bit and help the chakra flow through the whole thing, like cursive for Japanese Calligraphy. It was like veins bringing blood to different parts of the body. The lines didn't mean anything but to the one who drew it, they didn't affect the seal if done differently, but if I hid a few foreign words in those twisting lines…
But that was all for later thought, because there wasn't much I could do with it now anyway. Of course I slapped down some ideas for seals using science from home, theory garnered from Doctor Who and Star Trek, as well as a little bit of Fullmetal Alchemist. Alchemy seemed remarkably similar to this sealing business. My ideas were coded and stored away, all under 'Gabrielle'. She was the one those ideas came from mostly. Even if technically she was me and I was her. I had to put away the delicate mind of someone raised in a middle-class family who never wanted for food and only experienced hardship of any kind in that last half-year of existence. Her reactions and opinions on this place wouldn't help anything. Her morals, they wouldn't get me far. My original goal, to be someone that my twelve year old self would be proud of, it wasn't impossible, but twenty something me would probably hate this version of me the moment I got that headband and started ending lives for money. So she needed to be compartmentalized, hopefully without locking away the higher level reasoning and advanced knowledge that was giving me such an advantage over everyone else.
I tended to fall asleep over my notes, waking up with ink on my face and my short choppy hair a complete mess. I showered, washing away the ink, and towel dried my hair, examining it critically in the mirror. It hadn't gotten much longer since the last time I'd chopped it a bit shorter. I caught myself avoiding my own eyes in the mirror again. I didn't like to look at them. Dark brown, maybe black. I wasn't sure, I hated them. A rather obvious deviation from what I had before. And this pale skin that refused to tan. Ridiculous. I gave up on my hair, leaving it to air dry while I got dressed. Dark shorts with pockets, a grey shirt (tight fitting, more like underarmor from my previous world, bought from a ninja outfitter), and the standard ninja sandals, black in my case. I pulled a beanie on, black like the shorts, glad that such things existed in this place. Sometimes it was to hide a bad hair day, others I was just too lazy and I felt like it complimented the mood nicely. The green necklace stood out against my duller colors, and I wondered about it before deciding that when I was an actual ninja it would probably blend into the green of the trees, while my other clothes went with the shades of the shadows. I wasn't exactly running late for school, but I wasn't going to make it on time either. Mostly because I refused to rush. Not like it was going to be something I didn't know. I had never been so flippant about being late or absent from school before, not in my previous life. But this time the consequences were negligible. I had no parents or guardian for them to complain too, and they generally didn't bother with me missing or being late since it's not like it affected my grade. I deemed it a good thing I was taking a slow day when I felt a familiar chakra signature while walking through the market district. I finally saw the face of the newbie ANBU tasked to watch my friends, a young girl, young enough that they was probably her first real ANBU assignment. Whoops, I'd probably thrown her off worse than the others then. She stiffened when I got close, not a visible reaction in a ninja unless you're looking for it like I was. She turned and we made eye contact, with me throwing her a cheeky wave and genuine smile before continuing on. She was definitely young, fresh faced and with bright green hair, light purple eyes as well. I will probably never get used to the strange colors available around here. I was constantly thankful I hadn't ended up with something like blue hair, or red eyes.
When I finally made it to school the teacher just shot me an exasperated look and continued on with his lecture. Really, a six year old wandering town, swanning into school and usurping authority, it wouldn't have flown back in my old world. But I should really stop comparing the two. Because here people became trained killers at six years old, some were on the battlefield by seven. Some died in confrontations at 12. The two places were different, and I had to either commit to this one, or hold onto my useless longing for the old one.
~TimeLordOfPie