Tag: externality

That first month, she doesn’t ask.

That first month, she doesn’t even talk to him.

It’s an interesting mystery, of course, but ultimately irrelevant to her everyday life; she’s mired in too much as it is.

The second and third months are much the same.

This final year of the Academy seems to be less teaching and more training–a narrow, but distinct separation between the two–forcing students to apply what they’ve learned over the years into actionable combinations. It’s one thing to know the standard hand signs and team formations, how to make wire traps and stealth genjutsu, but it’s another to use it in a class-wide six-way game of capture the flag while Yanagi-sensei and his assistant pelt everyone with blunted wooden kunai.

The other drills and assessments aren’t nearly as fun, but they are equally as likely to give bruises or headaches to everyone involved.

And as if that weren’t enough, it’s as if Hikari-san has taken Tetsuki’s dwindling free time and increasing exhaustion as some kind of permission or, worse, a challenge.

A chuunin war veteran, regardless of the years off the field and the prosthetic leg, will still handily smack down an Academy student without breaking a sweat. Tetsuki would prefer it if Hikari-san wasn’t so smug about it, but it’s not as if it is a surprise.

“That technique,” Tetsuki says between panting breaths, ignoring the dirt pressing into her cheek in favor of the coolness of the ground, “with the flashing light. What is it?”

Hikari-san smiles, teeth sharp and bright, “It’s my own invention. Maybe if you can last more than a minute against me, I’ll teach it to you.”

It’s more of a threat than an offer.

Along with the more physical, literal beating her into the ground, Hikari-san also involves her more with the operation of the shop:

Business to business trading verses customer transactions, quotas and market equilibrium. What the forms she delivers daily to the Tower are for, where that information goes–funneled to the Logistics Department, just a drop in the flowing river of data–the correlation of sales and Academy enrollment, decreasing demand of smoke pellets as preferences move toward flash bang tags.

Or so Hikari-san says. But the shop is just one data point and they are not the ones in charge of interpreting the information.

Still, Tetsuki’s dreams, if she has any, are filled with numbers in the night, masked and waiting to jump out at her armed with wooden kunai and bright red yarn.

The weeks slip by and she doesn’t ask.

She barely even manages to talk to TenTen, much less a boy she’s never properly met before.

In fact, that doesn’t even happen until the first trimester’s exam, when the students are really put to the test: a three day trial in the dense forest of Training Ground 53–the students given unique, secret objectives and told to survive without any teacher interference.

Maybe that’s what prompts her to approach him: not having to worry about the flat expression Yanagi-sensei sends his way being extended to her by association.

Alternatively, it might be the sabotage.

There are two orphanages in Konoha: Enshoku House in the southwest–between the Hyuuga and Aburame holdings–and Ryokushoku Institute in the northeast–between the Akimichi district and what used to be Uchiha land.

Not that their proximity to cardinal clan territories have much influence on which orphans end up where, it’s just the easiest way to differentiate the two. That and the fact that most orphans from Enshoku tend to wear shades of red while those from Ryokushoku wear shades of green.

It must be a subliminal influence; Tetsuki certainly isn’t basing her fashion choices on nonexistent fond memories of the place.

Though perhaps that’s a bit harsh. Ryokushoku was hardly torture, and she knows that orphanages further from Konoha’s reach and subsidies aren’t as professionally run.

But maybe that was the problem–it was too well run, too clinical and cold and objective. They weren’t family, they weren’t students, they were barely even wards of the state–they were resources, potential products, and future soldiers. A mass assembly line of moldable children without anyone to care for their well-beings outside of what makes them useful.

Technically, six year old orphans aren’t mandated to join the Academy, but if they haven’t been adopted by that point then there aren’t many options left: very few orphans show an aptitude for a strictly civilian vocation that would induce government sponsorship for Shougakkou. After that, frankly, between the red light district and urban legends of ANBU stealing children in the middle of the night, the Academy is the safest bet.

Her Academy file had her name as Ryokushoku no Tetsuki until she was ten, when she updated it along with her new address–moving out from the orphanage as soon as she could even remotely support herself. Her life path thus far is in no way unique, but at the very least she has heard of others.

None of that helps in figuring out Naruto Uzumaki’s situation.

Dropping off paperwork to the Tower everyday makes her, if not a known quantity, then at the very least a face familiar enough to be allowed to walk through the lobby unimpeded. It’s more than she ought to expect, really–there are many cogs in this administrative machine and she is the most minuscule of a part.

Sneaking into her classroom is far more difficult, even if that is where she belongs.

Yanagi-sensei spots her immediately. Unsurprising, given he is a chuunin, and she’s not sneaking in to fool him so much as she’s trying not to be noticed or interrupt his lesson.

Beyond a tilt of his head, he doesn’t remark on her entrance though, which she is grateful for. Some students, when they’re tardy, get punished–standing outside with buckets of water in each hand or being tied upside down until their faces turn bright red–though generally they’re also troublemakers for other reasons.

Tetsuki tries not to make trouble; she can’t afford it.

Still, being late is not without drawbacks: her preferred seat, four rows back and nearest to the window, has been taken by someone else, and she catches looks from her classmates who already have wandering eyes.

She slinks into the nearest available seat–second row, closer to the wall, unfortunately–and doesn’t recognize the person beside her.

She’s taken aback for a moment, a flash of mortification–has she entered the wrong room? Is this the wrong class entirely?–before logic asserts itself.

No, Yanagi-sensei wouldn’t do that to her, and she did spot classmates she knows from her original cursory glance around the room; it’s just this one in particular that she doesn’t know.

The boy beside her gives a baffled look in return, before shifting his attention back to their sensei.

Following his lead, Tetsuki does the same.

She can solve the mystery later.

Mornings in Ueno General Store are an exercise in patience, frustration, and futility. Still better than what her mornings used to be like at the orphanage, but only just.

When most small business owners say they open whenever they want, they generally mean later in the morning, sun high in the sky, so they can get a few extra hours of sleep.

Hikari-san wakes up before the sun–opens the store at dawn hours before any of her competitors think to do so–and so Tetsuki must do the same.

Hikari-san is a strict taskmaster, rapid staccato orders from the storefront heard even up the stairs in the apartment turned makeshift stockroom turned both. Tetsuki carts down boxes of inventory to the rhythm of Hikari-san’s “don’t you dare drop those,” and “don’t use chakra with that box, they’re shock tags” and “check how many of the high grade soldier pills we have, I might have to order more, no not the generic brand, the Nara brand.”

It’s a living.

Once enough supplies are brought downstairs, she directs Tetsuki to put together the genin kits–basic bundles of kunai, basic food pills, bandages, and other things that non-clan Academy students or their parents can purchase without shinobi background and the knowledge included.

First day of Academy means a huge boost in sales for these bundles which is, of course, fantastic. The fact that she’s the one who has to assemble over a hundred of them herself is less so. If Tetsuki knew how labor intensive the kits were, she’d never have suggested them in the first place.

But it’s a quieter sort of busywork, repetitive and mesmerizing…

… until Hikari-san smacks her over the head with a stack of invoices.

“Ten minutes until classes start,” she says, nodding her head towards the door, “Off you go.”

Tetsuki scurries away, though not before catching the muted, exasperated, “Honestly, that girl.”

The bakery next door is Akimichi owned, not run–a branch of the original–but just as delicious. In exchange for delivering their paperwork to the Tower every morning, Tetsuki gets a free breakfast.

Yoshihiko-san, civilian through and through, but with strong arms from kneading dough gives her a smile as she comes in, skirting around the line.

“The two of you were at it again early this morning,” he says, before handing over a paper bag of still warm bread and a flour covered envelope due for the Tower.

She takes a curious sniff at the bag–savory and sharp, curry pan.

“Good nose,” he confirms, before clapping her on the shoulder, “Better get moving, you’re running late.”

She shoots a quick thank you his way before dashing away, self-deprecatingly amused at herself: how worried she had been in the wee hours of the morning, and yet now she’s on her way to being tardy for the first lesson.

Well, it’s unlikely she’ll miss too much.

Tetsuki wakes up from a dream so vivid and ferocious she gasps and jolts upright on her cot. There are no clouds this night, nothing to block the bright shining moon; the boxes of inventory in the room cast sharp, angular shadows on the floor.

Her heart beats furiously, achingly. There are tears on her face.

Between one blink and the next, she forgets what she had dreamed.

Her heart slows, as do the flurrying, wild emotions. Still, she gives herself a moment before drying her face, turning and swinging her legs off her cot.

The floor is cold beneath her feet, toes curling up in reflexive protest, but she stands nonetheless.

There is no more sleeping for her tonight.

Creeping down the stairs, she pauses at the spill of light coming from the makeshift kitchen of the store.

Hikari-san is awake then.

“So loud,” her boss chastises, not looking up from her book of accounting. There’s more black than red, but only just. “If this were wartime, you’d be dead.”

But she gives a nod to the empty seat across from her, and Tetsuki takes her up on the invitation. There is a still steaming teapot on the table and two cups. Tetsuki prepares one for herself and refills the other.

“So would you,” she says in response, belated, hesitant despite her attempt to banter–after all, Hikari-san is her boss and landlady both.

The woman gives a small, acquiescing smirk.

Neither of them look at her prosthetic leg, stiff and wooden and propped up against the wall but still within Hikari-san’s reach.

“Worried about tomorrow?” she asks, curt but not unsympathetic, the scratch of her pen a static, soothing sound.

Tetsuki pauses, considering. Yes, actually, though she hadn’t been thinking about it just now. She knows there’s no real reason to be so, it’s just another year at the Academy. Her final year–if all goes well, that is–and the most important, but just another year at the Academy all the same.

It’s a silly thing to be worried about, when a woman who fought in a war says it out loud.

“You’ll do fine,” Hikari-san says, more in a tone that brooks no argument than one outrightly encouraging, but Tetsuki has learned over the years how to interpret that subtle language.

She’ll be fine. Just another year, same as before.

Tetsuki hopes so.

~

A/N: I’m going to make another serious attempt at my Externality series, in the actual order that I would publish it instead of just jumping all over the place. So… wish me luck, I guess?