Chapter 13: Chapter 13: Team Training Arc: One
Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Kishimoto and every time I say this, it makes me sad.
A month after we start tracking exercises, Sensei halts our training before noon and gestures us to come with him. Muta and I exchange a wordless look of confusion as Toku stretches his hands in front of him, and bounds over to Sensei. Sensei's a Nara, but he's not a slacker. We've taken breaks for lunch but we've never just flat out left the training grounds before. The Triplets clamber to their feet from where they'd been panting in the shade and trail after us.
Ni's had the hardest time of learning to track out of his siblings, and it showed in his plaintive whine. "Hana, why do we work? I don't like work."
I close my eyes for a long moment, and bring my determination to the forefront. "Because we need to protect our family." I pat him on the head and scratch behind his ears for comfort. "We want to be strong enough that nothing can hurt them, remember."
He perks up at this. "I remember! I remember now!"
That's the thing with Ichi Ni and San, they might have their own personalities by now, and they knew that I'm not smart enough all the time, but their idolization of my focus has never faded even a tiny bit. I am still untarnished, still infallible, and I wish with all my heart that I can stay that way.
"Hey Sensei, where're we going?" Tokuma takes Sensei's left side.
Sensei's still slouching and staring straight ahead despite Tokuma's questions. "I sometimes can't believe that you are actually a Hyuga, Tokuma-kun." Sensei mutters this under his breath.
To Toku's credit, he only laughs. "I'm a corrupted Hyuga because I've an Inuzuka and an Aburame as friends."
The thought warms my heart. When I'd looked at the lonely years in front of me in Konoha when I first realized where I was, there hadn't been time to think about whether or not I had friends. Now, I had three, and a family that I could be proud of.
"Hey Sensei, you ignored the question." I smile at Ensui-sensei from his other side. "You never did tell us where we were going."
Ensui-sensei ruffles my longer hair. I had started growing it out more despite my reservations because I had no desire to have Kakashi think of Rin if he ever saw me drunk again.
I'm my own person. I am not the ghost of some long dead girl.
"Well someone wanted to meet my family. Or as a certain impudent brat put it, 'the woman who could persuade me not to be lazy' so come. I'm introducing you to the troublesome woman." Ensui-sensei has a lazy drawl, and he slouches forward with his hands tucked in his pockets quite often.
Muta snaps on his sunglasses as we exit the training field. "Statistically speaking we should have already at least glimpsed your wife at some point during our lives in Konoha. We just didn't know what her significance was."
Ensui-sensei laughs. "I don't doubt it, Kiho's not that hard to find."
Nara Kihona is a tall woman with dirty blond hair, teal eyes, and a teasing smile. She's in the front of the small house tending to the flower garden when we arrive and she brushes the dirt off of her hands with a quick water jutsu. Looking at her dark purple outfit and high tail I conclude that Sensei's wife is in fact, a Yamanaka by birth. How closely related she is to their clan head Inoichi is unclear, but everything about her screamed Yamanaka.
"Ah, so you must be the Wastebasket's ducklings." She crouches down to pet the Triplets and squeeze the daylights out of Tokuma's cheeks. "Ah, aren't you all so cute! I'm Nara Kihona, but you all have to call me Kiho-baachan."
"It's nice to see you too, Vicious Hag." Ensui-sensei's slouched over with his hands in his pockets, but a smile on his face.
Kiho-baachan sticks her tongue out at him and flicks her hair over her shoulder. "If Ino-niichan heard you call me that you'd be in a ditch somewhere, Space Waster." She herds us into the house with her head held high. "I'm so sorry you have to hear such dreadful nonsense all day every day."
Tokuma frowns. "But you married him." I feel a slight chill in the air as Kiho-baachan leans down to smile at him.
"My husband's a waste of space, but he wouldn't even get out of bed in the mornings if I didn't make him. It's my job to make him a productive member of society, and it's your job to listen to him, alright?"
I slide a hand into hers and chirp brightly. "Don't worry, Baachan. Toku's a corrupted Hyuga so he's not stuck up."
Muta fiddles with one of his sleeves and scuffs his shoes on the floorboards. "Indeed, Nara-san. Don't hurt him."
She giggles with a hand over her mouth and gestures for us to find a seat around the kitchen table. "I kid, I kid, little ones." She turns with a happy hum to the stove. "Lunch will be ready in just a few minutes."
Sensei ambles into the room with his hands still stuck deep in his pockets at about this moment. "Kiho." He drawls, his eyes bright. "Don't scare my children."
Kiho-baachan smacks him on the back of the hand with her ladle as he attempts to steal a cookie from the counter. "They're now my children too, Ensui." The next few minutes pass in companionable silence as Sensei sits and Kiho-baachan busies herself with food. There's an old faded set of photographs on the counter that I slide off my chair to look at more closely.
"Those are our old academy pictures." Ensui-sensei says from behind me as I trace the central faded frame featuring three proud students making peace signs together. I knew all of them. There's Sensei's wife with a dreamy smile in the center, and Sensei himself trying to look cool on the right. The last person in the photograph I would know anywhere-wide, blue-gray eyes, a small smile, pale blond hair-
"Tou-san." I whisper, my voice cracking. "That's Tou-san right there." I scan the other pictures, Aunt Kiho wearing a crown of flowers and dragging a younger Kaa-san into the frame, a copy of Kaa-san and Tou-san's wedding portrait, Sensei and Aunt Kiho's team portrait sans Tou-san and Kaa-san but plus an Akimichi and a woman who must have been their jonin sensei, and another of Tou-san as a teenager posing as a cat at what must have been the Winter Festival.
"Ah, that's Kai-kun." Kiho-baachan looks at Sensei with accusing eyes. "Why on earth didn't you want me to go see her with all of these earlier?"
Sensei meets her eyes with a level gaze. "We still have a shrine on our counter even though he's been dead for nearly two years now. You would break down crying whenever his name was mentioned until two months ago. It would have made everything worse to visit, and it wasn't as if Tsume wasn't doing okay by herself."
Kiho-baachan sighs and starts setting dishes in front of us. "You're right as always, Space Waster."
After we visit Kiho-baachan for the first time, Ensui-Sensei has us take a mission a week. A single D-rank mission. Once a week. Certainly not even Kakashi the teacher from the darkest pits of hell had ever bored Team Seven to death like this.
After the third consecutive week of this, Team Six calls a huddled conference after training to attempt to figure out how to handle the overwhelming free time we suddenly had on our hands. Sure, Sensei made us do tracking exercises, he'd tell us that he had planted fifteen kunai using earth jutsu throughout the village and expect us to run through and find all seventeen tagged kunai with his scent, in an hour, but we still had a lot of free time on our hands.
He didn't teach us fancy jutsu, although he approved of Substitution Tag with fewer and fewer hand signs allowed. We'd gotten it down to two for simplicity's sake. We henged each other, inanimate objects and Sensei and random villagers until we were blue in the face and practiced cloning ourselves, but there weren't even D-rank jutsus that Sensei could be persuaded to teach us.
We had some sparring, but Sensei didn't teach us new Taijutsu skills either because he preferred to watch us spar and then give strategic pointers afterwards. He advised us on different ways to make our current moves more lethal, harder, faster, better, but nothing new is added to our repertoire.
And we went on no actual missions beyond weeding gardens and watching small children.
"We have to be able to do something harder at least." Tokuma runs his hands through his hair until the locks on the back of his head stick up into spikes. "This can't possibly go on."
Muta rubs the lens of his glasses with a sleeve and looks at Tokuma with one golden bug-like eye. "I would prefer not to get myself and both of you killed because we weren't ready to leave the village."
"I mean, Sensei's training us to be a tracking team, right?" I ask, as I tilt my head back to stare at the wide blue sky. "Theoretically we won't need any heavy hitting skills or S-ranked Jutsus. We're focused on finding the information, or hunting and bagging a target."
Tokuma sighs. "That's not really what I meant. I meant we should find some way to learn new stuff by ourselves."
My eyes widen with understanding. "You mean, we should learn things by ourselves?" I had planned to look at Tou-san's papers, but I'd never had the time. I pull them out now. "Tou-san left me some learning materials, we should look at them." We make our huddle even smaller. There's a scroll that I unroll eagerly. "Seven Earth Techniques for My Sprout." I read aloud, and Tokuma sighs.
"The Hyuga have a water affinity."
"And the Aburame's traditional affinity is Fire." Muta adds.
I pull out the other stack of papers. "Analysis on the Explosion Release Kekkei Genkai." Why would Tou-san have been looking at this? "Well," I say at last. "I don't think Tou-san's going to help us this time."
Tokuma stands up and pulls us both to our feet. "We should go eat dinner at my house, and then I can see if I can pester Koma-niisan to teach us something." Muta and I allow ourselves to be dragged along by our far more energetic teammate.
We do end up having dinner at the Hyuga compound that night, with only Tokuma's immediate family in attendance, sans his older brother Koma, who is out running a mission. His brother's twin sister Haya is in attendance though, and so are his parents, Hyuga Hideta and Hyuga Reichiru. The three of them are more dignified that Toku on a good day, but they seem to take his energy and exuberance with good grace and no admonishments.
"I'm so glad you finally brought your teammates over for dinner, Tokuma-kun." Reichiru-san says as she sets two extra bowls of rice out for us at the table.
"It was indeed bad manners not to invite them over earlier." Hideta-san smiles at both of quite kindly, and Muta and I are marginally more at home.
"Dear, don't scold him." Reichiru-san sets a hand on Hideta-san's shoulder and they share a smile.
Haya simply turns back to the large medical text she has open next to her rice bowl. "Please let me keep reading, Haha-ue." She says as Reichiru-san attempts to close the book and put it away. "I have a practical test on liver surgery tomorrow that I've yet to finish preparing for." Tokuma's parents exchange a look, but let her keep the book open.
"And then the brave shinobi unsheathed his tanto..." I made the requisite shhk sound of unsheathing a sword. "And dueled courageously with his enemy!" I snap the book shut and wriggle my fingers like a spider at Kiba who shrieks with laughter.
"Nee-chan! Nee-chan! Read it again!"
I gather him up in my lap and tickle his toes. "We can do that later, maybe." Whatever else I'd been concerned about, I am certain that I am not a worse sister to Kiba than Hana was in canon, given that his first word had been Nee-chan followed closely by Kaa. The librarian glares at us from over her glasses and I glare just as fiercely back until she looks away.
With a huff, I gather him up, set the book back on the shelf, and walk out the door. "Thank you for your time and cooperation." I don't expect an answer from the stern woman, and I don't get one, which suits me just fine.
"We're leaving?" He sounds disappointed.
I look down into Kiba's dark brown eyes and poke his cheek. "We're going somewhere much more fun: the kennels."
His entire face lights up at this. "Nee-chan's the best Nee-chan in the entire world." He waves his arms to gesture at our surroundings and I laugh.
"Well, I sure hope I am, I'm your Nee-chan after all." I owed Kiba more than he could possibly imagine for lighting up my world again after Tou-san. I want him to become the best that he could ever possibly be. I want to give him the best.
That weekend Itachi and I eat dango together at a stand off of main street. Or well, I eat a single skewer of dango at a sedate pace while Itachi orders five skewers of varying flavors and practically inhales the food just slowly enough that his cheeks don't bulge like a chipmunk. I cover my mouth to prevent from breaking into laughter at the mental image of Itachi as a chipmunk.
He looks at me with curiosity. "What's the matter?"
I shake my head. "I just had a funny thought that's all." I pull another piece of dango off the skewer with my teeth and chew slowly. "Tell me about your team, Team Two, isn't it?"
Itachi falls silent. "I don't know how to describe it."
I look at his down turned lips and wonder if Itachi had ever been happy with being a ninja in his entire life. "What's wrong?"
He valiantly makes an effort to try to smile, but it doesn't quite work and he looks like he's trying very hard not to wince instead. "Temma doesn't like me and Shinko is..."
I pat his shoulder. "You'll survive. After we make chunin we can take missions together, or you could enter ANBU if that's what you want." Just preferably ANBU that's far far away from Danzo's meddling
"What did you want to do after your chunin promotions?"
I chew another piece of dango while thinking about my future life. "I want to take a non-desk job that'll be close or inside the village."
Itachi blinks. "You don't want to go into tracking?"
I shrug. "Not really, it would take me out of the village a lot, and I'll see Kiba less often." I meet his eyes and smile. "I don't want to miss his childhood you know? Tracking and the Hunter Nin Division is full of missions that take months at a time."
Itachi looks away first and twirls his empty dango skewer around his fingers. "Am I being selfish if I'm not willing to give up ANBU for Sasuke?"
There's only one reply to that. "No. Of course not. I don't think I'm giving up anything by not becoming a Hunter Nin." I set a hand on his arm when he still refuses to look at me. "Itachi-kun, everyone knows you love Sasuke. Sasuke knows that you love Sasuke. We aren't the same you know, you want to be ANBU, that's different from me."
He nods. "Oh. I see."
I smile, relieved that he understands. "Yes."
"Alright, let's get this thing started, Little Nose." Kaa-san stands with her feet planted shoulder width apart across the clearing with Kuromaru. She'd dragged me out for training at an ungodly hour of the morning and in the pre-dawn light, the Triplets and I stood shivering.
The Inuzuka techniques weren't exactly a kekkei genkai and they certainly weren't something you'd be able to find in a book. From what I could understand by speaking to Cousin Ashi, the techniques were just something an Inuzuka knew. We didn't really read about it and then learn how to do it, we just did.
"You ready?" Kaa-san asks as she pulls out a bottle.
I nod, and Kaa-san throws a soldier pill at Ichi who catches it in his mouth. He explodes with a surprising amount of light gray chakra not two moments later.
"Feel his chakra. Feel the connect you have with him, Hana."
I breath in. I breath out. And I focus on the chakra that is not next to me like it is on most days, but a part of me. I feel myself shifting into all fours to match more evenly with Ichi.
We breath in. We breath out. And we are one and the same.
We leap when Kaa-san tells us to, and turning counterclockwise is the song in our blood, the ground beneath our feet. We fly at impossible speeds across the clearing, as naturally as breathing, perfectly coordinated.
And then we crash straight through a tree and it shatters into slivers that fly everywhere as we tumble onto the ground on the other side suddenly not the same beast any longer.
With a groan I attempt to push myself up, but every muscle in my body screams in protest and I flop back down again.
San and Ni race over. "I want a turn." "I want a turn."
I laugh weakly. "Maybe next time guys." I sit up and feel the protests shriek through every inch of skin in muscles that I didn't even know I had. "What was that?"
Kaa-san stands above us with a wicked grin on her face and Kuromaru looks more deadly than ever. "That was the first clan technique you will ever learn. Fang Passing Fang." Kaa-san gestures to the tree. "It looks like you have the basics down already." She looks back down at me, still as limp as a noodle and not entirely elated. "You've got a dismal lack of stamina, but that'll come with practice."
I just hurtled through a tree like a drill and now the tree's dead.
The thought brings a barking laugh to my lips. "I did it." I'm actually an Inuzuka.
Kaa-san leans over to ruffle my hair. "You did. Now you've got to practice doing it until you can get to that state in less than an eye blink and hold it for longer than the fights you'll be picking." The thought brings terror to my heart and it must have shown in my face because Kaa-san sits down next to me, and proceeds to tell me the first time she tried the clan technique with Kuromaru and ended up crashing into a lake.
"Your aunt was always the better one when it came to the clan techniques as a child." Kaa-san muses.
"But we never stopped working hard." Kuromaru counters. "We never gave in."
Kaa-san scratches behind his ears. "No. We didn't." Kaa-san agrees and turns her gaze on me. "And you won't either, no matter what Nara teaches you."
I nod. "I'm an Inuzuka." I say and Kaa-san smiles and spins me around despite my wobbling legs.
"You're my daughter." Then she pulls me close in a fierce hug and I can feel how she smells of pine because it seeps into my every pore. "He'll be so proud of you."
"Un." I agree and hold up a pinky. "I know."
A.N. Thanks to Snidekick and Shy911 for reviewing! (Also, Shy911 I don't think your reviews are disjointed at all. I love reading them.)
Also, since I'm excited today, have a second chapter.
We've officially started Hana's genin days, guys. And this chapter at ~3,500 words is the longest yet.
Thank you so much for your support.
~Tavina
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