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The memories came in at a trickling pace. For a good few years, Hanibuchi Hiromi was an ordinary child, for all that she lived in a Hidden Village. Her shinobi parents were killed in the Kyuubi attack like so many others, but by luck her uncle survived to take her in as a toddler. She did not suffer like so many orphans suffered, even if her now-small family still struggled in the aftermath.
As a toddler, she was quite ordinary. A little lonely in nature, but such things happened. She learned the language at an acceptable pace, came to understand the world around her. But there were flashes, moments of oddness. She once told her Uncle Taisei that he was much better than her old uncle, much to his bemusement. She picked up sticks and waved them about, claiming to be a witch and becoming upset when other children thought it was a game. She looked for curly hair and freckles, and was disappointed to never find them.
These were passed off as simple moments of fantasy, even in a village filled with shinobi. Her uncle gently asked her to stop joking, and she learned to keep her memories of castles and dear friends to herself.
Once she got to the very mature age of six, she remembered the names of her friends, of the place she felt she had once lived in, remembered being a wizard and being afraid and surviving with luck and grit teeth. By this point, though, she had spent so long pretending that she didn’t have these memories, that they were just childish fantasies, that she almost believed it herself. But then—
Then, she was enrolled in the Shinobi Academy by her reluctant uncle. It would be a few years until lessons turned from ordinary subjects their civilian fellows were also learning to the ninja arts, so he allowed her with the hope she might lose her interest in being like her parents.
Hiromi was dropped off by her uncle, escorted to one of the classes by a teacher. And there—there was a kid. Not just any kid. Laying his head down on one of the little desks in the classroom was a boy with the curly hair she could recall so clearly.
She made a beeline for their desk. Even if they weren't that girl from before, weren’t her Hermione, having someone with the slightest familiarity was something she couldn’t miss out on.
Hiromi sat at the desk with them, prodding them on the shoulder. The teacher was too busy with the other arrivals to stop her from bothering them.
With a weary sigh, the kid peeled himself up from the desk and glared at her with tired eyes. He froze.
So quietly that she only heard it due to her proximity, he breathed, “Harry.”
She grinned back, nearly squirming in her seat with all the elation filling her chest. “Hiromi, actually.”
He blinked at her, still looking dazed. And tired, but that might’ve just been his face. “Alright. I’m Hiroshi.”
They were best friends, after that. Obviously. They had already been best friends for decades.
The teacher barely noticed—children became friends and lost favor with each other with astonishing swiftness at that age. As long as they didn’t kill each other, she didn’t care. She stood in the front of the class, took roll call, and kept the class moving.
The two of them took a few days to scope out good places to talk, after that. Hiroshi’s house was no good, being filled with shinobi as it was. Hiromi’s house was pretty good, since her uncle was a civilian often occupied by work. But the simplest thing was just to park themselves under a tree during recess or after school. No one really tried to bother two kids being calm and non-disruptive.
Hiromi was leaning against a huge tree root, tuning out the sounds of an active playground not too far from them. Hiroshi was laying on the ground beside her, watching the light shining through the leaves.
“What’ve you been researching?” she asked him, a teasing note to her voice.
Hiroshi nearly snorted. Trust Hiromi to assume he wouldn’t be content to not tear through all the textbooks the world had. She wasn’t wrong, though.
"A lot of things. But mostly I'm still trying to figure out how this government works," he grumbled. "The structure is completely winding and obtuse; on purpose, I'd imagine, but I still want to sort it out. Not to mention everything else about this world. Information can be so fragmented for how advanced everything is. It's just all so— so—"
"Troublesome?" Hiromi suggested, expression perfectly innocent.
"Oh, shut up." Hiroshi had not developed that particular tic so typical to the Nara, and he had no plans to succumb to it either.
Hiromi snickered at his glare before settling down with a sigh. She propped her elbows on her knees and set her head in her hands, looking out across the playground where other children chased each other with squealing laughter.
"The only thing I really care about is where Ron is," she said quietly. "Or whatever his name is, now. If he is here. She? I thought I might be alone—but if you're here, she must be too, right? It can't just be us."
Hiroshi sighed, leaning back. The afternoon sunlight made him sleepy, but the trouble of where Ron could be kept him focused despite that. As Hiromi asserted, he couldn't imagine that if the two of them happened to be born in these lands with their memories still lingering that Ron hadn't come either. They were a trio throughout life, always facing trouble together. If anyone else from Britain had come with them, it had to be him.
Hiromi, he knew, hoped Ginny had followed as well. When she wasn’t hoping Ginny had been allowed her peaceful rest, anyway.
The thing was, they had been born in circumstances that allowed them to look quite similar to their old selves. Hiromi had the dark unruly hair and bright green eyes that Harry Potter had once possessed. Hiroshi had the brown curly hair and tan skin of his former self; they were from his mother, who was not a straight-haired Nara. No buck teeth, at least.
"Outside of a few Akimichi, there's not a single redhead in the village that I've found so far, and I'd have met her by now if she was there." he said. "Or, there was, but she died in the Kyuubi attack. Uzumaki Kushina. She was a foreigner."
"So Ron will be too," Hiromi said.
Hiroshi shrugged. "Most likely. Maybe even an Uzumaki."
It wasn't very likely, considering everything to do with Uzushiogakure that he had dug up, but who knew? There must have been some survivors aside from Uzumaki Kushina.
There was every chance he wasn't, of course. The Uzumaki were famously red-haired— and that meant truly blood-red red-haired, not ginger—but they hardly were the only ones. Suna had a tendency for red hair as well. He might come from there. Or he might stay truly ginger and come from what here was considered an orange-haired family. While they too were rare, he had found no particular area they tended to pop up.
"This is a large enough village we might've just missed him," he added wryly. It wasn't impossible.
"He would've been enrolled in the academy too," Hiromi insisted.
It was a false confidence. There was every chance that Ron could've been born to civilian parents that disapproved of their child getting into the shinobi business. Or that he didn't have the chakra reserves for it. Hiroshi couldn't rule it out.
He shrugged drowsily. "If you say so. We'll just have to keep an eye out."
It was a lovely day at the park. Deeply uninterested in dealing with the other children running around in the grass, Hiroshi had parked himself at one of the tables where old men tended to sit and play games. No old men right now, but that was alright. He was content to nap in the sun, or maybe pull out a book later on.
"Hey! You!" a voice cried, and Hiroshi perked his head up an inch.
He didn't really think it was him the person was calling for, but he was curious as to who. When he caught sight of the banner of orange hair, it took everything in his power not to freeze on the spot at the sight of the girl running up to him.
It was Ron. It simply had to be. The shade of orange was different, the freckles regulated to a few on her face and dotting her hands rather than everywhere—but it was undoubtedly Ron. The blue eyes had the same look to them.
He opened his mouth. He had no idea what he was going to say until it came out.
"You've got dirt on your nose," he blurted out.
Ron's grin widened impossibly. "That's the first thing you're gonna say, you bastard?"
She swiped at her nose anyway, searching for the spot. It was on the other side, but he didn't intend to tell her that.
"Doesn't matter!" she declared. "That Go board! You any good at it? Don't answer, I'll beat you anyway."
With absolutely no further conversation, she flung herself into the seat opposite his. Hiroshi felt like he was losing his mind a bit—all of that time worrying about Ron, about where she was, if she was here in this world at all, if they would ever find her if she was…
He studied her face, suddenly unsure if it could be her. But he saw it, saw the knowing way she looked at him, like someone she knew intimately rather than a stranger she had stumbled across.
Like, say, her once-spouse in an old life.
“My name’s Hiroshi,” he managed to say.
“Rena,” she said back. “You should invite me to your house, or something. What do your parents do? Dentists? You look like the kid of dentists.”
Hiroshi laughed, giddy. It was undoubtedly her. “That’s something my friend Hiromi would say. You should team up with her to make fun of me.”
Her eyes lit up. Message received, then. “Who said I’m making fun?”
“Most shinobi wouldn’t like the idea of some kid assuming they’re dentists.”
She nodded sharply, and from an outside view it would look like something accepting their due scolding for insulting ninja in a ninja village. Hiroshi knew she was filing this away, adjusting to the idea that not even Hiroshi’s home might be safe from canny people who could stumble across what they were.
Once they could extract Hiroshi from his parents and convince them to let him go see Hiromi, they made a break for it. Hiromi’s face lit up at the sight of Rena standing by Hiroshi’s side, and she almost broke the door with how quickly she flung it open to let the two of them in.
They settled in Hiromi’s bedroom, eager to hear about where Rena had been.
It was not a particularly happy tale. Rather than the large family of her last life, she had only one older brother with no previous memories himself—Hiromi hid her disappointment badly—and a mother with a brittle outlook on life. Her father was dead, and they had to travel frequently to keep ahead of what, or who, had killed him.
“That’s why we ended up here,” Rena explained, grim. “Mom didn’t tell us everything, but I’m pretty sure Dad had some special bloodline limit, or something. Or was part of a family everyone hated. Konoha’s the biggest Hidden Village, so she’s hoping we can’t be tracked here if someone wants to take his kids out too. I don’t think she even told them everything, but she managed to get us in.”
Hiroshi wasn’t sure enough to say it aloud yet, but he suspected his guess had been right. She was an Uzumaki. And certain villages wanted to be sure the Uzumaki were dead.
“But there is one great thing from all this,” Rena said.
“What is?” Hiroshi replied, eyebrows raised. Hiromi leaned forward with interest.
She grinned, pointing at her own hair, currently braided back into two large fishtails. Her voice was somewhere between gleeful and reverent. “Chudley Cannons orange.”
They both stared at her hair for a moment, trying to remember and compare it to the memorabilia that had stubbornly filled Rena’s old bedroom, even after her bedroom also became Hiroshi’s bedroom when they moved in together. It was maybe a shade off one way or another, but—
Wow, was it close.
Hiromi threw her head back with a laugh.
At some point, at about age eight, Hiromi came across a little blonde boy being firmly escorted out of a grocery store even as he howled that he hadn’t stolen anything. The grimacing store employee shut the door between them anyway.
The small scattering of people around shot the boy wary looks and hurried away, muttering between themselves about what had occurred. Nobody stopped to help the boy, who stood glaring at the glass display window of the store that showed off cut fruits.
Hiromi watched him. She knew about the boy everyone seemed to hate for no reason. They weren’t close enough in age to have seen him in school, if he was even going there yet or at all, but she had seen him wandering around the village. She had heard other older villagers muttering about demons as he ran past.
Hiromi remembered being turned against for no reason you could conceive of. At first in the suburbs of her old relatives house, but in the castle too. It was a terrible thing.
Without concerning herself about the consequences, she walked up to the boy.
“What were you trying to buy?” she asked him.
He startled, spinning around and baring his teeth at her in a poor attempt at a smile. His eyes were squinted almost shut. He had strange whisker marks on his cheeks. Scars? Hiromi was finding more parallels by the second.
“Why d’ya wanna know?”
She shrugged. “It’s stupid they wouldn’t let you buy it. Tell me what it is and I’ll get it instead.”
He squinted at her even harder, somehow, and after a second of deliberation took a chance on her. “Ramen. ‘n some milk. How ‘m I supposed to know you aren’t gonna steal my money?”
“I’m not asking you for your money, I’m asking you what you were gonna buy,” she said. “Cup ramen. How many?”
“Fourteen. For the week,” he said.
Hiromi felt her eyebrows rising. “You’re allowed to eat just that?”
“‘M the one who figures out what I eat!” he declared proudly. “N I like ramen!”
She stared at him, but he clearly wasn’t lying.
There was nothing in the world that she wanted to do less than speak favorably about the Dursleys, but at least they did feed her more than one thing when she was a child, and didn’t leave her to decide her meals. Sure, they made her cook at around nine years old, but as a helper—and it still involved meat and vegetables half the time.
By the way he was talking, did he even have a guardian?
“Alright,” she said, before the kid could worry about her taking it back. “Give me a minute.”
She went into the store, taking a basket from the little stack of them. First she got what she had come for in the first place, some onions that her uncle had forgotten to buy earlier. Then a bundle of cup ramen, milk, and then she stopped and tried to figure out what a five to six year old could make on his own that was still half-way to healthy.
Some fruit he could just eat, obviously. She got apples and bananas and a mango. The kid must have a working fridge to be getting milk, so some yogurt too. Some nuts—Hiromi hoped he wasn’t allergic. She went back to the aisle she got the ramen from and got some canned soups, too, since he obviously had a microwave or stove for them.
After that she was running up against her allowance plus the money her uncle had given her for the onions. It’d have to do. She went up to the counter, paid, and walked outside to see the kid sitting down to the side of the building.
“Hey,” she called to him.
He jumped up and approached her with those narrowed eyes.
“Here,” she said, thrusting the bag towards him. She had the bundle of onions in her other hand. “I got you some extra stuff. You shouldn’t just be eating noodles, you know. In fact, here’s a deal—you can repay me for getting this by eating all of it.”
He stared at her. “Didn’t this cost a bunch?”
Not really. She had mostly gotten smaller packages, the cheaper brands. Hiromi told him the rough final cost without the onions included.
The kid’s eyes went wide. “That’s what I get the ramen for!”
Seriously? Price-gouging a six year old? Hiromi shot a glare in the direction of the cashier's counter, for all they couldn’t see it.
“They’re making you pay too much for them, then. There’s a receipt in the bag, keep it and bring it with next time you go shopping so you can prove they’re the right price.”
He nodded furiously. Hugging the bag close to himself, he broke out into a genuinely sunny grin. “Hey, hey! You’re not bad! Thanks!”
“You’re welcome, kid. Go home before anyone takes that from you.” She wouldn’t be shocked, considering stealing money from kids was happening around here.
He turned to run off, but Hiromi continued, “Hold on—there’s cans of soup in there. Don’t put them straight into the microwave like cup ramen. The metal will destroy the microwave. Put ‘em in a bowl first, or an empty ramen cup if you have to. And eat the fruits before they go bad.”
“Uh-huh,” the kid said. “Thanks, miss!”
At eight, Hiromi probably couldn’t be called a ‘miss’. She waved for him to go on. As much as she kind of wanted to scope out this kid’s living situation, she had to get back to her uncle herself before he got worried.
He ran off. Hiromi watched him go with a frown and decided to help him out next time she saw him. Even one person in your corner could help a lot.
Belatedly, she realized neither of them knew the other’s name. Well, she’d figure that out later.
“So, what do you think of Naruto?” Hiromi asked, twirling a stick of dango in her hand.
The three of them had gone out after classes with the blessing of the parents. Dango wasn’t any of their favorites, really, but there was a good place sort of close to the academy without being so near by other students and teachers would stumble across them and try to make conversation.
Hiromi hadn’t been able to stop at her and Naruto’s meeting spot so she could shop for him in the morning, so Rena had gone in her place.
Rena took a moment to finish chewing her own dango. “Hilarious. He’s a little brat. The only reason he listened to me was that I disabled his little prank. If I had been old enough to have memories from around then, I’d figure he’s basically what Fred ‘n George were like at five.”
“Not Fred or George?”
She laughed. “Gods, no. I mean and. He’s got the energy of two people.”
“I’d put it higher—at least five people,” Hiroshi sighed.
Rena prodded at Hiroshi’s face with the tip of her dango stick from where he laid it on the table. He made no attempt to stop her, aside from tilting his head to glare at her.
“That’s because you’re lazy now,” Rena declared. “Seriously, where’s the energy?”
“Being conserved,” he said, as Hiromi snorted.
“Trust me, he’s motivated for a Nara,” she said. “I’ve been to his house. They’re all so sleepy.”
Rena made a face at what that implied. “Damn. How the hell do they manage to have kids in the first place, then? Just lumps in a bed.”
Hiromi laughed loudly as Hiroshi spluttered, complaining about how he didn’t need to think about his parents like that, thank you. He finally swatted away her dango stick as well.
“Nara’s are only motivated when something is interesting, thank you,” he said crossly, then added, “and don’t make a sex joke, I swear—”
Rena’s face had split into an unholy grin at that, but she gracefully refrained from any innuendos. That comment invited them so obviously she didn’t really need to say a word of any of them.
“Anyway,” she said. “I’m gonna teach him the taijutsu we’re learning. Don’t trust them to do it probably, since you had to help him read. It’ll make it stick in my head better too.”
Hiromi beamed. She and Naruto interacted too infrequently for him to be called her little brother or anything, but she had absolutely taken him under her wing when people weren’t watching.
Shikaro allowed himself to raise his eyebrows at the girl rocking back and forth by Hiroshi’s side. She was about his son’s age, a shock of color in the serene browns and greens of the Nara clan’s housing. The long trail of orange hair was enough on its own, but her dress was an almost neon green, and an orange belt that matched her hair was tied around her waist. Her sandals, at least, were an ordinary brown.
He imagined what would happen if Maito Gai ever met this child. Then he swiftly decided to have never thought such a concept up in the first place.
His son’s voice drew him out of his own mind.
“I’ve brought reinforcements to assist in the game, today,” Hiroshi drawled, daring him to oppose.
“So you have,” Shikaro said. He was honestly curious to see why Hiroshi had brought this girl along. “Let’s not waste any time, then.”
He opened the door and stepped aside to let them in. The shogi board was already set up on the low table in the living room. Hiroshi went right towards it without further fuss, but the girl stopped her rocking to squint up at him.
“I thought Nara loved to waste time,” she accused.
At the table, Hiroshi sighed, sounding closer to thirty than ten. “Rena, really.”
Shikaro liked this girl already. She reminded him of Inoru at that age—of most Yamanakas at that age, really. So tiny and so opinionated. If not for the orange hair and completely different bone structure, he’d almost wonder about her parentage.
“Time is never wasted for Nara,” he told her serenely. “We only ever waste other people’s time.”
He wasn’t the clan head and Jounin Commander like his cousin. Shikaro could afford to have a visible sense of humor. It was how he’d gotten a wife and later a child in the first place; to this day, he wasn’t sure how the rest of his clan had managed to get their spouses.
Hiroshi sighed even louder. Rena barked out a laugh and scampered over to Hiroshi, so Shikaro let the door close shut and joined them at the table.
He was not expecting much. Hiroshi was excellent at shogi for a normal ten year old, which meant he was terrible for a Nara. He was simply too focused on the now, and though he could conceptualize the future and plan well ahead in other circumstances, in games the ability simply escaped him. Shikaro wondered at how well an ordinary ten year old like Rena would fare.
The girl in question sat right next to Hiroshi and slumped against him, propping one of her arms on his shoulder and laying her head on it. For a second it looked like Hiroshi was thinking of slumping to the ground counter to her in revenge, but he refrained.
Cute.
“You take first,” Shikaro told him.
Hiroshi smiled and didn’t make a move. Not in the way most Nara would, with the air of someone planning out their method of attack, but with the drollness of someone not trying at all. There was a difference, even if Naras were the only ones who could clock it instinctively. Teammates of Nara followed after with enough training, usually Yamanaka and Akimichi.
Instead, Rena leaned forward a touch, studying the board and then Shikaro’s face thoughtfully. He thought that she might then turn and whisper a move into Hiroshi’s ear. It’d be obvious, but they were ten.
She did not. She hollered it like a military commander directing field agents.
Hiroshi didn’t blink at all at the bellowing happening right next to his ear. He moved the piece as commanded.
The game conmensed. And it was a good game, frankly. A very good game. Rena nattered on at the both of them in between commands for Hiroshi to move one shogi piece or another, pelting questions at Shikaro when it pleased her.
“Why is Hiroshi Hiroshi instead of ‘Shikaroshi’ or somethin’?” she demanded as his son moved a piece that trapped a few of Shikaro’s own.
It was a blatant distraction. Shikaro humored her anyway. It was always good to encourage the younger generation with practice rounds of shinobi skills.
“It’s because I refuse to let us be too much like the Yamanaka in our naming tendencies,” he told her, which had the benefit of being partially true.
“Huh?”
Hiroshi hummed. “Check out the registries for Yamanakas and you’ll find an endless wave of ‘Ino’. I’m surprised they aren’t constantly confused on who they’re talking about.”
His son wasn’t wrong. Sure, the tradition of naming kids Shika-something and Cho-something was popular in Nara and Akimichi, but it was more for the main line of clan heads, not everyone in the clan. But the Yamanaka’s commitment to Ino at every turn was so strong that at times Shikaro wondered if it was some secret way of messing with other shinobi about how many of them there were and who was who. He wouldn’t be surprised. They were the village’s resident mindfuck clan.
It might also be a strange form of narcissism. Again, they were the Yamanaka. He would not be surprised.
“Perhaps they are constantly confused and it’s a form of training,” he speculated aloud, moving one of his own pieces. “I’ll ask Inoru next time I see him.”
“Don’t tell ‘im I put you on it,” Rena demanded immediately.
Shikaro nodded along agreeably. He was closing in on a win for this round.
He won.
That wasn’t any surprise. It’d be a sorry day that an adult like him could be outclassed by a ten year old. What was surprising was how long it took him to secure the win, and the many smart moves Rena had made throughout the game.
Rena sat back with a huff once she realized the verdict, but otherwise took it well.
She pointed a finger at him. “We’re playing again sometime!”
“Hiroshi and I play every week,” he told her.
She nodded to herself, then jumped up without any further discussion.
“My mom needs me home,” she said, and darted for the front door.
“Your mom also needs you to get more tuna,” Hiroshi reminded her with a drawl, which only got a “Yeah, yeah!” from her.
Shikaro watched her go, amused despite himself. Again, quite a bit of Yamanaka-ness for all that there was no relation. He glanced down at his son, who was watching her retreat with sharp eyes. Combined with his oddly good posture for all the relatives that slouched around him, he looked like a warhawk masquerading as an academy student.
The door swung shut.
“So, where’d you find such a wonderful shogi player?” he asked.
“The academy,” Hiroshi replied, which was what Shikaro expected. What was less expected was the boy casually adding, “She’s my future wife.”
“Oh? You both seem a bit young for that, brat.”
Hiroshi looked up at him like Shikaro was playing dumb. He was, but what was the point of having a kid if you couldn’t mess with them a little?
“That’s why I said future wife.”
“Ah, my apologies,” he said. “Does she know about the impending engagement?”
“I’d hope so. She’s the one who proposed. According to her—” He adopted a slightly more expressive tone clearly meant to imitate Rena. He wouldn’t be sent on any infiltration missions soon. “—all the other academy boys suck, and I don’t, and since she was the first one to notice I’d be a good husband I should marry her rather than anyone else.”
Shikaro outright chuckled. “And you went along with it?”
His son shrugged. “Saves me from dating in the future, right? It sounds like too much work.”
And there was the Nara-ness shining through. Unable to help himself, he leaned down and ruffled his son’s already wild curls. It was good to know he’d gotten a few things from his old dad.
“Don’t tell Shikamaru,” he said as Hiroshi lazily swatted his hand away. “I don’t want Yoshino breaking down my door because we robbed her of the hilarity of his dating years.”
His cousin’s wife was a frightening, frightening woman. How she hadn’t ended up killing her husband by now was a mystery. Shikaro assumed blackmail was involved in some capacity. That was often a safe bet when two shinobi were in the picture.
“Shikamaru can figure it out his own damn self,” Hiroshi grumbled, which was true.
He ruffled his hair harder. “No swearing in front of me.”
There was something more happening here than spontaneous friendships and silly promises, that he was sure of. But Shikaro was content to let it lie until there were hints of genuine danger afoot. For now, letting Hiroshi play his games would only let the boy improve.
If his son needed help, he’d seek it out. That was all his mother, really.
Naturally, it was Hiroshi who came up with a plan regarding the genin team situation. They all peripherally knew that genin came in teams of three. Though they could survive on different teams to each other, Hiromi, Rena, and Hiroshi all knew they didn’t want to if they could avoid it.
They had always been a trio, and that wouldn’t be stopped by bureaucracy.
Hiroshi had investigated the team composition process, eventually herding Rena and Hiromi to Hiromi’s house to explain his findings.
“It’s mostly clan business first, specialization teams second,” he told them as they all sat on Hiromi's bedroom floor. Hiromi and Ron were shamelessly picking through the fruit platter her uncle had given them as they went through the kitchen. “If there was a Yamanaka and an Akimichi in my grade, I’d be placed with them, but there’s not. So we don’t have to worry about that.”
“So we’ll have to plan for a specialized team instead? What would that even involve?” Hiromi asked.
Hiroshi shook his head. “We won’t. I thought about us trying to set ourselves up as a front-lines team, or maybe a knock-off InoShikaCho—that’s the informal name for the teams involving Nara and their allies—but I found out there’s a sort of ‘balancing’ team that happens. If the top academy students from both genders aren’t a part of a clan-based team, they’ll be placed in a team with the dead last student of the year.”
“That’s fucking stupid,” Rena scoffed. “Why would you put the ambitious kids with the one doing the worst? That’s begging for them to hate one of their teammates and fracture the whole thing. It’s not like the academy has been ramming how important teamwork is into our heads or anything.”
“That team does usually blow up,” Hiroshi agreed wryly. “Often the dead last student is left behind as the top performing members move on as chunnin, or the dead last is killed or permanently crippled in combat and the team is given a new third member anyway.”
Hiromi and Rena both grimaced at that, Hiromi muttering “Brutal,” under her breath.
“It’s very strange,” Hiroshi said with a sigh, taking a slice of mango for himself. “Sometimes the dead last is pushed to improve, but the records I could track show them mostly remaining genin. Stupid as it may be, it’s the only easy guarantee to being on a team, so we’ll have to play to it.”
Rena frowned. “One of us will have to be dead last, then.”
There was a troubling sort of dread to that thought, an old and familiar sense of inadequacy that had started with her exceptional siblings and had only been driven home by having a chosen one and an intellectual prodigy as friends. It had caused one too many rifts between them during their last life. She didn’t really want to revisit that position.
Hiroshi frowned back. “Yes. I was thinking Hiromi could play the idiot.”
Hiromi blinked. Rena’s mouth dropped open in surprise. “Hiromi? Really?”
“She’s the civilian between us, which means she has no expectations placed on her, and frankly considering your family are foreigners,” he nodded to Rena, “I’d worry you doing badly would reflect poorly on them. Hiromi doesn’t have to worry about that.”
“But—” Rena said.
“I know a thing or two about keeping my grades low, too,” Hiromi interrupted, thoughtful. “I’ve been keeping them pretty middling already, to make sure no one pays attention to me. Like old times.”
They all took a moment to scowl at a reminder of Hiromi’s previous family. Fate had seen to take her parents away in this world too, but at least her current uncle was leagues ahead of his old counterpart—not that that was a head bar to clear.
Hiromi continued, “And aside from that, I did spend most of my career watching all the ways students can do badly in a class. I even had a few deliberately failing, sometimes. It won’t be too hard to do what they did.”
“But…” Rena said again. “Do you think I can manage top kunoichi in the first place?”
Hiroshi shrugged with what they could all tell was a forced casualness. He took Rena’s emotions very seriously. “Your grades were never particularly bad the last time around. You just ended up comparing against me and your brothers, which was a bit weighted. More than that, you’ve got great physical control, are good at routine movements, and can hit hard, which is the important thing here. Being a top student still counts if it mostly comes down to the physical tests.”
“I’m not sure if sports is the way to tell if I can cut it as a shinobi,” Rena noted.
“It can’t be a bad starting place, though,” Hiromi said. “And we can all train together to make sure you’re golden.”
“Well—thanks,” she said gruffly. “I’ll just have to put in the effort, then. And you will to!”
She pointed at Hiroshi, who let out a gusty sigh and made a show of flopping down on the floor.
“The tests I can handle—but all that exertion ,” he complained. “Just thinking of it makes me want to fall asleep. This sucks.”
Rena grinned, nudging him with her foot. “Well, sleep while you can, then.”
Inuzuka Fuka already didn’t want a genin team, but the minute he realized which combination of brats he’d be training up, he started to turn around with the intent to demand a months-long tracking mission. In Lightning Country, maybe. Or Wave. Somewhere that wasn’t here.
“Absolutely not,” Raimu said, snagging his arm. Her voice was sunny and her grip was a vice. “We’re all getting brats today, you don’t get to be the exception.”
Fuka stopped and raised a hand to prevent his partner Iroha from growling at the kunoichi, extremely glad she had trapped him with her hand rather than a genjutsu. He had known Raimu from back in the academy. She was a disarmingly sweet soul with a terrifying grasp on illusions that could make you beg to meet your maker within seconds. There was a reason she was in T&I.
Why she was being given control of children, he was less sure. That was someone else’s problem. Mostly the brats and their family’s problem.
“I’m getting team disaster,” he argued back.
“Could you all take this a touch more seriously?” the chunin handing out the assignments said. “It’s a great honor to lead the next generation, you know.”
The impending jounin-sensei in the room all scoffed. The chunin’s glare became frigid.
“Just take the files,” he said, and started passing them around to unhappy owners.
Fuka grimaced down at his set of files, which was slapped into his hand with unneeded force. The ‘balancing’ team. The top students and the dead last. This was a shit sandwich served on a platter—the best he could hope for was the top two restraining their resentment of the dead last until the chunin exams, where the deadlast was likely to fail or outright die.
He scanned through some of the assessment notes. A Nara for top shinobi—not a surprise except for the fact that his physical testing was decent. A clanless foreign girl for top kunoichi. That was marginally more interesting. Another clanless girl, this time homegrown, for dead last. Her notes had complaints of laziness and excessive skipping.
Fuka sighed. Not promising.
Honestly, why was he being given this pack of idiots? His main skill set involved solo tracking in the wilderness for days to weeks to months on end. Social graces were not his forte. If they expected him to pick apart the waiting time bomb of this team, they’d be sorely disappointed.
One of the other jounin shot him a sympathetic look, “There’s still the secondary test. They might fail it.”
Fuka snorted as the chunin frowned at them both. The secondary test was a tradition only some jounin-sensei followed, and if he’d gotten any other team but this one, Fuka probably wouldn’t have bothered.
With these lot, though, it might be a kindness to let them fail now instead of later.
But…
“I’ll give ‘em a fair chance,” he said aloud. “If they can try ‘n be a team, I’ll let ‘em try.”
There was a collective round of ‘it’s your funeral’ glances from the other jounin. The chunin shot him a grateful look. Spirits above, did he think Fuka was gonna engineer their failure?
Well, considering some of the jounin in this village, a few might’ve tried that. Stupid of them. These were their fellows in protection of the village, for all that they were as green as green could be. Giving them a fair shot was only right.
And if they failed, well, Fuka could sleep easy about it.
He sighed again, stuffed the files in one of his pockets, and turned around to leave the Tower for real this time. He’d read the files back home, and then do some assessments of his own the next day. They were academy hopefuls; he wasn’t expecting any trouble tracking them in their own village.
“Don’t go ‘n kill your own brats,” he called to the rest of them.
Time to let Tsume laugh at him for his bad luck.
The prospective Team Six were, Fuka discovered, a little pack of liars.
According to the files on the trio, while Hiroshi and Hiromi had once been thick as thieves, their friendship had drifted apart in the last year or so. The Nara had gotten close to his fellow top student instead, with the shift noted for its risk of resentment between the three.
If they cared so much about resentment, why have a balancing team in the first place, Fuka wondered, but to ask such things aloud would’ve just been the same as yelling at a wall.
The thing was, the files were wrong. It took only an hour of tracking Hanibachi Hiromi to learn that the three of them were already friends, falling together as a group to talk about their team placements at her house. There wasn’t the slightest sniff of resentment between them. They spoke and plotted and teased each other like old pals.
It was very interesting. Fuka decided to stop trusting the student files immediately. This was clearly more akin to a blank slate tracking job where he was building up a profile from scratch.
From his lurking, he quickly determined some details about the group.
Unlike what the files said, Hanibachi was a dab hand at ninjutsu, what few the academy taught. She practiced her kawarimi in the yard of her family home and could get pretty far pretty fast with it. Her balance was fantastic, as was her spatial awareness—he was pretty sure she knew someone was around the area, even if she couldn’t spot him.
On the other side of the yard Wasaki Rena, a girl with bright orange hair bound in a tightly braided bun, moved smoothly through the academy katas. Good flexibility. That, at least, was correct in the assessments from the teachers.
He’d need to test her himself to be sure, but while she was a twiggy kid right now, Fuka was sure she’d grow into a very strong frame with time. A bit like a lot of women in his clan, and good for a taijutsu specialist.
Not that Fuka would let them specialize too hard too quickly. A well-rounded shinobi was a living shinobi.
The Nara was napping. No surprise there. But while they had been planning amongst themselves on the porch about how to handle whatever jounin-sensei they got, he had been vocal and quick with details. Most of the Nara Fuka had met preferred to sit back and provide short arguments instead.
He was also very straight-backed for a Nara. Fuka wasn’t sure what to make of that, yet.
Once the kids began to wrap up their training for dinner, Fuka decided to take his leave as well. The rest of his reassessment could happen during the meeting and test, after all.
The five of them all gathered at one of the less favored training grounds, where Fuka had led them after picking them up from the academy. The three students had all followed him without fuss, but he had gotten a glimpse of the ruse they were pulling in how far Hanibachi sat from the other two and the look Nara had shot the girl when she took a second too long to stand up.
No matter. He’d only worry about that if they tried to keep that up with him, and he doubted that. It was easy enough to guess why one of these three was playing dumb while the other two thrived—they knew about the balancing team.
It was a clever plan that required long-term commitment. Such effort spoke well of them.
He wasn’t a fan of all the ways they could turn those skills against him, frankly.
“Right. I’m your jounin-sensei, Inuzuka Fuka,” he said. He gestured to the large ninken sitting patiently beside him, watching the students with keen eyes. “This is my partner, Iroha.”
“Not Snuffles?” Hanibachi inquired.
Fuka blinked, a little thrown. By the crinkle of Hanibachi’s eyes, the quirk of Nara’s mouth, and the involuntary snort from Wasaki, this was some sort of in-joke. Well, alright.
“No. If you have any worries about her, we can talk about it. With me as your teacher, you’ll have to get used to being around her.”
“That’s okay,” Wasaki assured him. “I’m only scared of three-headed dogs.”
Nara’s mouth quirked up another notch. Hanibachi’s lips also twitched as she said, “Well, just sing a little ditty and you’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, but the slobber,” Wasaki said.
Alright. So his brats thought they were a little band of jokers. Fuka was willing to let it ride for now—it proved they had a good amount of camaraderie, if nothing else.
Still, he had to ask. “Where'd three-headed dogs come into it?”
“Hiromi has a very active imagination, sir. We were dragged into quite a few adventures,” Nara said.
The girl in question swatted him on the arm. He barely reacted.
“Had, thanks,” she said. “And you stuck your noses into half of them!”
“We needed to, else the snake would get you,” Wasaki told her.
Fuka sighed, cutting off whatever further explanation they were going to give. It clearly wouldn’t be helpful. “Introductions. We're gonna go through ‘em. Seems like it’ll be more for me to get to know you all than for you to get to know each other.”
There wasn’t an ounce of shame coming from any of them. Amusement, if anything.
“I want your name, your likes, dislikes, dreams, and a skill you believe will be helpful to the future of this team,” he continued. “Here’s a start: I’m Fuka, as I said. I like roasted peanuts, the udon at Shiori’s, and swimming. I dislike the smell of pine sap, chocolate, and too much humidity. My dream is to whip you all into shape, and one of the skills I’ll be putting to that is my experience in the field. Got that?”
He nodded to Nara to begin. Didn’t want the boy to fall asleep waiting—he was a Nara, after all.
The boy hummed. “Nara Hiroshi. I like well-organized data, toffee, and orange cats with squashed faces. I dislike snakes, poor dental hygiene, and discrimination. One of my dreams is to marry Rena, and I’ll be bringing my good memory to the team.”
Fuka checked Wasaki’s expression. She didn’t seem bothered at all by the marriage declaration.
“Well, since he mentioned you, you’re up next,” he told her.
“Wasaki Rena!” she exclaimed. “I like punching people, the color orange, and apples. I dislike three-headed dogs and elitist rich idiots. And snakes. My dream is to marry Hiroshi and steal a crown at some point. My skill is that I’m good with brooms. Taijustu, too, if you want something else.”
Flickers of amusement from the other two at the mention of the brooms. Fuka ignored that.
“You’re in a good line of work for punching people,” he remarked, and gestured for Hanibachi to finish.
He might be getting a headache at this point.
“Hanibachi Hiromi,” she said, and the glint in her green eyes didn’t spell anything good. “I like Hiroshi and Rena. I dislike snakes and rats. My dream is to never, ever be involved in a prophecy. They're all bunk. And the skill I bring…well, if you ask my academy teachers, I don’t bring anything. Maybe ninjustu, if we’re being generous. My dream is to marry someone who isn’t Hiroshi or Rena, probably.”
“‘Grats on surviving the ordeal of talking about yourselves,” he said dryly. “You can leave now. Tomorrow at noon we’ll meet back here for a final test—and if you fail it, you’ll be sent packing back to the academy. Got it?”
The three of them nodded obediently, not at all shocked or panicked at the idea of going back to school. They’d probably endeavor to all fail the test together.
“Just… go,” he said, flapping a hand.
They scampered off, throwing out polite goodbyes as they left to probably go and eat somewhere.
Fuka brought a hand up to rub at his face, tugging at the claw marks cutting up his cheek. Despite himself, he was already a bit fond of these strange little brats. He looked down to Iroha, who had silently observed the whole show.
“Thoughts?”
Iroha sniffed the air and said, “For all their giggles, they’re taking this seriously enough. They did provide their actual strengths. I doubt they’ll do anything to sabotage each other, and that’s miles ahead of some genin hopefuls.”
Then, almost absentmindedly, she added, “They all have little faith in adults. Do not disappoint them.”
“They have to avoid disappointing me first,” he grumbled back, but took that to heart. He remembered the many frustrations of being a genin who’s jounin-sensei never really listened to them.
Fuka stood in the middle of a training field utterly dosed with water, with a smarting cut on his arm, and a feeling of deep foreboding. Iroha was sneezing away the spray of water that had gotten up her nose. In front of them, the three students stood up on shaky feet, grins wide.
With a deep, deep sigh, he announced. “You passed.”
Cheers broke out. Somehow, he got the sense they had never doubted the outcome at all.
He also got the sense that this little trio was going to try every last one of his nerves.
Well. As long as they survived, that’d be alright.