Chapter 29: Penny for your Thoughts

Axel, for one, was just glad his second batch actually looked pretzel-esque. He'd had to go out to buy more ingredients after his first attempt had gone up in smoke. Not because he had used it all up, unfortunately, but rather because he had noticed the burning bread while washing dishes and, in his rush to turn off the oven, accidentally knocked the bag of flour directly into the sink of soapy water.

That had been a mess to clean up, though prying off the charred blobs from the baking sheet had been much more depressing.

Still, that whole dishwater mishap aside, he was somewhat impressed that it had only taken two tries to get anything presentable. There had been quite a bit of trial and error for the entire process, including just getting the ingredients in the first place: figuring out what baking powder was called in this world had been a struggle.

It was worth it, though. This batch tasted good, and even looked vaguely like they were supposed to. That's a win in his book.

He readjusted the tray of pretzels he was carrying in order to free up a hand, ignored the sign on the green door that proclaimed the store closed, and let himself inside. It was oddly busy, he noticed immediately, with seven people—not even counting the old blacksmith himself—working in small groups around the forge.

It was a good thing he'd made so many pretzels.

These weekly blacksmithing lessons had originally just been between Pei and himself, to help him work out the differences between medieval Western and other-world 'Eastern' techniques. But after a week or so, some of the old man's other apprentices began occasionally joining in. It fairly quickly became more of a group activity discussing methods or brainstorming new tricks rather than individual study.

It had taken some convincing, but Axel had even gotten Pei to extend invitations to some of the other metalworkers in the village. He didn't seem very happy with the idea, but he did it anyway. Suffice to say, the old blacksmith was glad that not many took up the offer.

Until today, at least.

Of the seven people, Axel only recognized one: Tanso Hagane, who, as an assistant smith, was very aptly named. The man seemed a bit preoccupied running herd on some of the others, but he spared a moment to wave hello when he spotted him by the door.

As for the head blacksmith himself—who looked more frazzled than Axel had ever seen before—well, Pei noticed him a moment later. And grinned, though the expression was somehow both strained and amused at the same time.

"Oh good, Hen-dama. You finally made it." He huffed. "Took ya long enough."

That nickname was new, and he wasn't even sure what it meant.

The 'dama' part sounded kind of like the word for 'ball', and 'hen' could mean 'side', but that made no sense. So 'hen' or 'dama' had to mean something else, too, though he couldn't think of what. He really missed languages where one sound meaning different things was an exception, and not basically the situation with every word.

"I thought you called me—" Axel tried to recall the exact phrase, "—'you crazy-brained Blondie'. When did that change? Also, what does 'Hen-dama' mean?"

The old man shrugged. "You're a strange one, that's why."

Right, of course, 'hen' could also mean 'strange'. Though 'strange ball' made about as much sense as… oh wait. He was being called an odd-ball.

Well, he couldn't really argue with that.

"And besides, I decided I needed to change it up 'bout half an hour ago," Pei continued, tone grouchy even though there was no real heat behind it. "Since ya've stopped being the only blond menace I have to deal with."

Clearing off some tools from a nearby table and setting his tray of pretzels down, out of range of any potential fires (hopefully), Axel glanced again to the unexpectedly large number of guests. None seemed to have blond hair. "Is something wrong?"

"Eh, depends on how ya define it." The old blacksmith was wrapping the hilt of a kunai, deftly binding fabric while still keeping half an eye on the gaggle of youths loose in his forge, and he gestured vaguely in their direction. "Can't say I'm too happy 'bout all these strangers in my forge."

"What is even going on?"

Setting aside the finished knife, he paused before picking up the next one. Then, thoughtfully, he scratched his beard. "Well, I'm not rightfully sure, to be honest."

"I believe," came a familiar voice, "that some of the other smiths heard about your lessons, so they sent along their younger apprentices to try and take advantage of them." Minato had just walked in from the storage room, carrying a box that clanked when he shifted it to a better grip. "Hi, Axel!"

"Oh." That cleared up several things. "You must be the other 'blond menace'."

"Excuse you!" the ninja said with mock outrage. "I'll have you know I haven't blown anything up for at least two days. Granted, it came close a few minutes ago, but that was almost entirely her fault and—"

Pei simply nodded, cutting him off. "Yep, that's him."

Disguising his chuckle as a cough didn't work very well, but at least his friend didn't really mind.

"So why are you here?" asked Axel.

"No real reason." Minato shrugged, which seemed suspiciously nonchalant given the probably-fairly-heavy box he was still holding. "I just, you know, had some free time. Thought I'd… visit."

In Axel's opinion, his friend was acting pretty darn shifty about something; the shrug, his tone of voice, the pause—all those mannerisms pointed to one unsettled ninja.

But he had no idea why.

Of course, it was also a bit odd that the was here in the first place. Minato was usually pretty busy training or teaching his trio of little students or—most commonly—doing whatever ninja work he got assigned. That in particular took up a lot of his time, given the sheer number of missions his friend was given.

Because Minato was very good at what he did.

Axel tried not to think about that too much.

As the conversational pause stretched longer, Minato appeared to become even more anxious about whatever was bothering him. "And of course I knew you'd be at your lesson," he rambled, "so if I wanted to see you—for no particular reason!—then I'd—"

"He's lying, ya know!"

A blur of red whirled into view as Kushina leaned out from around the corner, and the smirk on her face had a scheming tint to it.

Of course, Minato immediately denied that claim. "Wha— No! Kushina, don't tell— er, don't say that!"

Well. It… wasn't a very effective denial.

Axel blinked, looking between the two of them, then asked bluntly, "So do you need something?"

His friend gave him an exaggeratedly shocked look. "Axel, I can't believe you'd think that I only seek you out when I want something!"

"Do you want something?"

"He wants something," she confirmed with a resolute nod. "Dunno what, though."

"Kushina!"

She shrugged, unrepentant. "I just say it like it is, ya know?" Hand held up by her lips as if to disguise a conspiratorial whisper, she very audibly added, "Man, you shoulda seen him earlier. He came home all frazzled about something, and he didn't want to talk about it, so I figured the best thing to do would be to have him talk to you instead."

Minato groaned, trying not to look as embarrassed as he actually was (and doing a fairly good job of it).

"But!" she continued, "He gave me all these excuses for why he couldn't talk with you, 'cause you're like busy or something, so I figured you're probably why he was all anxious in the first place. Which, ya know, all the more reason to get you two talking."

Axel blinked, drawn up short by that unexpected conclusion. "Wait, what did I do?"

"No idea."

They both turned toward the individual in question.

"No, it's nothing!" Minato set down the box and dusted off his hands, looking a tad sheepish. "Nothing bad anyway. I just… well, I had something I wanted to talk to you about."

Kushina looked smug. "Called it."

"And—for the record—I was planning on stopping by your shop." Shooting a disgruntled look to his girlfriend, he pointedly added, "After your lesson."

She scoffed, but didn't bother with a retort.

Pei, who had been watching the back-and-forth with quiet amusement, snorted. "So it's definitely your fault these two are here, Odd-ball," he said, stern (but still grinning). "Even if Uzumaki did push things along a bit. You better keep 'm in line, understand?"

"I'd like to see him try," Kushina cackled, hands on her hips and a sure smile on her face.

"Anyway, as for your lesson today…" The old blacksmith paused, considered his options, then called out, "Oi, Hagane!"

The man in question had been working with one of the younger guest students at a grinding wheel, helping the boy file off the edges of a molded kunai. He glanced up at the sound of his name.

"You're gonna have to deal with these menaces so I don't have to."

"Sure—"

But, conveniently for him, the assistant didn't need to deal with them either.

"There you are!"

Framed by the now-open doorway, Akaiko smiled brightly at her best friends.

"You weren't home," she continued, letting herself in, "so I figured you'd either be hanging out somewhere with Minato or bothering the grouchy blacksmith guy you somehow convinced to teach you."

Kushina laughed at that, adding on, "And here you found him, doing both!"

Pei looked between the two women, then quietly rested his head in his hands. "Oh spare me, there's another one."

"Anyway," Akaiko continued, "I have something for you. Found it while…" She paused, catching sight of the tray of pretzels and promptly distracting herself from whatever she had been saying. "What're those?"

To be honest, Axel had almost forgotten he'd brought them.

Minato, who seemed to have finally noticed that his friend had apparently brought some kind of food, curiously came over and picked up one of the knotted breads. "What're they called?"

"Pretzels."

He blinked, and definitely had the look of a man who had just connected some dots. "Well, I suppose that explains the burnt smell from before," he murmured.

"What?"

"Uh, nothing!"

"Who cares what they're called—'purettseru' or whatever," said Akaiko, having already snagged one and taken a big bite in the time it took him to ask. "It's awesome! Since when could you bake?"

"Since about three hours ago," he replied, smiling.

Minato, for some reason, looked like he was trying not to laugh. Sure, Axel had meant it as a joke, but he didn't think it was that funny.

"Well I, for one, have a new favorite food." She licked some of the salt from her fingers and happily finished off the pretzel.

"I'll make them more often, then."

Akaiko grinned at him as she grabbed another pretzel. Then paused, remembering that she wasn't actually stopping by to eat snacks. "Oh, right, the thing!"

She didn't say anything more, which was just as well since she stuffed the bread in her mouth while she searched through her various pouches. Ninja gear has a lot of pockets, and it seemed like she had to pat down all of them to find whatever this 'thing' was. When she finally found the item, she gave a pretzel-muffled cheer and withdrew a… necklace?

Hanging from a thin loop of leather cord was a coppery pendant, and it glinted in the light.

It was also distinctly familiar. Yet, at the same time, unfamiliar.

"Is that a…" he held out one hand, and she dropped it into his palm, "Penny?"

Which it couldn't be, pennies simply don't exist on this side of dimensional reality. Here they used ryō, after all, and all the coins had a hole punched through the middle. Every truly foreign coin or bill he'd brought with him was fully accounted for in his old wallet, stuffed in the traditional hideaway for money one didn't want found: under his mattress.

So it couldn't be a penny.

Even if it kind of looked like one.

And, now that he holding it up close, he was stunned to realize that, indeed, it was a penny. Just not as he knew them. He turned the small coin over in his hands, half-remembered factoids and pictures from history textbooks stirring in his shocked mind.

A normal penny would have made far too much sense, clearly.

Kushina leaned over to curiously peer at the little disk of metal. "A what?"

"You know what it is?" asked Akaiko at the same time. She was actually worried about that now, given how his expression had flit between emotions: curiosity to confusion to recognition, then shock, and finally a general sort of disbelief.

With a touch of… hope, and that somehow made it all the more bitter.

"A Penny," he repeated.

Well, technically it was a Pfennig. A penny, of a sort, but an old one.

"Yeah," Kushina huffed. "We still don't know what that means, ya know."

Axel said nothing for a moment, squinting at the small numbers near the edge, as if that could somehow change the year they spelled out into something reasonable: "Achtzehn achtundachtzig."

Having gotten fairly decent at recognizing numbers, at least, Minato was able to translate for the people who weren't getting occasional lessons on the German language. "Eighteen eighty-eight?"

He nodded slowly, still stuck in disbelief, eyes glued to those impossible numbers.

Had it been a normal penny, Axel could have accepted it; there was always the slim possibility that he had lost one of his coins at some point, and it could have traveled around until some twist of fate and luck had it find it's way back to him.

But that was not the case.

This was not his coin.

It had never been in his possession until this very moment.

But, undeniably, it had come from his world. It was from his home country, the name standing proudly on the shiny metal, clear as day. For goodness sake, it had the German crest on it, eagle, crown, and all!

How?!

And it was from 1888, over one hundred years ago, yet it looked… almost new. Not just shiny, which could have been easily explained away as the restoration job when it was made into a pendant, but the coin simply didn't look worn down enough to be over a century old.

"Where… How…?" He couldn't seem to figure out a full sentence.

Luckily he didn't need to, as Akaiko easily caught onto his incomplete question. "Got it off a girl at a festival I visited, said her father gave it to her 'cause he thought she'd like the picture." She shrugged. "Apparently he found it on the side of the road."

And that made no sense. If the coin had been stuck in dirt for who-knows-how-long, it had no business looking as new as it did: regardless of whatever clean-up it may have gone through.

Minato, however, looked suddenly thoughtful. "Did he happen to be traveling to Konoha? Coming from the west, perhaps?"

She shrugged. "No clue. Why?"

"Just a thought," he replied, then held out his hand. "May I see it?"

Mutely—and oddly unwilling to do so—Axel passed him the penny.

His friend studied the small coin, clearly taking notice of the letters. "Weird, that's definitely the same writing that you use." He sent his fellow ninja a significant look, but she just shrugged.

"I was as surprised as you." She did a funny gesture with her hand that might have meant something, but Axel was far too distracted to even question it.

Minato, though, nodded slightly. Then he turned the coin over, and chuckled a bit at the image. "The bird looks like it smacked into that shield at full speed."

"The best part is that the shield has a picture of a bird on it, see?" She pointed to the small detail. "And that bird's also smacked into a shield."

He looked a bit closer. "Hah! So it does! Axel, did you see…" Minato stopped, suddenly concerned: he'd seen that look on his friend's face, the very first time they'd met.

It was the expression of somebody who was completely lost. Somebody who had lost completely.

But this time it was tinted with possibility.

"Axel?"

He didn't respond, his mind too preoccupied with this world-tilting revelation for anything else.

Because the coin wasn't his. He didn't bring it here, yet here it was. Which could only mean that he wasn't the only thing to pass through, that other things had ended up here, that he wasn't a lone freak accident—or… well, a coin is obviously very different from a full person, but at least not as much of an anomaly as he had thought.

And if that was the case, he couldn't help but consider a fact he had kind of been avoiding. He had decided to simply live his life here as best he could, so he tried not to think about it and the possibility it posed.

His world had known about this one. It may have been presented as action-adventure comics—unbelievable ninja fights and fantasy—but he couldn't deny that what had once just been fiction was real here. The stories from this country's future, a coin from his country's past…

There were bits of his world in this one, and bits of this world back in his.

"Vielleicht…"

"Is everything alright?"

No.

Yes.

He didn't know.

"I'm fine," he answered, voice surprisingly steady. "Just… not thought would see… coin like this."

The sentence wasn't put together well, but the point was at least understandable.

"A coin?" The word had apparently caught Pei's attention, as he was looking their direction with obvious interest. "What kind of coin?"

Kushina shrugged. "No idea, but it's got the same weird writing stuff on it that Axel uses."

The blacksmith stood up, still-unwrapped handles forgotten for the moment. "Does it? What do you mean?"

"You haven't seen his handwriting?"

"I have, but I take it you're not just talkin' about his horrible handwriting." He shook his head. "His hiragana's hard to look at, but it's not that bad."

Minato held out the coin on his palm for him to see, text-side up. "Like this sort of thing." He pointed to the words. "Looks nothing like what we use."

Strangely, Pei's eyes seemed to light up when he saw the letters. "Oh! Well, I 'ave seen that sorta stuff before, sure. Not from him, though."

Axel froze, and even the pair of ninja were visibly surprised.

"Seriously?" Akaiko looked like she kinda wanted to shake answers out of the old man. "Where? How?!"

He held up a hand. "Calm down, Spitfire. Here, I'll be right back."

The blacksmith was only gone for a minute, and came back with a small wooden box he held like a treasure. He undid the latch and held it open for them to see.

"Took me near thirty years to collect these," he said proudly.

Coins.

He had six other impossible coins.

There was a two euro coin next to a twenty eurocent one, both innocently sitting on the velvet lining as if it was perfectly normal for them to be there. Beside them was a coin that looked kind of like the ten eurocent, but a little bit off. The other three he couldn't recognize: they seemed positively medieval, despite their generally unworn appearances.

"Hiroshi gave me this one," he pointed out the odd ten cent coin, "way back when he was still a brat and I'd just taken over the business here. Bartered it for a kunai."

Taking yet another pretzel, Akaiko glanced between his collection and the one she had found. "So… what are they? Are they really coins? 'Cause I'd never seen anything like it."

"Neither have I." Minato gave his friend a searching look.

Who, pointedly, said nothing.

"They're hard ta get your hands on," the blacksmith remarked with a nod, then he tapped the other two euro coins. "Though I got these in just the past year, surprisingly. The others were, well, few and far between."

"To put it mildly, if it took thirty years for you to get just four of them." Minato made to pass back the pendant, paused, then looped the leather cord over his still-shocked friend's head.

Startled, Axel glanced down at the necklace.

"I don't suppose you'd be willing to sell me that, would ya?" Seeing the expression on his intermittent student's face, though, Pei just sighed and answered his own question. "No, I suppose not."

He clicked the box shut again.

Akaiko gestured to the collection with her pretzel. "Still, two in a year sounds surprising."

"Three, technically."

"Oh, true."

"Drei in ein Jahr…" Axel murmured to himself, thinking. "That's three since… I came here."

This was a lot to try and process all at once, and he couldn't help but wish he had his laptop there to write this all down. Or, better yet, he wished he had found his notebook before coming here. Nothing helped him organize his thoughts like scribbling them down with pen and paper.

But unfortunately his notebook was still missing. It wasn't jammed beneath the register anymore and it hadn't fallen under the desk, so he assumed it had somehow found its way under one of the shelves in his shop.

Well, he wasn't too worried. He'd find it eventually.

And it's not as though someone else would be able to read it, anyway.

Author's Note:

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Now his thoughts are all twisted up… like pretzels

Hey guys! I hope you're all having a great month so far.
Also! Agent 3 Novi drew a little sketch of Axel, which you can find a sorta link to from my profile. It's super cute, so check it out if you want to. Thank you so much, Agent 3 Novi!

Updates on the 15th of every month.
Thanks for all the reviews, favorites, and follows!

Translations:
Tanso Hagane = Carbon Steel
Pfennig = penny
"Achtzehn achtundachtzig." = "Eighteen eighty-eight."
"Vielleicht…" = "Perhaps…"
"Drei in ein Jahr…" = "Three in one year…"

Shadow Phoenix: I'm sorry you have been disappointed by recent chapters, and I hope that if this story doesn't have what you want, that you can find another. I know how frustrating it can be to find a story that's close, but just misses your mark.
As for why Kushina is listed in the character notes, there's two reasons for that. Firstly, she'll play a bigger role in upcoming events. Secondly, I really didn't want people just reading the description to think that Minato would be shipped with Axel. So that's that.
Have a good day!

See ya on the flipside, everyone!