A/N: I'd like to take a second to explain why this work uses macrons like "ō" or "ū" for long vowels instead of the more conventional "ou" or "uu" (or the thankfully outdated "oh" and "u"). Japanese long vowels are exactly the same as normal vowels, except held twice as long (the way you'd go from "aah" to "aaaah" to indicate a longer scream). "Jōnin" is pronounced with the same "o" as "on", only longer, not as in "own", which isn't obvious when you see the vowel written as "ou". Macrons avoid this problem, with their only disadvantages being that not many people have heard of them and you need to know how to type them.
-o-
Naruto was officially fed up with being a genin. Weeding gardens? Moving furniture? Mowing lawns? And the cat… the less said about the cat, the better. Meanwhile the D-rank mission pay was pathetic (and that was coming from him, a guy who had to count every single ryō to get through the month), Sakura was a prima donna who wouldn't deign to dirty her hands with manual labour (unless the labour was inflicting violence on his person), and swapping ever more creative barbs with Sasuke was the only thing keeping him sane.
But there was one upside to being a genin. The public libraries had been happy enough to automatically refuse Naruto membership while he was a random kid with nobody to speak up for him. They were less ready to do so now he answered directly to the Leaf Village government and could call down funding-imperilling scrutiny if he made enough of a fuss.
Thus, even after the day he'd had, Naruto could at least look forward to lounging back with a bowl of hot, life-giving ramen and his library copy of Clone Techniques: Tips from the Masters. Or that had been the plan before he heard the knock on his door.
If this was Mrs Inazuma from downstairs again…
"I told you, that smell isn't coming from my flat, you old bat!" he yelled.
He punctuated the complaint by swinging the door open so hard it nearly crashed against the wall.
Hinata, standing with her hand frozen in mid-air, gave him a nervous look. "I'm sorry. Is this a bad time?"
"Oh, sorry, Hinata. Just another day in the Sewage Wars. What's up?"
Hinata held up a paper bag, interposing it between herself and Naruto like a shield.
"Um… Chōji asked me to return your manga for him. He said he'd promised to give it back today, but he's hurt his ankle and can't walk all the way over here."
"Huh." Chōji had in fact promised no such thing. He'd borrowed the first five volumes of Burning Fighting Fighter, an old series Naruto knew off by heart. But he didn't think Hinata was lying either. So why would Chōji go to the trouble of sending her over here?
But Naruto didn't care about that as much as he cared about resuming his badly-needed relaxation.
"Thanks, Hinata. I appreciate it." Naruto took the bag and stepped back into the flat.
Hinata didn't move. She started to fidget, tapping her index fingers against each other repeatedly. The thought came to Naruto that he was seeing a physical ellipsis mark, a sign to indicate that some other action was being omitted.
"Was there anything else?"
"Naruto, I...
"I…"
After a couple of seconds in which they looked at each other without any further communication taking place, Naruto chose to assume that she'd changed her mind.
"OK, then. Catch you later!"
Naruto began to shut the door.
"Ineedtotalktoyou!"
He opened the door again. Hinata was bright red, and looked like she wished the cracks in the floor would open up and swallow her.
"Did you say something?"
"Um..." she started fidgeting again. She looked up at him and then slowly repeated, "I need to talk to you."
So much for that afternoon of peace and quiet.
"M-May I please come in?" Hinata asked in a trembling voice more suited to a line like "May I please be eaten by lions?"
"Sure."
Naruto took a look back at his flat.
"Hold that thought."
He shut the door, but his voice carried.
"Multiple Shadow Clone Technique!"
What followed was a cacophony of voices, all Naruto's.
"It expired how many months ago? Get rid of it—now! No, I don't care how many of you it destroys in the process!"
"Is that...? Yikes, she can't see that! Get rid of it! I don't know, hide it under the bed or something!"
"Clear some space for her to sit down!"
"What even is that?"
"No idea. But it looks really cool and it only cost five ryō. Put it in the corner."
"Look out, coming through!" (This last was followed by a clang like that of lots of metallic things falling on the floor in a heap.)
Before long, the door opened again.
"Come on in."
-o-
Hinata entered with trepidation. She was inside Naruto's flat. The flat of Naruto. The actual place where Naruto lived. She'd Seen it before, of course, but there was a difference between the layered spatial perception of the Byakugan and standing in the middle of someone's home in person. The posters, the untidy bed, the half-open scrolls and the teetering stacks of manga… it was so him… finally in colour and warm and close enough to touch.
It also looked like an accident at the explosive tag workshop, and that was after being cleaned by an army of clones.
She'd been to two other classmates' homes before, visiting to pay her respects to their clans when they were assigned to the same team. The Aburame residence had been a place of understated order, with even the buzzing of the insects creating an eerie background harmony. Meanwhile Kiba had skipped the main buildings altogether, and taken her straight to the kennels so she could meet his full family. But both were spacious compounds that followed familiar architectural traditions, whereas here she'd stepped into another world.
Yet it didn't make her feel on edge. Naruto's flat felt so different to the spartan atmosphere of the Hyūga Clan compound, and in fact her father would disown her on the spot if she ever left her room in such a state. Whereas here the mess was somehow natural, even comforting.
-o-
"So what's up?" Naruto asked, wondering why Hinata was looking around like she'd never seen Hokage-subsidised budget housing before.
Hinata looked down, her gaze tracing the grain of the flat's wooden floor. "Naruto, I... I have a confession to make."
To Naruto, Hinata was little more than "that quiet girl with no pupils and a cool hoodie". Given they'd barely interacted over six years of ninja training, he couldn't begin to guess what she might have to confess to him.
"I didn't mean to eavesdrop," Hinata began with a statement that didn't reassure Naruto in the least. "I just happened to be walking past your flat on the way somewhere, and I heard you talking. But your voice was sort of… overlapping with itself, and that made me curious."
It briefly occurred to Naruto that his flat was on the second floor of a semi-detached building, and thus not on the way to anywhere, but right now he had bigger concerns. Depending on what Hinata had heard…
"So... So I Looked, and I saw you playing shogi with your own clone. And I wondered why you'd do that, when you'd only end up making the same moves as each other, so I kept watching. At first, I thought you were just wast—using your time unproductively, because I couldn't see any pattern to how you were placing your pieces, and your clone looked like it was reacting without taking time to consider."
Naruto kept a neutral expression on his face. He couldn't afford to take his focus off Hinata in case he missed some vital detail of her story, but at the same time he needed space to think. There were many ways this conversation could go, some of them disastrous, and if he didn't come up with a plan to steer Hinata into safer waters, there was a catastrophic risk that she would come to the right conclusions. He bitterly wished this conversation were taking place when he felt less worn out.
"And then your clone said, 'Checkmate'. And I studied the board again, and suddenly I realised that your moves hadn't been random at all, and that you'd made a clone which was using a strategy. Then you played some other games and... um... I watched those as well."
Hinata broke off. She glanced at Naruto, as if trying to gauge his response, but he did his best to give nothing away.
She took a deep breath. "And... and I sort of followed you when you went to the Training Grounds on your own... and I saw you coming up with all these amazing uses for the Academy techniques. It made me wonder why no one taught us things like that."
Her voice was getting quieter.
"And... um... I followed you many times after that. I kept wanting to talk to you, but... I was afraid you'd tell me to go away... so I just kept watching you."
"So you were spying on me," Naruto said coldly, his already-low patience not up to the challenge today. It wasn't on his mental map of where he wanted the conversation to go, but that was getting harder to hold onto as his emotions intensified.
Hinata reeled as if he'd hit her.
"I'm sorry! I'm really sorry! I know it was wrong, and I shouldn't have, and I'm really sorry, and if it bothers you I'll never do it again..."
Naruto could see tears forming in her eyes. It made him feel sorry for her, and that in itself made him feel angry all over again because she was making him feel sorry for her when he was supposed to be feeling angry. Now he was feeling emotionally blackmailed, and angry, and guilty about feeling angry, and angry about feeling guilty, and the more he thought about it the more tangled it all got. He gritted his teeth and tried hard to force the whole mess down while he dealt with the immediate crisis.
"So is that what you wanted to tell me?"
"N-No, that was so you'd understand… how I knew. What I wanted to tell you is something I've been thinking… ever since I saw you that day."
She paused.
"I—I always thought... I thought you were an incredibly brave person for never giving up when things seemed hard. And I always wished I could be confident the way you are. And then..."
Hinata took a few deep breaths and gradually relaxed a little. Naruto, caught completely off guard by the compliments, quietly waited for her.
"Then I discovered you were clever as well. Clever and creative and... cunning. So cunning you made everyone in the class think you were... well... not very bright. And that's when I knew. I..."
She stopped. Whatever she was trying to say must have been pushing her courage to the limit.
"Naruto, I..."
Naruto swallowed. She couldn't be...
"I want you to train me."
What? Naruto's anger drained away; there wasn't enough room left for both it and the confusion.
"I'm sorry, what did you say?"
"I want you to train me," Hinata repeated.
"Me? Train you? Train you in what?"
"I... I want to be like you."
Naruto stared at her. "That's ridiculous."
He sat down heavily on the bed. Hinata promptly moved to a nearby chair.
"Hinata, you've got friends who like you, and a loving family. You don't want to be like me. Nobody wants to be like me."
Hinata looked up sharply. "You're wrong."
That was as assertive as he'd ever heard her. He gave her a questioning look.
She was quiet for a few seconds. "I'm sorry, can we not talk about that now? Please? I... I don't have the right words, and I shouldn't talk about it anyway, and can we please leave it for now?"
Naruto nodded. "So what exactly is it that you want from me?"
"I want to know how to be confident and clever and creative... the way you are. I don't know if you can teach something like this, but please... if you can, I want to learn."
Naruto had never contemplated whether you could deliberately teach qualities of character, never mind how you'd do it. He knew that, in theory, the Academy was meant to inculcate virtues like loyalty and hard work alongside the knowledge and skills expected of a ninja, but after six long years he still did not feel particularly inculcated.
"Um... I can pay you," Hinata ventured.
Naruto didn't know how he felt about this. The Hokage's stipend was tiny, and the payments for washing dishes and babysitting weren't making him a millionaire either, but was this the kind of thing that you took money for? Especially from a fellow genin who had apparently put some important part of her on the line just to ask for it?
"I don't have much—my father doesn't give me pocket money because he says I'll only spend it on frivolous things—but there are some old people near the edge of the village who let me do chores for them, out where no one from my clan is likely to go. And I have some savings from the fees we get for missions. So I can pay you."
"No," Naruto replied more on instinct than rational consideration. "Wow, you're actually worse off than me. How's that even possible? I mean, aren't you the heir to the most powerful clan in Leaf?"
Hinata looked down and said nothing. Naruto decided not to press the matter.
"Why do you want training so badly, anyway?"
Hinata shifted around in the chair. "I'm sorry. I know I'm being a pain... but this is really hard for me. I'm… not good at talking to people. So could we just... generally leave talking about me for another time?"
Hinata tensed, as if expecting Naruto to lose his patience with her and lash out.
"Sure."
It didn't seem to be the response she was expecting, which was downright odd, but now was not the time to think about it.
"Tell you what," Naruto said. "I'm going to need some time to figure out whether this sort of thing is teachable, and how. Why don't you come back same time tomorrow and we'll talk about it some more?"
Hinata nodded fervently. Her expression looked like it was looping all the way through excitement and back into anxiety.
"In the meantime, I want you to promise me that you won't mention any of this to anyone—not the training, and not my intelligence."
Hinata nodded again. "I promise.
"Um... Naruto... if you don't mind me asking... why do you act like you're less bright than you are?"
"Let's leave that for another time as well. Now it's getting dark—you'd better go home. And if this ends up going anywhere, you'll need an excuse for when people ask where you're spending so much time."
With that, he showed her out, still inwardly dazed at the turn the conversation had taken. He'd considered a variety of possibilities when she started speaking, up to and including having to deal with blackmail, but training? From him? For an idea that was so obviously wrong on so many levels, it was nevertheless strangely compelling.
-o-
It was a warm, sunny day, and Team Seven were enjoying some healthy exercise by the artificial riverbank. If by "enjoying some healthy exercise" you mean "picking up rubbish while grumbling continuously".
"Why do they even need ninja to do this?" Naruto complained. "Anyone, and I mean anyone, could pick up rubbish. We should be off escorting civilians through danger, or hunting deadly criminals, or whatever it is real ninja do."
"Quit moaning, imbecile," Sasuke responded from some distance away. "It's probably you dragging our average IQ down to rock bottom so they won't trust our team with anything else."
"Nah, I think it's that they know you're so incompetent you'd blow up the village if they gave you a mission that needed weapons," Naruto was quick to reply.
There was a moment of silence in which both boys had the same thought: there was something curiously familiar about this whole thing.
-o-
A much smaller Sasuke's hand closed around the last dumpling remaining at the outdoor stall. "I'll take this!"
How strange. Did his voice always come with an echo?
Looking to his right, Sasuke saw a grinning blond boy with his hand on the other half of Sasuke's dumpling.
"Hey, I was here first!"
"No, I was here first!"
The shopkeeper looked between the two as if weighing options.
"Buzz off, kid, the Uchiha got it first."
Sasuke and the blond boy both ignored him, and slammed down their money on the counter with their spare hands. The shopkeeper didn't seem to object.
A tug of war ensued as Sasuke tried to carry his dumpling away with him, while the other boy did the same in the opposite direction. Their struggle slowly dragged them down the riverbank, towards the river.
Sasuke waited for the other boy's reaction. Having heard his name, would he let go of the dumpling because his parents had taught him to show pity to the poor Uchiha orphan? Or would he snatch the dumpling and run because he'd been taught to stay away from the cursed Uchiha child who had suspiciously survived the massacre of his entire clan?
But what actually happened was the most natural outcome, namely that Sasuke won the tug of war. He continued to watch the other boy warily, but could not have expected what happened next.
The boy struck a dramatic, manga hero pose and pointed a finger at him. "I challenge you to a duel!"
Sasuke burst into helpless laughter.
The other boy turned crimson.
"Are you some kind of imbecile?" Sasuke asked when he could breathe.
"Shut up, greaseball!" the boy retaliated.
"Greaseball?" Sasuke repeated incredulously. "You're insulting my hair? What are you, a girl?"
"No," the boy barely hesitated, "I'm the guy who's going to kick your ass!"
"Bring it on!"
Sasuke and the boy threw themselves at each other, and before either knew it, they were rolling up and down the riverbank, kicking and punching and elbowing with everything they had. At one point, Sasuke stepped on something round and squishy, but he didn't let that distract him from his inevitable victory.
Given where they were, and the fact that beating the other boy was the only thing in the world that mattered, it was only a matter of time until they found themselves rolling into the river.
Splash!
Sasuke wouldn't have abandoned the fight if the Hokage himself were dragging him away by the collar, but there were limits, and being drenched to his very bones was one of them. He reluctantly let the other boy make his escape so he could go home and dry off.
Still, Sasuke couldn't let him think their battle was over. That was the most fun he'd had since… since… well, for a long time, anyway.
"I'll get your gravestone ready for the next time I see you, loser," he called out as he was about to leave. "What name do you want on it?"
"Uzumaki Naruto, Slayer of... who are you again?"
"Uchiha Sasuke, and—"
"Right. Uzumaki Naruto, Slayer of Uchiha Sasuke. Make sure you get it in marble or granite, not the cheap stuff."
Naruto grinned and ran off before Sasuke could get the last word in.
With that, the boys went their separate ways, and Sasuke finally had a worthy rival.
-o-
"Think fast, greaseball!"
Sasuke was snapped out of his reminiscence by a drinks can heading towards his head at near-relativistic speed. He caught it by luck as much as skill, and did not hesitate to retaliate. However, he was too cunning to just do the same thing back. His rock, lobbed with perfect kunai-throwing form, went into the river right next to Naruto, splashing him from head to toe.
"Oh, that's it!" Naruto growled. "You want to see who can get who wet? Believe me, I can get you wetter than you can imagine!"
Kakashi-sensei, who was standing nearby, broke into a sudden coughing fit. When it was over, he waved his arms.
"Naruto! Sasuke! Sakura! I just happen to have a super special prize for whoever collects the most rubbish in the next five minutes."
Both boys looked up.
"Hah. Too easy," Sasuke said.
"Oh, really?" Naruto replied. "Maybe you just don't know how fast I am."
"It's on!"
Within five minutes, the riverbank was restored to a state of pristine cleanliness it had likely not known since the day Senju Hashirama so thoughtlessly founded the Village Hidden in the Leaves around it.
Kakashi-sensei carefully examined both competitors' sacks.
"Winner: Uchiha Sasuke!"
Sasuke smirked.
Naruto muttered, "I knew I should have used my shadow clones."
"The winner gets my super special prize: not having to carry the rubbish to the recycling station."
Sasuke smirked some more.
"The runner-up, Uzumaki Naruto, gets the consolation prize: also not having to carry the rubbish to the recycling station."
Naruto grinned. Sasuke's smirk faded a little.
"Sakura, that means you get to carry it all."
"What?!" demanded an outraged Sakura. "I wasn't even competing!"
"Exactly," Kakashi-sensei said. "Either you pull your own weight, or you pull other people's weights. That's what it means to be part of a team."
-o-
Later that afternoon...
"All right, I've thought about it."
Hinata listened attentively, hands folded in her lap.
"I don't think you can fake your way to courage or confidence, and you certainly can't do it with intelligence. Or maybe you can, but I wouldn't teach something like that even if I knew how."
Hinata nodded. She was intrigued to hear Naruto in lecture mode; once, the idea would have seemed as bizarre as Shino cultivating Venus flytraps. More importantly, he was lecturing her. He hadn't rejected her. He hadn't told her to go away. He hadn't laughed at her or been appalled at her audacity or any of the thousand other things she'd imagined in those minutes standing on his doorstep, trying to summon up the courage to knock. He was taking her seriously. Now all she had to do was not disappoint him.
"Some people seem to be naturally confident," Naruto went on, pacing back and forth across the small flat. "Look at Kiba—dumb as a brick, no special talents apart from the standard Inuzuka package, and yet he still acts like he owns the place."
"Th-That's not very nice, Naruto. Kiba is a good person," Hinata interjected without thinking.
"I know he is. Believe me, I do. But point to the part of my description that you think is wrong."
Hinata had nothing to say to that.
"I don't think you and I can do what he does. Maybe it's our backgrounds, maybe it's something else, but we need a reason to feel good about ourselves. Something we can be proud of."
Something Hinata could be proud of?
"Would you mind explaining that a bit more?"
"I mean things we're good at, or things we like about ourselves. I'm proud of my intelligence. I'm proud of the fact that I always try to figure out how things fit together, and look for unexplored possibilities, where other people just accept things as they are. I'm proud of the fact that I've never given up, even though most of the world has hated me and tried to screw me over my entire life. You see what I mean?"
Hinata's eyes widened with distress towards the end of this explanation.
"Most of the world?" she echoed.
"Most of the world," Naruto stated flatly. "Except maybe half a dozen amazing people. And later our classmates at the Academy, but I had to work hard for that."
"By acting like you were... um...?" Hinata asked, then stopped suddenly. She did not want to accidentally insult him.
"Ask yourself this, Hinata," Naruto said. "Forgetting me for a second, who's the smartest, most talented person in our age group?"
Hinata didn't have to think long. "Uchiha Sasuke."
"And how many friends does Sasuke have?"
Hinata was silent.
"Exactly. Intelligence and talent might win you admiration, but they don't get you affection. I picked up on that early on," Naruto explained with a tinge of bitterness to his voice.
"That's... That's completely unfair!" Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around? If you wanted people to care about you, you had to work hard and make the most of the talents you were born with. The better you were, the more love and respect you earned from those around you. That was how the world worked. If Naruto wasn't being rewarded for his intelligence, then that meant something fundamental was broken, something Hinata had no idea how to fix.
"It is unfair," Naruto agreed. "But this isn't about fairness, it's about recognising how life really is. When you're smarter than everyone else, it makes them jealous, or uncomfortable, or suspicious. They start treating you like you're a different kind of person from them. If you're lucky, they'll put you on a pedestal. If you're not, they'll ostracise you.
"I'm telling you this because the only thing I know how to teach you is how to think like me. And if you learn to think like me, you might have to face the same problems I do. Are you sure that's what you want?"
Hinata was quiet for a long time.
"Naruto, how many friends do you think I have?"
"Huh?" Naruto looked like she'd asked him how the colour blue tasted. "I don't know, I've never thought about it. But it's not like you're unpopular. I've seen you with Sakura and Ino before, and your teammates like you, right?"
Hinata sighed. "Um... let me put it another way. What do you know about me, Naruto? Apart from what I told you yesterday?"
"Well... you're the heir to the Hyūga Clan. You can use the Byakugan. You've got OK test scores, not bad but not top of the class. You're kind of shy and you don't say much. You do this thing with your fingers a lot. You... um..."
"That's all anyone knows about me."
Naruto looked up at this. "I'm sure that's not—"
"I'm a wallflower, Naruto."
She was as surprised as he was at the interruption. She hadn't planned to thrust her feelings at him unasked, but for some reason, some part of her felt he needed to know. He needed to understand why she was here.
"If I disappeared tomorrow, I don't think anyone outside my family would notice until I was needed for a mission. I don't have any popularity to lose."
Her hands were tightened into fists. She'd said it, and his response would determine everything.
"I'd notice."
"What?"
"If you disappeared, I mean," Naruto clarified. "I know I don't know you very well, but I think it must have taken a lot of courage to come talk to me the way you did. I'm not going to forget someone I've witnessed being brave."
Hinata blushed. "I'm not brave at all. But... thank you."
An awkward silence settled over the small flat.
"So," Naruto stood up sharply, arms out in an expansive gesture of declaration, "it's time for shogi!"
He pulled out a game board and set it on the kitchen table.
"Shogi?" Hinata asked, shifting the chair she was sitting on in front of the table (only realising afterwards that she hadn't asked before moving his furniture).
"Of course! Do you know what 'emergent' means?" he asked as he started setting up pieces.
Hinata shook her head.
"It's what happens when you take a bunch of simple rules and they interact to result in very complex patterns and effects. In shogi, the only rules are how the pieces move, plus a few special ones for promotion and such." He paused. "Um, you do know the rules of shogi, right?"
"Yes. My father tried playing with me before, but he gave up when I wasn't very good."
Naruto opened his mouth, then closed it again.
"Anyway, you take a set of very simple rules, but when you put them together, you get deep, complex strategy. You can learn the rules of shogi in ten minutes. You can spend a lifetime getting good at it."
"I see. And this will teach me to think how you think?"
"Stranger things have—I mean, absolutely. First you get good at spotting patterns and possibilities. Then you learn to find your own blind spots. Then you learn to identify the dominant paradigm and look for alternative ones."
"I'm... not sure I followed that last part." Hinata wasn't keeping up, and she could only hope Naruto was a patient teacher.
"I picked up the language from a book I found in the library the other day," Naruto explained. "Gotta tell you, having free access to that place is fantastic. What it means is... say you're playing shogi. Your objective is to win by putting the enemy king in checkmate."
Hinata nodded.
"What if you want to win a different way? For example, maybe the person you're playing against is much better than you, but you still need to win no matter what. Then you might go for a strategy that isn't as effective, but is really, really annoying, until they get flustered and start making lots of mistakes. Or you might do nothing but defend, so they despair of getting through your defences before it's time for them to go home, and try to rush their strategy—and again, make lots of mistakes. Or maybe you want to let them win so they think they're smarter than you, and then you can kick their ass during a more important game later, like in a championship. You see where I'm going with this?"
That sounded unexpectedly simple when you broke it down. "You're saying that... there are many different things you can do to get what you want, but first you have to let go of the idea that there's only one way to win."
Naruto beamed. "Exactly."
"So... let's play?" Hinata asked tentatively.
"Again!"
"Again! This time, your objective is to take as many pieces as possible."
"Again! This time, your objective is to make the game last for as many moves as possible."
"Again! This time, your objective is to surprise me."
"Again! Wait, what time is it? Aaargh!"
"Eek, my father is going to kill me! Bye, Naruto!"
-o-
That night, Naruto stayed up late making notes. You can learn a lot about a person by watching them play a game you're very familiar with, and he was starting to get ideas for further training, from games to mental exercises and reading recommendations. Hinata was putting a great deal of trust in him, and he had no intention of letting her down. Plus, the whole thing seemed like a lot of fun, and he badly needed something to take his mind off the tedium of D-rank missions.
The possibility of gaining an equal through the process never once occurred to him. It was impossible. And unreasonable. And way too much pressure to put on someone like Hinata. And ran counter to everything he believed about human nature. And anyway, even if genius could be taught, that in no way meant that he, Uzumaki Naruto, had the skill and know-how necessary to teach it. No, the whole idea was ridiculous and had never even crossed his mind.
Naruto was in the middle of drawing a sprawling decision-making flowchart with at least five different colours of crayon when he finally fell asleep.