A/N: I know, I'm late! But as of Jan 24th, I made this fic available on the SpaceBattles forum, where I'll also be posting art directly. It's a general fiction forum with a pretty cool writing, gaming, and roleplaying community. If you have the time, especially if you like writing/reading fics, I suggest you check it out. Special credit to Recycler for introducing me :).
Kurenai looked up from the rice pot in surprise, startled by the little tap on her wrist.
"Here, sensei, let me help you," the sheepish girl beside her offered, casting her eyes down at the pot as Kurenai stared.
"Well." She let Sacora take the rice paddle and went about setting the natto and leftover vegetables on the table. "Someone's more lively today."
Sacora said nothing as she filled the bowls and brought them over. But after they were both seated, Kurenai had just lifted the first bit of shiitake with her chopsticks when she was accosted with, "Thank you for the food."
Her dark brow went up, further intrigued. "No problem. Gives me a better incentive to eat healthy, anyways."
But this new behavior didn't stop at breakfast. When they met up with Team Eight later in the village square, it wasn't Hinata or Kiba who gave the first word of greeting, but Sacora herself. "Good morning, everyone," she'd said with a smile.
"G-good morning!" Hinata returned happily, while Shino simply nodded.
"'Sup?" Kiba added alongside Akamaru's bark.
"Huh?" Sacora tilted her head in confusion. "But supper isn't until later..."
And as they went on their morning training routine, Kurenai didn't have to remind her to stick close. She actually wanted to sit within speaking distance of the genin, even striking up conversation with Hinata during breaks. Kiba would chime in now and then with jokes, thankfully less abrasive than before, and then Shino preferred to listen rather than speak – which was nothing new – but even he didn't fail to acknowledge Sacora occasionally in their various chats.
I almost feel bad for not including her in the training exercises, Kurenai remarked to herself. It was a dramatic change compared to just yesterday. She could only think of one thing that had spurred it on, and accosted Kiba about it privately when they went on their lunch break: "Good call on the tour. She's not half as sulky as she used to be, and I think she actually likes you guys now."
He paused in his chewing and suddenly became interested in the grass beneath his feat. She swore his cheeks turned pink beneath his facial markings as he mumbled, "It was all Hinata's idea..."
Kurenai couldn't help but smile, and gave his shoulder a hearty pat. "You all did a great job yesterday, that's for sure."
She enjoyed the pleasure of observing this newfound peace for another two days, a refreshing parallel to the adolescent sulkiness; and then another new development wormed its way into their routine.
"I got the call from Iruka this morning," Kurenai announced. "Kakashi's back, and he wants to see Sacora after Academy classes are done for the day."
At this, Sacora exchanged glances with Hinata, a flash of trepidation as well as dismay passing through her features.
"But don't worry!" Kurenai chirruped. "You won't be on your own for long. I'll be back as soon as I drop her off."
"Ha!" Kiba scoffed. "You act like you're gonna be missed!"
"Oh?" Shino interjected. "If it's not sensei, then who else would it be?"
Kurenai smirked at Kiba's sudden silence and the little giggle from Hinata that compounded it. "Anyway, I'd better see progress when I get back," she went on. "I've signed us up for another D mission, so no slacking."
"Yes, sensei," the three of them assured her in groaning unison.
"Come now, we're getting rusty. Finish it and maybe I'll bag us a C."
In the midst of this, Sacora raised a questioning hand. "Um, Kurenai-sensei, how long will I be there for?"
Kurenai looked over at her reassuringly. "I'm picking you up as soon as they're done. But the examination itself?" She crossed her arms and shook her head. "Not long at all. The Sharingan is known for being lightning fast, after all."
Iruka looked up from the podium upon hearing the rattle of the classroom doors. He half expected it to be Daikoku, ready to crack some joke or pun about one of the day's lesson plans, but perked up in surprise to find his visitor none other than the young firebender. "Ah, come in!" he greeted as he put his papers down. "How've you been? Please, have a seat. Kakashi-sensei's running a little late, I'm afraid!"
"I've been well," Sacora answered pleasantly. She stood awhile by the door at a loss for what to do, eventually picking out a seat in the front row. As she settled down, Iruka could see her inquisitive gaze plastered on the chalkboard behind him, still etched with the white scrawls and eraser swipes of the previous lesson.
"Bit of a strange sight, isn't it?" Iruka remarked. "Your Academy's classrooms must have looked different."
"They were bigger, and had more windows." She tilted her head in thought, before adding, "But there weren't any big boards like this."
"Really?" he asked. "How did your teachers manage, then?
"They dictated the lesson."
"Must have been hard to follow along."
"It wasn't so hard if you listened well." Sacora let her gaze linger on the board a little longer, and Iruka went back to paper sorting when silence enveloped them again. "Sensei," she suddenly interrupted, "what does that say?"
Iruka looked up and turned to the wall scroll she was pointing at. "Ah, that?" he asked. "It's a rather old poem. It says:
'The village of my youth is gone,
New faces meet my gaze;
But still the blossoms at thy gate,
Whose perfume scents the ways,
Recall my childhood's days.'"
Her eyes traced the characters wistfully as he read it, and he could see her fingers tapping in conjunction as she counted the meter. It was then he remembered that the poor girl couldn't read hiragana. "Do you like poems, Sacora?"
She stopped what she was doing to give him a bashful nod.
"We don't have an extensive collection, but we do have some poetry books that aid with phonetics," he ventured to say. Her eyes lit up at this, and the teacher within him couldn't help but feel excitement at the thought of another eager learner. Maybe...if I can get the Lord Third's approval, she could come here for lessons...
"I'd love to see them, if you'd let me," she said hopefully.
A knock came at the door before he could respond, however, and a nonchalant voice sighed as it slid open, "Sorry I'm late..."
Kakashi Hatake was a strange man. He seemed relatively young despite a head full of gray hair, though all Sacora could make of his face was a deadpan eye; a black mask completely concealed his lower face and a sloping headband covered his other eye, leaving only that tiny quarter of his features visible. She wondered what disfigurement, if any, warranted such cover, when she remembered that staring was rude and he hadn't been greeted yet.
"So that's her," he commented before she even stood up.
"Yup," Iruka confirmed, shuffling his papers together in finality before stepping off the podium. "So how was your mission? Team Seven did well, from what I heard."
"It was fine. They're waiting outside."
His passive and indirect manner reminded Sacora of Hayate. But if she thought Kakashi was strange, she found his genin even stranger. She followed the two men out of the Academy into a smaller training ground beside it, and it was there she found the three by a training dummy; a boy with bright yellow hair in an equally bright orange jumpsuit, a pink-haired girl (Pink! she'd fought the urge to gasp), and a brooding raven-haired boy dressed in blue; by far, the most colorful set of genin she'd ever seen.
Naruto, Sakura, and Sasuke were how Iruka introduced them, and the moment Naruto laid eyes on Iruka, he jumped for joy and hugged the unsuspecting sensei. "Iruka-sensei!" he exclaimed. "You should've been there! I was so cool! I kicked some serious Mist ninja butt, I used my clones against Zabuza, heck, I even saved Sasuke!"
"All right, all right," Iruka groaned as he extricated himself. But far from being annoyed, he seemed amused, as if this were a familiar feature of their relationship. "Wait, Zabuza?"
"...I'll tell you later," Kakashi promised.
Sakura furrowed her pink brows together in consternation. "Ugh, Naruto, can you get any more embarrassing? You're not a hero just 'cause you saved him once. Newsflash: you're still a knucklehead!" She turned to Sacora apologetically. "Ignore him; he's not right in the head, as you can see."
"Hey!"
Sacora smiled politely and offered a timid, "It's all right..." Are all the genin this odd? she wondered. But more distracting than that was a strange sensation swirling in her belly as she looked them over. Funny, I haven't had any trouble with the food here...is it the natto?
Kakashi cleared his throat, recapturing her attention. "Now that we've gotten that out of the way...are you ready, Sacora?"
She turned to the gray-haired jonin and gave him something of a nod.
"Good." He then directed her towards a more open spot until they faced each other unobstructed. Iruka and the genin were swept off to the side, spectators for now. Once they were settled, Kakashi slid a hand up towards his headband, lifting it ever-so-slightly, and Sacora could see a hint of scar tissue splitting down his cheekbone. "Now, when I activate the Sharingan," he instructed her, "I want you to come at me."
She jolted in surprise. "H-huh?"
"Come at me, as if you're fighting. I won't retaliate," he promised, and lifted the headband off his eye.
It revealed an angry, blood-red iris that almost seemed to glare at her. It was difficult to tell from where she was standing, but the iris also appeared to have been punctured with two tiny black shapes. Sacora fought the urge to cover her own eye at the thought of the injury that might have caused it, and it was only last minute that she gave a startled punch of fire as her focus struggled to switch between the eye and the sensei.
He jumped away from the attack so fast, it was almost as if he had simply flickered away. "I'm sure you can do better than that," he encouraged.
Remembering the last time she'd squared off with a ninja, though, Sacora was hesitant to go all out. She kept her initial attacks measured and probing, slowly circling around him yet maintaining a safe distance that she hoped wouldn't be breached anytime soon. But he was true to his word, and being nothing more than a frustratingly elusive target, she found herself coming after him in increasingly bold attacks that eventually brought her within touching distance.
Right in the heat of it, a firm hand slapped itself over her wrist, paralyzing her with its suddenness. Sacora looked beside her to find Kakashi gazing serenely down at her hand, both eyes half-lidded in a lazy expression despite the hostile gleam she still perceived from the red one.
"Well done," he murmured, and released her wrist. He fixed his headband back over his red eye and turned to the others. "What you're looking it is a highly specialized form of kekkei genkai."
"Kekkei genkai?" Sacora asked, confused.
"A bloodline ability," Kakashi explained.
"So it's not something you can replicate?" Iruka asked.
Kakashi slipped a hand into a pocket and rubbed his chin with the other. "It's more than that. How do I explain...it's not really jutsu in the sense of molding and releasing chakra. It's something that's so in tune with her physique, she could use it as naturally as, say, breathing. That's an overly simplified way to put it, of course, but the bottom line is there's no need for her to devote as much energy into putting together a jutsu."
"But that's still energy being expended, isn't it, sensei?" Sakura interrupted. "And fire itself is a combustion of energy. Even if it's as you said, it should still take a lot of stamina to create?"
"True," he nodded. "That's still something that happens; but in her case it's a little...different." He crossed his arms together. "Recall that chakra is created when physical energy and spiritual energy mold together. That allows us to perform various jutsu; but we each have a limit in how far our chakra reserves can go. Use up all of it and you run the risk of chakra exhaustion, or worse, death."
"Yeah, yeah, we know this already!" Naruto groaned.
Kakashi ignored him. "Here, however, we see someone with no chakra reserves at all." As shock registered on the faces of his genin, he held a demonstrative hand towards Sacora. "The basis of this lies in how her energy is distributed. While the pathway system is the same, the tenets of cultivating energy to mold are different. Actually, the word 'mold' here is inapplicable. What happens is there's a continuous flow of energy that can be directed to perform the moves you've seen just now. How? Her physical energy is bending."
Iruka nodded thoughtfully. "I see. So it's physical energy with an elemental affinity. Then, from what Hinata saw..."
"The act of bending itself doesn't wear her down," Kakashi supplied, "which is why her 'chi' returns to the body. Her stamina, then, would be dependent on her own endurance. In that manner, her physical energy is more streamlined than a shinobi's. But there's a serious drawback." He looked down at Sacora. "What other abilities can you perform besides bending?"
She felt her face grow hot as she averted her eyes from the genin. "I can't. There's just...bending."
"Exactly. Because her power is dependent on physical energy that rebounds on itself, she has no structure with which to perform anything beyond bending. Where we can use chakra to do such things as walk on water, increase our speed, or jump to high heights, she's limited only to what her bending can accomplish."
"So that's why you can't copy it," Sasuke surmised. "It's not just a kekkei genkai; it's a system we can't use in the first place."
"Very good, Sasuke," Kakashi praised. "For us, an emphasis in physical energy relates to taijutsu. An elemental release and affinity are more along the lines of ninjutsu. To restructure that is not an easy feat. The same goes for her, though it's hard to say whether that could have been different with a shinobi upbringing."
Sacora perked up at the thought. "Really? How?"
"Everyone has chakra and the ability to wield it," Kakashi explained. "It's just a matter of training. Not all choose to, though. Bending, on the other hand, sounds hereditary. Am I right?" When she nodded, he continued, "It's possible that you could have been trained to wield it like chakra if the basis of your training were different; the pathways of your chi are similar to ours, after all. But it could also be that that's how your peoples' bodies were evolved to perform."
Before Sacora could get another word in, however, Iruka approached Kakashi with an inquiring look. A hushed exchange passed between them that she was unable to hear, and the last thing they gave before going out of earshot was a statement that they would be finished with their discussion in a moment.
"Ha! Chakra without any jutsu? Laaaame!"
"Quit it!" Sakura scolded with a hand swipe Naruto's way. "She's right there, you doofus."
Sacora crossed her arms tighter and kicked at the dirt as she attempted to ignore the less-than-subtle remarks. The analysis Kakashi-sensei gave had provided something of an idea as to why jutsu was different, but it still stung to hear that bending was so limited. How is any of this fair? she lamented. Bending is a sacred art passed down from generations...but here, anyone can do what these ninja can by just training...and lots of them are my age!
"Hey!"
She looked up to find Naruto standing before her, his smug and impetuous face split into a mischievous grin. The roiling in her stomach intensified the more she stared at the strange, whisker-like lines etched on his cheeks. "Yes?"
"What's up with your chakra? Didn't your school know better than to teach it to you like that?"
Sacora frowned. "It's not chakra. It's chi."
"Chakra, chi, same thing, isn't it?"
"Well...I don't know." She huffed and turned away. "Go ask your sensei."
"Sucks, though," he went on, much to her annoyance. "I don't know how you benders can live without it! Ninjutsu is like, super cool. So you can't even make a basic clone? Man, you wouldn't last a second against an Academy student..."
"You sound pretty sure of yourself," she remarked irritably.
"Ha! You're looking at the future number one ninja of the village!" he boasted. "That's right, this bad boy's gonna be Hokage one day, believe it! Bet I could take down an army of benders easy–"
Fwoom
"Aah!" He flailed in alarm at the small fireball that flew past his head, backed a step, and then tripped with a hard thump to the ground on his bum. As he bewailed his fate, Sakura once again took up the task of chiding him while Sasuke dismissively breathed the word "idiot".
Sacora released her fist and lowered her arm back to her side. So there is someone here that I can beat...and he happened to be the least brightest of the genin she'd met. How reassuring.
It would take a lot of work if she wanted to ever compete on their level, that much was certain. And from what Kakashi had said, there seemed to be hope. Though it might be too late to rework the entirety of her training, perhaps it could be enough to replicate the mysterious power of the scroll and return home once and for all.
"Inoichi, sir. We have tested the jutsu on the scroll, as you instructed."
"And?"
"It produced...nothing."
Of course. He had expected that, what with all the moaning and groaning the Force had given him about the formula. Still, he had pushed for the analytics team to decipher the scroll completely before giving it a whirl. "Hold onto it until the next moon comes," Inoichi instructed. "We want to be sure it does nothing before writing it off completely. Bring her in try it, even." I know what I saw, after all.
"Yes, sir. I have the report here if you wish to see it."
Inoichi nodded and pat a stack of documents for the report to be laid on, all the while continuing to write on the paperwork he'd been occupied with. "Have the firebender's samples come in yet?"
"Yes, sir," the chunin before him repeated. "In fact, I was just about to hand in the results."
"About time." Inoichi clicked and dropped his pen to the table, reclining back in his seat with arms crossed. "So, what have they found?"
"Nothing out of the ordinary, sir." She opened up the manila folder and leafed through some pages. "All levels and counts present as normal. The results are those of a healthy individual."
"All levels?" Inoichi echoed, frowning. "No blood pH changes? No high carboxyhemoglobin or methemoglobin levels?"
"No, sir. None at all."
But she was found face-down in a pile of ash, and these samples were drawn immediately after hospital admittance! Not only that, she had been surrounded by burning wood matter and smoke for a long time. That honestly should have been enough to deplete her blood's oxygen levels long before he and the other jonin had gotten to her; for there to be nothing at all, not even a trace of particles from the ash or smoke, was highly suspicious. He had thought something was off when he heard she was discharged so shortly after awakening; "These results can't be possible," he murmured to himself, "not unless her body is able to diffuse oxygen and expel carbon monoxide at an insanely high rate..." And that was quite a stretch, even for someone whose abilities centered around fire.
"As for the ash content analysis," the chunin continued, "the samples you gave were largely composed of plant matter. However..."
Inoichi looked up, brow raised.
"...some particles resembling those found in cremated human remains were detected."
Oh? Is that so? All he responded with, however, was a simple, "Hmm." He accepted the folder and set it on top of his previous paperwork before dismissing the chunin with a wave. Once he was alone again did he open it to study the first page of results, eyes scanning through the medical jargon and numbers with growing interest.
Notes
richboylion- Noted and fixed. I'd gotten the techniques confused because of how often Naruto performed the Shadow Clone (i.e., basic Clone Jutsu & Shadow Clone Jutsu are two totally different things). Thanks for the heads up!
I fixed up the mind probe in Chapter 2 to imply rape rather than state it out, due to reader suggestions. Then I omitted the "all Airbenders were monks" statement after remembering that Fire Nation students operated under the belief that the Air Nation had a formal military (source: episode where Aang goes to Fire Nation school).
Changes in blood pH can be caused by interference in the diffusion or use of oxygen. Smoke inhalation can cause microscopic particles to get trapped in the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Carboxyhemoglobin and methemoglobin levels are often tested for in smoke inhalation victims; high carboxyhemoglobin indicates a high level of inhaled carbon monoxide & methemoglobin is a form of hemoglobin that comprises 1-2% of a person's hemoglobin, but when present in high levels indicates exposure to various chemicals. Also, it is unlikely in real life for human ash to be found/determined in a content analysis if Sacora's fire cremated the cultists immediately. That would require an insanely hot temperature which destroys DNA and makes the alternative, isotrope analysis, difficult; hence the vague yet still forceful wording summarizing the report. All science stuff taken from WebMD, Wikipedia, and the science subreddit.
The poem (not of my own invention) is verse no. 35 from A Hundred Verses from Old Japan (The Hyakunin-isshu), composed by Ki no Tsurayuki (872-945) and translated by William Porter circa 1909.