Something, somewhere, had gone very wrong indeed.

I had students.

There had been a plan, once upon a time. It had been a good plan. Keep my head down, quietly build skills and knowledge, covertly create things that could catapult you up a tech-tree once I was old enough to leave Konoha. Find a nice moderately-sized village in the middle of nowhere, set up shop, and slowly build something that could get me into space.

Once there, I could really spread my wings and, if the alignment of the moon at its fullest truly was required, I could find a shitty little piece of tundra or desert outside the elemental nations' land, then continue building my knowledge until I was ready to leave the solar system.

Take me out to the black, tell 'em I ain't comin' back...

…burn the land, boil the seas, you can't take the sky from me.

I didn't need these people; these tiny primitive short-sighted violent undeveloped brutal child-soldier barbarians. I neither wanted nor needed the short, bloody nightmare of a life as a ninja. It was a life I wasn't suited to, either, and I held no illusions that I was the second coming of Rock Lee.

I worked smarter, not harder. I found shortcuts and didn't bother earning the callouses the long way around. I held no illusions about any of this.

Even if swinging a sword in the bare light of dawn, following through with the motions of a sect of space-paladins and teaching a young girl skills that might one day save her life made me happy.

Even if dancing through a kata of an ancient and beyond-lethal sword style as another apprentice watched closely was honestly and truly the coolest thing I'd ever done.

"Stop!" I barked, gratified that Satsuki and Tenten paused in a fraction of an instant even if I was only looking at the former. "Hold that stance, Tenten. Satsuki, your form is off. Here-" I leaned over, moving her arms ever-so-slightly, tapping her left foot an inch to the right, and adjusting the twist of her torso. "This blow uses the entire body in a twisting motion to give it extra strength."

"When I was practicing it at home, I cut through three training logs in a single blow." Satsuki stated while subtly flexing her muscles to memorize the stance. "How much more power does it need?"

"Once you are properly instructed in the style... and finish growing to your full weight and reach, I expect you will be able to kill five men easily with this blow." I replied, heedless of her surprise at the statement. "If my chakra worked normally and I were fully grown, I could take the lives of twice that number if I found a group of enemies unwary enough to give me the opportunity."

Satsuki hissed in surprise, but nodded as I stepped back.

"Continue practicing while I check on Tenten." I stated, turning once I was outside the radius of her strikes. With the sound of steel whistling through air behind me, I walked the ten paces to my other student, taking in her tense form and grit teeth as she held the sword aloft perpendicular to her body.

Nodding to myself, I wrapped a hand around one of her arms and frowned as I noticed the vibration in them, then knelt and did the same to one of her legs.

I ignored the surprised inhalation she made as I placed one hand on her ankle and the other just above her knee on her thigh, releasing only after I was sure of my deduction.

"Relax." I allowed her, Tenten heaving a great breath of relief as her quaking limbs were allowed to lose tension and hang loose. I stood from my crouch, slapping my hands against each other and shaking my head. "Either you haven't been doing the exercises I told you to or I've misjudged the intensity you need. Which one is it?"

Tenten grimaced, looking down at the ground. "I had tests this week, sorry sensei. It won't happen again."

I suppressed a twitch at the title. "Don't call me that." I uselessly reiterated. "I'm just showing you some moves." Gracefully, like the mature adult I was, I ignored her snort of disbelief. "Okay. I'm adding an extra ten repetitions to each exercise for the next week. We'll see where you are after that."

The bun-haired girl frowned, but sighed and nodded after a moment. "Yes, sensei."

I grunted and rolled my eyes. "Seriously, stop it with that. I'm not your teacher."

"You're teaching us an entire sword style each." Tenten replied, crossing her arms carefully with the sword in her hand pointed down to the earth. "I think that makes you a teacher."

"I reject your reality and substitute my own." It was a testament to exactly how comfortable I felt with the girl that I knowingly allowed that line to slip my lips simply to smirk at the befuddled look that resulted. Turning before she could ask what the hell that even meant, I called back to Satsuki. "Break!"

She whirled to a stop, breathing hard, almost gasping as she held the resting pose for a moment before slowly sheathing her blade. "H-hai!"

Tenten sighed and followed me to where I'd dropped a pack with snacks and water, the former of which had been prepared by me and paid for by both Tenten and Satsuki after I'd made the terrible mistake of sharing a bit of food I'd made for myself one day. Satsuki frowned minutely as she took the bag of home-made chex-mix, nuts, dried fruit slices, and caramelized meat.

"Pizza is too heavy to have in the middle of a training session." I reminded her, handing Tenten a bag as well.

"Thanks." She nodded, then grabbed a towel from her bag before pulling off the top half of her training gi and beginning to wipe off the sweat she'd earned. She stopped midway through, the cloth not truly obscuring her bare chest as she looked at me. "Sorry, I forgot I wasn't in class. Do you want me to stop?"

I shrugged, allowing my eyes to linger on her developing body before casually reaching over to grab myself a bag of snacks. "It doesn't matter to me, whatever makes you comfortable. I did go through the first few years of academy training, remember. We had communal showers and changing rooms, too."

Tenten sighed in relief, continuing to wipe herself down as Satsuki stole a few curious glances at the slightly-older girl. Konoha's attitude towards the sexes was...weird, to my late-twentieth western cultural upbringing, but... I kind of thought that the ninja had something of a point here, at least.

Academies inducted children starting at age five or six depending on if you were big, strong, and mature enough to take the training they thinly disguised as games. If you didn't fail out by age eight or nine, they started introducing slightly more strenuous activities that simulated fieldwork.

Things like walking across a rope while balancing over a pool of water, moving through muddy or wooded terrain without trails, disarming 'traps' that contained various smelly and sticky substances...

The point being that all of these activities were the types of things that filthy little child-gremlins both enjoyed the hell out of and ended up covering them in some kind of mess.

The academies asked students to bring and keep at least one change of clothing in their classroom and, when they got dirty, they were directed as a class into communal showers where they could strip, clean themselves, and change into new clothes.

Boys and girls didn't have separate bathrooms, they didn't separate classes for the seduction/sex education units (I knew this part second-hand, since Tenten had gone on a horrified, yet fascinated rant in my presence after school), and when the teachers organized overnight camps in the wooded areas of the village, boys and girls were usually matched with each other to watch out for each other while using the bathroom. Ostensibly, this was so that kids were less likely to get lost or take a shit on a poisonous snake, but pragmatically...

Well, there was a reason that the two-week medic-nin academy course coincided with the unit on sex education during the final year of coursework. This was also coincidentally when they would use a basic anti-pregnancy medical technique to evaluate students for potential fast-track to the hospital staff or field medic rank.

None of this was on the level of a hentai world I'd commonly seen the setting described as; where teachers went out of their way to personally instruct students in the sexual arts or anything. No one was using weird tantric jutsu on the kids or the like, they didn't hand them pornography (though that was fairly accessible if you went looking for it), and they didn't give students time and space to have sex on school grounds.

If you boiled it down, the ninja side of our society treated sex the same way it treated violence.

'This is very likely to happen at some point in your life, here are the tools and information to deal with it, best of luck and ask someone if you're curious about learning more.'

I... didn't exactly disagree with that level of pragmatism or outlook on sex, actually.

Oh, and because underneath-the-underneath was a thing, the academy failed out anyone who either got pregnant or got someone else pregnant before graduation. If you had the knowledge and tools to prevent a situation that would complicate your life and were either too stupid or chose not to use them, you were not ninja material. I knew about that because apparently an Aburame clan kid had knocked up a civilian academy girl the year prior and it had made the gossip circles for a solid month before blowing over.

Of course, all of this was all in service of the fact that the last thing a young ninja needed to worry about in a life or death situation was body shyness.

"Kota? You there?" Tenten asked, and I blinked as I pulled myself from my musings and looked between the barely-visible concern on Satsuki's face and the amused exasperation on Tenten's. "Ah, there you are. You were staring off again. Honestly, where do you go when you do that?"

I rolled my eyes. "Getting lost in my thoughts is sometimes fun, that's all."

Satsuki grunted. "When can we start using chakra when we're practicing?"

"When I say so." I replied, restating my ready answer to yet another thing Satsuki enjoyed bringing up over and over.

"My parents are asking, since they see me practicing at home. I had to explain everything." Satsuki looked grumpy at the thought and I sympathized.

"I'm asking you not to use chakra during your lessons or when practicing the techniques because th-my styles are all able to be mastered without chakra. You will see far greater returns if you do things my way than if you start out using chakra. It's also good training to conserve your energy for when you need it. Finally, since I can't use chakra in more than mediocre amounts, I can't keep up with either of you while you're enhancing your speed, strength, and reflexes. That is dangerous for learning new material. If I can't see you making a mistake in time to stop, you could very easily hurt yourselves before I realize you're about to do so." I restated my reasoning.

Satsuki nodded, chastised as her eyes flicked away. "I know. It's just... my father doesn't think it's worth it learning from someone who can't use chakra like a ninja should be able to."

I snorted. "Me being an academy dropout likely doesn't help."

Satsuki opened her mouth, the look in her eyes telling me she wanted to contest that, before another voice spoke. Its timbre was cool and deep, yet strangely hoarse, as if from disuse. Following the words as they were being spoken, I could easily see their source as he walked into the clearing from the shadows.

"That is why he sent me to observe one of your training sessions."

Uchiha Itachi.

"Nii-sama!" Satsuki practically yelped, animate in a way I rarely saw her as she sprang up and approached the cloaked figure. Thankfully for my peace of mind, I didn't see any red clouds on the expansive black piece of fabric and wondered if the fashion was simply something he'd picked up in his ANBU days...which I should neither know about nor be thinking about right now.

"Satsuki." Itachi smiled softly, his hand coming up to tussle his sister's hair before the smile faded as his eyes ghosted over Tenten as she rapidly pulled her gi back on and landed on me heavily with the weight of his cool analytic stare. "These are your friends."

It wasn't a question, but Satsuki nodded as she looked at us briefly. "Tenten is a year older in the academy. She helps me with some of the homework sometimes. Kota is an apprentice blacksmith."

Itachi frowned minutely, the deep lines on his cheeks that were part of his Uchiha heritage twisting slightly. "An academy dropout who is teaching you the single most brutal and savage sword style I have ever seen, even having fought Mist swordsmen during the previous war."

I finished standing up and brushing myself off, forcing myself to understand that there was quite literally nothing I could do if Itachi decided I was a threat to his little sister or the village and moved to execute me on the spot. "Yes."

I met the ninja's gaze, not without fear, but having long-since learned to master the fear responses in my body and resolved to allow myself no deceptions here and now. I'd made my bed by deciding to be a friend to Satsuki, I'd have to lay in it now.

Hell, once I realized that my dumb ass had volunteered to teach the Uchiha clan head's daughter how to swing a sharp piece of metal around, I'd even gone so far as to invest in medic-nin training, because I knew that even with a good, respectable standing in Konoha, Itachi was just the kind of crazy you did not fuck around with by letting his adorable baby sister get injured under your watch. Fugaku probably wasn't any better, for that matter.

As if to prove my point, I saw his sharingan flare to life for a fraction of a second and felt the spider-thread softness of genjutsu cling to me. After a moment's hesitation, I twisted a nerve and muscle in my back no normal human would be able to and sent a spike of pain through my system as I cycled my tiny chakra pool around my body. The combination shattered whatever illusion had been trying to take hold.

Without even the slightest hint of surprise or hesitation, Itachi's hand snapped out and a shuriken was flying towards the right side of my face. Unthinking, my hand snapped out as I devoted a tiny spark of energy to reinforce that limb to catch the spinning star of steel.

"Nii-san!" Satsuki shouted, outraged as she leapt away from him, looking between the two of us as we stared each other down.

"It wouldn't have cut him deep, imouto-chan." Itachi soothed while never taking his eyes off me. "He could have easily dodged it as well."

I flicked my fingers to send the star back to him, off-center of his body so that he wouldn't mistake it for an attack and far slower than even my meager fastest speed would compare to his own. "Tenten was behind me. You wanted to see if I was situationally aware enough to make sure she didn't come to harm."

The faintest smile tugged at the corners of Itachi's lips as both Satsuki and Tenten inhaled sharply.

"I know less capable chunin." The jounin praised, the ghost of a smile fading on his face for a tinge of bemusement as he continued to study me. "You aren't even trying to lie to me."

I blinked at him, once, as I kept my face blank. "Would trying to lie to you accomplish anything?"

Itachi nodded minutely, an undertone of something in his expression as he acknowledged my point. "Why did you intentionally fail out of the academy?" Satsuki turned an accusing glare my way at the question even as Tenten made a surprised grunt.

I cocked my head slightly, sure that I had... ah, I see. "The forger's mistake?"

He blinked at me uncomprehendingly.

"I was too meticulous when choosing how I failed out. I treated it like a forger does his art, the flaws themselves were too perfect." I explained shortly.

This time honest amusement flashed across the older man's face for a bare instant. "The 'forger's mistake.' I see. I've never heard it described as such." He nodded. "Yes, that is an accurate summation of things. Even with your disability, you could have become a shinobi. The academy instructors should not have been so lapse in their judgment."

"I failed out because I don't like killing people and there are other things I excel at which can contribute to the village." I replied honestly.

Itachi didn't respond for a moment, then narrowed his gaze at me. "You claim to dislike killing, yet you teach my sister a sword that does so unrepentantly and proudly."

I could have talked about how the sword style I've chosen would compliment Satsuki's sharingan perfectly, being based on reaction times, speed of thought, and speed of movement as it was. But that was beside the point. It wasn't what Itachi really wanted to know, given his own secret pacifistic leanings.

"Satsuki wants to be a kunoichi." I replied as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "I would rather she send ten bodies to be buried in foreign soil for each mission she completes than come home in a scroll herself."

Satsuki stiffened with a blush as Tenten snorted lightly behind me.

"Even if I do not want to kill anyone, the only way I can stop another from killing is to kill them myself." I continued. "To be a shinobi is to live with the knowledge that you will eventually be forced to take a life or be complicit in the taking of one. While I have decided that I would rather make contributions to the village in other ways and that becoming a shinobi would be very difficult given my medical state, I can't stop Satsuki or Tenten from choosing that life. Hence, I can only prepare them as best I am able. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of their friendship."

I could feel the weight of both girls' gazes on me as Itachi silently assessed the words I'd spoken before nodding slowly. "I see." Then, he turned and left, pausing at the edge of the clearing we'd claimed as our 'training ground.' "Satsuki."

"N-nii-sama?" The girl asked, swallowing as she looked between us, torn and worried.

"I will report my approval of your tutor and his capability to father." Itachi stated, then stepped into a shadow and vanished from our senses.

I wanted to ding him for being a drama queen, but honestly? If I could pull a Batman, I'd do it too.

Instead, I simply sighed and allowed myself to relax.

"You failed the academy on purpose?!"

Also groan. I also allowed myself to groan.

Goddammit Itachi.