Most likely because I eagerly awaited it a certain day seemed to approach at the rate of a funeral march. When it finally arrived I wasn't the only one bouncing in excitement. Sasuke watched Naruto and I lose our minds over the event with amusement while we waited for our chakra systems to be activated. Naruto's was probably going to bowl me over with intensity the first time it went truly ninja-live. From the corner of my eye I could see Ino sticking a leaf to her hand and showing off to the civilian raised kids who had only just gained access to their chakra.

I was right about Naruto, falling out of my chair from the backlash. The ANBU guards were present for today, probably in case the activation of the system did something to the Fox's seal, and I couldn't help feeling a bit embarrassed at my reaction. Naruto, Sasuke and the Chunin instructor were the only ones who noticed, the latter giving me a funny look before reaching for me with a hand I could feel was lit with chakra. When it touched my own I had to fight not to pass out, instead keeping still until he moved on and slowly putting my head on my desk, closing my eyes and trying to comprehend all the new stimulus. If I thought my chakra sense was accurate before it was stupid now. I had to take a few breaths, waving Sasuke and Naruto off when they tried to swarm me, they figured out quickly enough what the problem was. I wasn't able to attempt the leaf exercise that day. I felt ill and overloaded each time I tried to reach for my chakra. At first I was pissed because I had waited so damn long for it, then I was afraid. What if this chakra sense turned into a disability? What if I couldn't use chakra because each time I tried I overloaded my own senses? Perhaps training in being a sensor so early had fucked me up. Most people wouldn't have had the sense of mind to train it like that, so they wouldn't have been able to mess themselves up. What if I'm broken?

Such thoughts flowed through my head for the next week. I received a lot of laughs and jeers for refusing to try the exercise, looking a bit green each time. But I ignored them, they were children after all. I had recently turned seven years old, and I wasn't bothered by the thoughtless words of my peers. However, I was worried about what our ANBU thought about us. They weren't there for me, but I fed them so I considered them a bit mine as well. They were watching Sasuke only on the night I finally got my chakra to move. The static feeling was what I would imagine waterbending with corn syrup would feel like. It didn't want to move, sluggish and sleeping still. But I emptied my white box that the necklace had come in and filled it with leaves, starting on this little exercise. Naruto and Sasuke came in and out during it, but wisely got what they wanted out of the fridge and left silently. It took weeks of near constant trying to get it to work. I figured out after awhile that my system was sluggish because it had never flowed any way other than what was natural for the human body. It didn't know what the hell I wanted and was slow in being turned from the natural order. But once I set the precedent of movement it got more and more pliable, finally moving just as I directed. With more practice I was able to move only exactly as much as I needed to exactly where I needed it. Perks of feeling my chakra in ways most people can't.

Of course my sudden mastery of it after such a long period of struggle pissed Naruto off to no end. He just had so much chakra. Control was nearly impossible for him at this point. So one evening when he was struggling to attach a leaf to his head I handed him a thick novel and told him to stick it to his hand. He managed, after quite a while and some struggle. I had him work on that until it was easy, then worked his way down so that the objects got smaller. His grade in regards to control sucked, obviously, but he was making obvious visible improvement with the size of of the objects and how long he could get them to stick. When he finally managed to get a leaf to stick I had all three of us stick leaves to everywhere we could hold them, and then spar. We got a lap for each leaf we dropped, though we all ended up running the same number of laps that Naruto ended up earning. I wanted so badly to start attempting tree walking, but I hadn't 'seen' it before, and it wasn't the easiest of things to just 'come up with'. So I was forced to watch more carefully and attempt to catch a ninja in the act. It took a surprisingly long time. I finally had to stalk a genin team looking for training tips all the while. I dragged Sasuke along with me, Naruto being caught up in painting something that he shouldn't somewhere that it didn't belong. The ANBU following Sasuke of course observed our discovery of certain methods, including tree walking, water walking, and a few tricks we really wanted to learn. We agreed not to bring any of it up in front of Naruto until his control was closer to where it needed to be so he didn't struggle as much and get frustrated with himself.

That didn't stop me from practicing chakra strings in the privacy of my own apartment. Hell yeah did I want to be able to control things from a distance. Chakra strings were only learned for those who wanted to use puppets, which I thought was rather short sighted. You could throw around paper bombs like candy, directing them with that, not to mention curving a kunai mid-air, or determining a set strike pattern for an entire handful of shuriken. Also, you lost your weapon? Big bad guy in the way? No biggie, just send a flying spider web of chakra after it and suck it back to you. Also, spider webs made out of chakra. How stellar of a trap would that be? I you make the strings small enough and conserve how many you use then only a sensor would be able to find it. Making chakra strings was easy enough at first. But getting them to behave how I wanted, take the shape that I wanted, and move, was difficult enough, never mind actually detaching them. They wanted to die, disappear into nature chakra the moment I detached them from my main system. I figured I would probably have to use a seal to get that to work eventually but I was going to be ninja spiderman even if it killed me.

As for seals, I went to work on those, only small ones at first, treading lightly until I figured out what would blow up, what meant it was going to blow up, and when failure meant melt down. Fuinjutsu was a dangerous art, playing around with it was no small thing. I just couldn't help it though. I was so impatient to move forward, get better, improve, become a real shinobi. I was just like the boys in that aspect. When we learned our first jutsu, the henge jutsu, I was over the moon. Of course, Sasuke already knew how to fucking breathe fire, so this wasn't as impressive to him, but he still liked that we were moving forward.

He wasn't the complete dick headed gloomy emo 'avenger' he would have been, but he was still mopey and determined to get stronger so that he could find out why his clan was killed and what was really going on. Which was fine, honestly. I wasn't expecting him to just be 'okay', not after that trauma. Naruto was just as cheerful as expected, with somehow having obtained the iconic goggles at some point. I already had a beanie, so I wasn't worried about it, though I teased Sasuke about his jealous glancing at them every now and then. They were both young, and they both figured it was a good object to use as a pretend hite-ate.

Our contact with actual ninja wasn't as much as I would assume in a ninja village. While we saw them every day jumping from rooftop to rooftop, shopping in the marketplace, or stumbling home from a mission we weren't in contact with them. We didn't interact with them, ask them questions, get advice, it didn't work like that. We didn't know any real ninja anymore now that the Uchiha were gone. Well, other than ANBU, and only I knew they were there, and I didn't even technically know them. they were watching out for our health, though. One day I thought it would be neat to figure out how to hide my chakra signature like some of the shinobi around town do, not that it stops me from 'seeing' them, but I figured it would be useful. So I dragged the chakra inwards, rather than along the passageways like I was doing a jutsu. Usually Chakra radiates around a person, like an aura. I sucked in inwards, towards my core. This ended with an ANBU crashing into my room, looking around for me. I was sitting with my legs crossed on the couch and promptly held my hands up, running through what had happened to get this one to react. OH. Yeah. I was in close proximity to their two charges, and I had probably either seemed to sustain injury of some sort for no reason, or disappeared if I'd done it like I'd intended. I resisted the urge to facepalm and made a mental note not to practice this while the ANBU were hanging around. This one felt familiar.

More so than the normal 'you hang around outside my house, sometimes in my kitchen, and eat my food'. I couldn't put my finger on it, so I dismissed it for the moment. Perhaps we walk past one another when I'm not paying attention enough to match at that point why they're familiar. The ANBU stared at me for several seconds and I finally broke out into a nervous grin.

"Eh, sorry. Just messing around."

I glanced at the seals to my right, all working ones that I had copied out of a book in the library. I glanced back to him, sheepishness intensifying, laughing nervously.

"Eh heh heh, oops? Erm, take some mochi for your troubles?"

There was nothing for several seconds and then the guy was gone. No movement, no transition, just, gone. From the slight flux in chakra I would think it was shunshin, from the lack of leaves or debris left behind I would conclude that it was a very high level, often practiced one. The bowl on the table was now empty of mochi. I relaxed, sighing and moving the bowl to the sink, deciding to turn in for the night. It had already been entirely too eventful.

The next day class was boring as hell, the math being easy, the history simple, and the theory slightly stupid in my opinion. 'No emotion', 'follow the rules', 'the mission takes precedence', fuck you guys. We're human, rules were meant to be broken, and no man get's left behind. So there. The physical portion was much more exciting now that we were doing sparring. The clan kids had the obvious advantage, even if they were instructed to only use the academy style, and to leave their family stuff at home for now. I put up a good fight, usually being faster than my opponent, sometimes because I was smarter. I tried not to dismiss the civilians, or the kids who weren't part of the Rookie 9, just because they didn't have canon importance didn't mean they couldn't potentially kick my ass. Hyuuga Hinata was someone that I wanted to befriend, but since I was a friend of Naruto's she tended to also avoid/stalk me. I wanted to let her know that I knew she was there, but decided against it. She'd likely die of embarrassment. Also, while Sasuke's mother had been fine with us being his friend, Hinata's father was hardly going to be the same about some no name orphan, the kid of the rival clan, and the Kyuubi Jinchuuriki. It was annoying, but at this point in her life she probably didn't have the fortitude to lie about where she'd been successfully, or hide it from him. Especially since those eyes of his could probably find her if she was within five miles of him. Creepy.

Sakura was also someone I had thought to befriend, if only to stop her from dieting and get her to start training properly and take everything seriously for once. Her and Ino were still friends, not yet broken up over Sasuke, and I hoped that the change in his attitude would keep them from splitting up. Really though, the only canon characters I interacted with were Naruto, Sasuke, Shikamaru, and Choji. Shino was in our class at the moment, and the only time I interacted with him was when we sparred. I tried to always be polite, unlike the other girls who sparred with him, but I wasn't sure if he even noticed. Either way, the effort was made. Choji never did stop inviting me over to his compound for food, and it picked up after my hospital visit and subsequent weight loss. I started eating more, and healthier, but really, it wasn't possible to gain weight other than muscle mass with the training program I was doing and trying to keep up with Naruto's endless Uzumaki energy.

It wasn't long before our second official year was over as well, and we were moving on to the next one. Time was moving swiftly, and I wasn't particularly sure how I felt about that.

~TimeLordOfPie