Chapter 3: Little Discoveries

"How does I… nein, 'do I'." Axel was much better after three weeks of having Japanese as the only option if he wanted to be understood, but some points still tripped him up since he wasn't familiar with every word or conjugation. "How do I get to Tokyo from here?"

Kichirou glanced up from the groceries he had been considering, looking very much like he had just been reminded of something. "Do you mean Konoha?" he asked, vaguely gesturing with an eggplant in what was presumably the right direction. "That's the largest city east of here."

Axel hadn't known that the fictional hidden village from Naruto had a real-life counterpart, but at least it sounded large enough to have trains or a phone or something. He just settled with an uncertain nod and wondered how frequently the local kids—who he had seen running around playing ninja nearly everyday—bugged parents to let them visit. "Uh… Yes? Maybe?"

"Are you from Konoha? You don't talk about yourself very much." The teen dropped the purple vegetable into the bag Axel was carrying for him, moving over to look at the cabbages. Picking one up, Kichirou checked to see if it had any rotten bits; a few, but better than some of the others so he handed it over as well.

"What? No, no, I'm from München. You know, Munich. In Deutschland." At Kichirou's blank look, he tried, "Germany? …Doitsu?"

"Sure, whatever." The teen shrugged, tone making it clear that he wasn't really following his blond friend anymore. Instead he just held up a radish for Axel to help inspect. "Does this look good to you? I'm not sure about this bit here."

Since he didn't know much about telling ripe vegetables from one-day-till-compost, Axel couldn't say for sure the discoloration wasn't a sign of rot or something. He took it and gave the questionable spot a poke. It didn't feel gooey, which was a good sign, so he added it to their groceries.

Despite the bags being uncomfortably full by this point, Kichirou seemed determined to stuff in a few more veggies. He had a tendency to over-pack, something Axel had noticed on a previous grocery run when the teen had spent several minutes rearranging things for maximum food-to-bag density.

After packing in as much food as possible, they finally made their way to the counter to pay. It was really lucky that the blacksmith family had been kind enough to temporarily take him in; he had no money worth anything here. In fact, he had exactly €2,35 and not a cent more. He hadn't so much as seen any yen since waking up at the clinic, since he had stored what he had left in his checked bag to avoid carrying unnecessary coins through security. Interestingly enough, he hadn't seen any card readers either. So while he didn't enjoy feeling like a charity case, until he could find an ATM or something he was stuck on that point.

They spent a brief moment debating who would carry most of the bags back, as seemed to happen at the end of every shopping trip. And, just like those other times, Axel was ultimately left with one mostly-empty bag: it held only a single cabbage. The other things it had held had been carefully (and impressively) tetrised to the rest of the bags that Kichirou had insisted on carrying himself. Apparently, having just been released from the clinic, Axel was just too fragile to be trusted with heavy groceries for the trip back home.

Axel shook his head and gave the overly-concerned teen half an eye roll, but otherwise just went along with it.

"Anyway, Konoha's about a day's walk away," Kichirou continued from the first question, one hand loaded down with all the bags as he led the way back to his house. "Or at least, it is when we're bringing in things to sell. There're plenty of signs at crossroads for merchants and travelers, so I wouldn't worry about getting lost."

Axel snorted, the terms reminding him of fantasy stories and the medieval fairs his college club had taken trips to visit whenever classes had allowed.

"Of course, it only takes shino…" Kichirou drifted off, thinking. "Actually, I don't really know how fast they can make the trip. Pretty fast, I'd reckon."

They reached the door before Axel could ask what a 'shino' was, and Kichirou awkwardly tried to fish out the keys from his pocket with one hand. After a moment of watching the younger boy flounder—the shopping bags swinging about unhelpfully—Axel grabbed his bags from him so he could open the door in peace.

"Hey, Dad! We're back!"

They took the grocery bags into the kitchen, but before they could start unloading their purchases, Morimoto walked in with an uncharacteristically annoyed expression aimed squarely at his son. Axel decided the best course of action was to let them handle whatever the issue was between themselves, and so he turned back to the less dramatic option of stocking the fridge with vegetables.

"Kichirou, I know they've been laying around for ages now, but didn't I tell you to repair the broken pickup tongs?"

"Yeah?"

"That's what I thought." Morimoto set down a pair of metal, definitely-not-broken pickup tongs onto the table with loud clang and a stern look. "Who did you even buy this from?"

The teen blinked at the tool in confusion. "I… What? I didn't buy that!"

His father crossed his arms. "You're good, but still learning. I know you didn't make this."

"Well, yeah, I was gonna fix them. Eventually." He looked very confused. "I hadn't even really thought about them since Axel-nii moved in."

He hadn't been following the conversation—it was going by just a bit too fast for him to easily listen in—but the sound of his name made Axel glance back over his shoulder. Spotting the tool on the table, he sheepishly grinned; it seems like he might have gotten Kichirou in some sort of trouble. "That was me. Sorry if using the… forge?— Sorry if using the forge was not okay."

For a moment he wondered if he had said something horribly rude or incorrect—or horribly incorrectly, as the case may be—since both father and son just stared at him in surprise for a long moment.

"Did I say it wrong?" Axel asked, hesitantly closing the fridge and glancing back and forth between the two of them. Kichirou looked very much like the human version of a buffering video, but his father was just thoughtful. "Or… Was it really not okay? If so, sorry."

"You really fixed this?"

Late yesterday afternoon, when both Morimotos had been out of the house doing who-knows-what and he had been left with basically nothing to do, Axel had come across the broken tool set out on the worktable. He had been meaning to ask for permission to use the forge at some point, but since the chance was so tantalizingly there and (as Axel had justified to himself) he was capable enough not to make a mess of things… well, he figured it would be fine.

"Yes," Axel answered, warily unsure if they were angry or not. "I wanted to be helping."

Kichirou picked up the tongs, looking them over, and distractedly corrected, "You mean 'helpful'."

"I hadn't thought I'd ever see you fix someone else's grammar," Morimoto remarked, chuckling to himself. "You're almost starting to sound like Kimura-sensei."

The comparison had Kichirou dawn a sudden (and jokingly exaggerated) expression of horror, acting as if nothing could be worse than finding out he had done something similar to the old doctor. His father grabbed the tool back from him before he could drop it dramatically in fake shock, but it was a funny performance all the same.

When Kichirou turned to his blond friend for reassurance (presumably), Axel just nodded with a shrug.

"Now you're just being mean," the teen huffed, though with no real heat behind it. While perhaps a little bit genuinely bothered by the comparison, Kichirou didn't really mind all that much. Or at least, not so much that he'd stop smiling.

Secretly, Axel breathed a sigh of relief: the conversation had moved past his use of the smithy without permission and it didn't even look like they particularly cared about that in the first place.

So they continued talking about random things as they finished up putting away the groceries and the bags. Then, in spite of Axel's thoughts that the topic of his unapproved repair work had been resolved, both father and son teamed up to not-so-subtly steer him back into the workshop. Morimoto in particular seemed rather determined to get Axel to show that he could handle himself as a blacksmith, though Axel himself hadn't the faintest idea as to why.

The rest of the day was spent in the forge, Morimoto all but testing Axel as he presented topic after question after tool and on and on. It was fun, if a bit tiring, and he enjoyed listening to an actual professional blacksmith talk about his chosen trade. Axel had occasionally taken the things he had made—weapons, buckles, latches, ornaments, and so on—to sell at medieval recreation fairs, but that had mostly been because he had nothing else to do with those things. Hearing the perspective of someone who makes a living of smithing, rather than just doing it as a hobby, was pretty interesting.

When the impromptu… was it a test or a lesson?—finally finished and the evening drew to a close, everyone retreated back to their own rooms for some much needed rest. The day had taken a rather unexpectedly energetic turn when the whole blacksmithing topic had sprung.

Flipping open his laptop and typing in his password with a speed born of long familiarity, Axel then promptly… did nothing. Just sat there and stared silently at the desktop. He had discovered that there was no internet in this small town, as ridiculous as that might seem, as soon as he had turned his computer on for the first time after recharging: or at least, he had no way of getting at the internet. When he had tried asking about it, he received only strange looks and uncomprehending shrugs—another casualty of his sub-par language skills, he supposed, even if he had been improving.

He again lamented the loss of his cell phone: he might have had data here, at least. Enough to send a text message, surely.

God, his sister was going to be positively furious with him.

Navigating through his computer files, he opened a document that he had been using to keep track of interesting or helpful smithing tricks as he learned them. He added a few of the tips Morimoto had mentioned, then scrolled through the long list to check that they hadn't already been in there somewhere.

When he realized he had reverted back to blankly staring at the screen, Axel decided he might as well just go to sleep. Soon he could head out to the non-fiction Konoha; he had to assume that, as a larger city than this adorable town, it would hopefully have a train station, an ATM, and maybe even an internet café (if he's lucky). He sorely needed to send off an email to his family to reassure them that, while a bit lost, he was alive and well.

Soon.

=X=X=X=

It had been a little over a month now.

Scratch furious, his sister was going to straight up kill him for all but dropping off the face of the planet. At least the day had finally come: they were packing up to head for Konoha.

Axel wasn't even all that sure how he had let so much time pass: the days had just slipped by, one after another, until it had been another full week and then some. He just fell into a comfortable rhythm, helping out around the store and working in the smithy and generally… settling. There was a soothing peace in the small town, regardless of the occasional inexplicable moments of tension in the otherwise relaxed community. Sometimes he felt like the town was on-edge or maybe even scared—waiting for bad news, an attack, something—but since he couldn't figure out any real reason for why, he decided he must just be imagining it.

He had somehow lost track of (or hallucinated) a trip around the world, so it wasn't that farfetched.

"Axel-nii!" Kichirou called from the other side of the door, followed by a loud and extremely unnecessary knock. Then, because announcing himself was apparently the only permission he needed, he let himself in.

Axel was stuffing his things into his backpack. Or at least, he was trying to. Morimoto had forcibly gifted him a few changes of hand-me-down clothes at the start of his stay, so now he couldn't quite fit everything. It's not as if he would need the extra clothing once he got home, but his attempt to return them only earned him a stern stare that brokered no arguments. So here he was, trying to cram everything away.

Maybe he could just hide the clothes in the room somewhere, tell no one, and skedaddle before the jig was up and Morimoto could chase him down with a sack of old shirts and pants. The blacksmith, counter to his gruff appearance, was remarkably fussy and protective of the people he cares for. Apparently Axel had somehow stumbled into that category during his stay.

Of course, the hide-and-run plan wouldn't even have a chance to work since Morimoto was coming with him to Konoha: knocking out two birds with one stone by both guiding Axel and bringing in a delivery of various goods. At least that was Axel's understanding—the older man had been oddly sneaky about the whole plan whenever asked about it.

It didn't help that he had been banned from helping Morimoto pack the cart, partly because of said sneakiness and partly because Axel's attempt to help had led to him accidentally dropping a box on his own still-recovering foot. The box had also, somehow, cut a new gash in his leg that then needed bandaging, so all in all…?

Really not his greatest moment.

"Dad thought you might need this," Kichirou said from the doorway, bringing Axel from his musing by tossing him an empty bag. It looked just large enough to hold both the backpack and clothes.

Failing to catch the bag, it instead thwapped against his face. At least Kichirou got a chuckle out of it.

"Ah, thank." Axel shook the bag out and looked it over. It was made of a sturdy dark-blue fabric and had a drawstring that doubled as a shoulder strap, with one end around the opening and the other attached at the bottom. "This helps a lot."

Kichirou pulled out the chair from the desk and sat down tailor style, cross-legged despite not sitting on the ground. "No big! I know my old man's being pushy, but you don't need to feel bad about keeping them. He just wants to help, since you don't have much."

"But I don't need—"

"So you say, but he's unconvinced." The teen shrugged and, with a lopsided smile that suggested he wasn't too convinced himself, changed the topic. "Oh, he also wanted to ask if your legs are alright. It's not really a hard trip, but you'll still need to walk for most of the day."

Blue satchel now full of all his worldly possessions, Axel sat down on his— rather, on what had been his bed. He could admit that it hadn't been his brightest moment, trying to move one of the heavy boxes Morimoto was planning on taking to Konoha. Apparently the advice to lift with your legs is less helpful when said legs had been recently broken and still healing. Nothing newly snapped, thank goodness, but he had a fresh bruise on his foot and a new bandaged cut on his apparently-still-unsteady leg to show for his mistake.

Axel lightly checked over his latest injury, concluding, "Should be fine. Lot's of stops, right?"

"Better be. Don't hurt yourself, man." Kichirou scuffed a foot against the floor, slowly looking around the cleaned-out room he had begun to think of as Axel's.

For a moment the two of them sat quietly, eyes scanning over the bare desk, the bed and its mattress left with no bedsheets, the open closet, floor to ceiling. Even the recently emptied trashcan.

Kichirou, apparently deciding the mood had gotten a bit too depressing, shoved aside his frown with an only somewhat forced smile and eagerly (though kind of abruptly) restarted the conversation. "Anyway, Konoha! I haven't been since I was super young, so I don't remember much."

Eyes scanning over the now-empty room, Axel refocused on his younger friend. "Why not visit more?"

"Eh, it's a lot of work." With a shrug, the teen added, "Plus, things have been pretty… tense lately."

Before Kichirou could say anything else, they both heard his father shout for them through the walls from outside; he was apparently done with his own packing. Casting one last look around the room as a yelled conversation passed faster than he could follow, Axel decided he was also done. It was well and truly time to head out.

The door clicked quietly shut behind him, closing off what had temporarily been his. Compared to when he had first seen it, the room he left behind was at least more clean and tidy.

And empty.

One month: that's as long as he had known them. Just a single, short month, but somehow… it almost felt unreal to be leaving. Like he was staring at a sentence and recognizing none of the words. Or, far more literally, like how he had felt leaving for Japan all those months ago, in the airport waving goodbye, soon to be on the opposite side of the world from his sister and his parents and everything familiar.

Now, as he walked down the hall, he saw that these past few weeks had become familiar in their own way.

Kichirou and his father had pretty openly welcomed him into their small clan of two, and he couldn't help but feel that, had he been able to introduce them to his own family, they would have fit together like metal in a mold. Knowing his sister, Adri and Kichirou would have been fast friends: both having similarly energetic, this-is-neat-so-time-to-rant-for-ages personalities. To be honest, he felt a bit like he'd accidentally acquired another younger sibling.

Though it would probably be more accurate to say Kichirou acquired him.

Beyond and beside their friendship, however… Axel owed them, plain and simple. They had helped him—housed him—when he could barely speak their language, for goodness sake! They're good people, that's for sure, and Axel was glad that circumstances led him to them. Strangeness of those circumstances notwithstanding.

Goodbyes are always a bit bittersweet.

And yes, he was definitely going to miss them.

But Axel was glad to be heading home.

Morimoto was waiting near the front door, leaning back against a wooden pull-cart that he had loaded up with crates of who knows what. It was quite impressive, since some of the boxes looked like they were only saying in place by the grace of a lot of rope. And an unsafe amount of good faith. One of the two wheels creaked loudly and for no apparent reason.

When he had tried to help out earlier, this was not the finished, fully-packed result he had been expecting. Mainly because it wasn't fully-packed: it was rather drastically over-packed

"Will that be… okay?" Axel asked, internally debating whether or not the cart would be able to carry his bag despite already looking (and sounding) overburdened.

"It'll be fine," the blacksmith said, slapping the side of one of the crates as if to prove a point. The was another wooden groan, followed by a metallic clack as something the the pile of stuff shifted. "Perfect."

That obviously didn't do much for Axel's confidence. Even Kichirou was giving the stacked crates a skeptical look.

"I bet I could have fit more stuff."

Okay, then. The teen was clearly as blind to packing-logic as his father. Or, thinking back to the groceries, perhaps this is a simple case of 'like father, like son'.

Looking more closely at the stacks of crates and stuff, it seemed significantly more stable than he had first thought. Tugging at one of the ropes in order to gently test the cart, Axel elected to just ignore the escalating challenges of who could out-pack who going on the the background; he idly wondered if they had ever played Tetris, because the competition they'd get into would be intense.

He actually found a small area where he could store his bag if he wanted, but considering it held a number of electronics that he certainly didn't want getting accidentally crushed by whatever was in the boxes, well… he decided to just carry it.

"Oh, hey… um, Axel-nii?" Since his voice wasn't quite enough to catch Axel's attention—distracted as he was by packing and travel logistics—Kichirou poked him. "You'll keep in contact, right?"

"'Contact'?" Axel repeated, the word failing to come up in his mental dictionary, despite how much it had improved.

"Yeah, you know… send letters, write back, maybe visit sometime?"

"Sure, I could write back. Maybe." Thinking back to the hiragana lessons, he added, "But could you read it?"

From Morimoto's direction there was a snort that sounded suspiciously like a cut-off laugh.

Kichirou just smiled. "I'm sure we can manage."

Axel was going to say more—even though he hadn't quite figured out what that 'more' was just yet—but he was interrupted before he could make a fool of himself stringing together nonsense words. He had been cut off by a rather loud wooden groan of protest, as Morimoto had walked to the front of his teetering cart and experimentally pulled it forward about half a meter.

It didn't fall apart, which was a good sign. Even if it sounded a light breeze from collapse.

"Will you be okay?" Axel asked. The cart and its, shall we say, optimistic stack of boxes was clearly not going to be argued away, but someone was still going to need to pull that probably-heavy burden. "Maybe we should take turns pulling—"

Kichirou was quick to put a stop to that barely-even-voiced idea. "Are you kidding?"

"I'll be fine," added Morimoto, looking as if he'd be tempted to roll his eyes if he was any less mature. "Besides, you just hurt yourself when you were trying to help pack earlier."

That couldn't really be argued, but that didn't mean Axel had to like it. Putting it that way made him sound rather inept. "Why do you need to bring all this?"

The older man got a peculiarly shifty look in his eyes. "I was hoping we might be able to reestablish old business, you know. One way or another."

"Dad!" Kichirou all but groaned in annoyance. "That doesn't—" The teen suddenly stopped, realized something, then adopted an expression that very much suggested he had just been let in on a great scheme.

"Doesn't what? What?" asked Axel, looking between the two of them in growing curiosity and, if he was being honest, slight trepidation. A feeling like he might be the butt of some yet-to-be-sprung joke, based on a sense developed over many years with a younger sister trying to catch him by surprise.

"Nothing," the teen said, quick to wave off the questions now that he had apparently figured it out. "You'll see eventually."

Which apparently means that 'eventually' would come along this evening, since he imagined that he'd get his answers as soon as they arrive in Konoha.

A few more last-minute checks to make sure they had everything, and then finally it was time to say their goodbyes. After promising again to stay in contact—just as soon as he got an actual address or number or whatever—Axel and Morimoto set off on their long day's walk. Kichirou, who had followed them to the edge of town, waved until they were out of sight.

Author's Note:

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

I bet you can guess what's gonna happen next chapter. He might be a bit in denial, but it's pretty dang hard to deny yourself out of seeing an entire city.
Idea Partner: Rikkamaru

Just as a heads-up, next month's chapter (on the 15th, as usual) will likely be on the short side. This is because I'm currently on a trip traveling about Europe. Super fun, and even more tiring. Also, since I'm on said trip as I'm writing this, there might be a bit more errors in my writing: didn't have as much time to edit. Sorry, and please tell me if you spot any!
Anyway, thanks to everyone who has followed, favorited, reviewed, or simply enjoyed this story so far! There is no better feeling than knowing someone has enjoyed the work you've created. If you have thoughts, ideas, corrections, or whatever, feel free to leave a review.

See ya on the flipside, everyone!