Chapter Text
Kaeru wishes she had eaten her brother in the womb. Then none of this would have had to happen.
“Itachi,” she hisses. “It’s night. It’s midnight. Quit training and go to bed, before someone sees you and then asks me why I’m not up training in the middle of the night.”
“No one will ask you that,” Itachi says.
It’s true, they won’t.
“They’ll think it, which is worse.” Kaeru crosses her arms, scowling.
Itachi ignores her completely, returning to his late night kunai practice. Honestly, this useless guy... She heaves a dramatic sigh, flopping down to lay down on the grass and stare up at the stars.
Thunk, thunk. The silence of a miss. Thunk.
“I’m graduating from the academy,” Itachi says.
“You’re seven,” Kaeru says.
“We’re both seven.”
“I’m not graduating, though.”
She can feel the frustration in the way he clenches his baby little fists.
“You could. You could help the clan, Kaeru.”
She lets her eyes slip closed. Fakes a snore.
“I know you’re not sleeping.”
“I’m sleeping.”
“You could do it,” Itachi repeats. “You’re smart enough. We could be on the same team.”
Her eyes reopen.
“Who’d want to be on a team with you?”
-------
It’s a good thing that Itachi’s teammate’s recent tragic death inspired him to head into secluded training, because otherwise they might have ended up on the same team after all.
Instead, she just has these losers to deal with.
Maruten Akimichi puts his sticky nine year old hands on her notebook, brown hat obstructing her view as he uses the cover of her miniscule frame to peer over at where their other teammate stares silently at a tree, high color and sunglasses not enough to hide his own distinguishing mark of a strange blue tattoo on his right cheek.
“Tatsuma....” Maruten says. “Got any snacks?”
A small silence, where all she has to deal with is listening to the buzz of Tatsuma’s bug collection.
“....No,” Tatsuma says, five minutes later.
Maruten turns his gaze to her. He blinks. She blinks.
He slumps.
“You guys are the most boring geniuses imaginable,” he says, scuffing one foot across the ground.
“I’m not a genius--”
“My scores were perfectly average.”
Her voice and Tatsuma’s overlap as they both react, then try to quickly silence themselves.
Maruten immediately brightens up, however.
“Yeah? Really? Do you think I’m the smarts of this team? The mastermind? The man behind the man?”
“You’re the one in charge of stepping in front of me,” Kaeru says. “Don’t get it mixed up.”
“The best men behind the men are the men who stand in front of them!” Maruten says, not affected at all by her statement. “Wow, this is so great. I’m going to make jounin for sure!”
“Your performance was substandard on our last mission,” Tatsuma states, droning the way he always does. “Your Multi-Size Technique only lasted for less than a minute, and left you vulnerable to continued attack when it ended, which was at a time when there were still hostiles on the field. A terrible vulnerability.”
“Aw come on,” Maruten grumbles. “I lived, didn’t I? And it was just supposed to be some basic C rank.”
“On the bright side,” Kaeru says. “Now that sensei’s gonna be in the hospital for the foreseeable future, I don’t think we're doing any more of those.”
Now its her turn to be caught in the crosshairs.
“It was a mission failure to not have better guarded him,” Tatsuma says.
“I feel like you’re wishing him ill will all the way from over here,” Maruten says, performatively shivering. “That’s cold, Kaeru.”
“I didn’t want to take the C rank,” Kaeru says.
“You don’t want to do anything,” Maruten whines, yawning and wandering over to the side of their training field. “Are you sure you’re an Uchiha? You didn’t get some wires crossed with a Nara?”
“You’d like that,” Kaeru says unsympathetically. “But nope. No Ino-Shika-Cho for you, Maruten.”
“It’s impossible for her to be a Nara,” Tatsuma says. “She has an identical twin brother with an awakened sharingan.”
Mastered sharingan, by now.
“Oh, yeah. What’s that like?”
“What’s what like?” Kaeru’s tone gets even flatter.
“Having a twin.”
Oh.
“Kinda annoying. You know how siblings are.”
Maruten sighs.
“You guys are the most boring people ever, ya know? I bet you hope that nothing interesting ever happens to you for the rest of your days.”
“That’d be nice,” Kaeru says, leaning back on the grass as she begins tossing a kunai back and forth in her hands.
“The probability of that occurring is less than 0.0001%,” Tatsuma says.
“What!? That’s great! Hell yeah, Tats!”
Maruten pauses in the middle of his celebration.
“But, uh... that’s more confident than you were when you were giving your own graduation likelihood.”
“That is so,” Tatsuma says.
-------
Itachi comes back out of seclusion as Kaeru puts her gear back together for another mission. Their sensei had been fine after all, see? Just a few weeks in the hospital to recover from taking a brutal lightning jutsu head on.
“I’m back,” Itachi says.
“I’m leaving,” Kaeru says.
She can feel the weight of his stare as she continues rummaging through her clothes and folding stuff before dropping it into her bags. Really heavy stuff in the seal, everything else visible.
“I heard your team was paid out for a B rank,” he says.
Confidentiality agreements may work in the tower, but they sure as hell don’t work within the clan.
“Kaeru.”
Ah, she forgets he’s a baby. Almost ten now, though.
“Heard your teammate died,” Kaeru says.
A pause. A quiet swallow of the throat.
“It was... we were one of the teams working as the Fire Daimyo's bodyguards. Tenma died nobly.”
“Oh, it was Tenma?”
Kaeru tries to remember her one year in the academy that overlapped with his. Spiky grey hair, grumpy expression. Kept loudly blaming the Uchiha for the Nine Tailed Fox attack, which was annoying as hell.
“Wonder why they put him and you on the same team.”
“Kaeru, he’s dead.”
Poor baby.
“They put his name on the rock?”
“That stone is for the Kyubei Attack, Kaeru.” The you know that is unsaid. “He was... my friend.”
“Didn’t know you had any.”
If Itachi were the type to have any sense of humour about his life, this is where he’d say ‘not anymore’, and they’d both sit in silence, and Kaeru could feel like she wasn’t alone in the world, and everything would be gucci.
Instead, he looks like he’s about to cry, in that stifled way Uchiha get. Probably learned that from their dad.
And what’s she supposed to do about that?
“Kaeru.”
He’s still not done?
“What would..” she shouldn’t have looked back at him. No, no no. Why does he feel so safe with her? She won’t help him. Nothing can help him, really. “If one of your teammates died...”
She imagines that. Of course, she imagines that daily, nightly.
“I’d try to quit,” she says, quiet, young voice filled with a poisoned kind of irony. “And then, having awakened the sharingan, the clan would refuse the request at all costs, and I would never know rest till the day they all died.”
..
“Go away, Itachi,” she says wearily. “I’m tired.”
“Sorry, Kaeru.”
Not sorry enough.
-------
Sasuke was born when Kaeru and Itachi had both been out on missions, unsurprisingly. She’d received an apologetic shrug from her sensei, and congratulations from her teammates. Actually, had that been during her first ever mission out of Konoha? Wow, that kid made Itachi’s sense of timing seem good.
But however long ago that had been, or even if she’s misremembering entirely and that was congratulations for something else, now he’s .. five or six or something. Sure. When do normal kids start the Academy, again?
“Bis sis!” He’s got a little lisp.. Itachi definitely had not had a cute lisp when he was six. “You’re back!”
She picks him up by the armpits and tosses him a little.
“Oh, it’s Sasuke. Didn’t see you there.” She makes a show of looking over his head. “Practicing your stealth already?”
“Yes!”
He’s wriggly, too.
“I’m gonna be a ninja, just like Itachi!”
Oh, come on.
“Like Itachi? Aren’t I cool too?”
He gives her a suspicious look.
“Mama says that I should be a ninja that serves the village, just like Itachi,” he says, carefully pronouncing each word. “And that I should.. That I should...study...”
Kaeru cracks up. Should she tell him that Itachi almost never studied? That at the age Sasuke was now, he’d already had his sharingan unlocked, so he’d never have to worry about rote memorization again?
“You do that,” she says. “Okay, little man. I gotta get going.”
He always pouts. What a little grump.
“Everyone’s so busy,” he mutters. “No one teaches me anything.”
“And isn’t that the greatest life lesson of all?” Kaeru wonders aloud.
“Kaeru-chan!” A familiar voice says, the sunshine of forced familiarity always coating his voice like plague filled clouds. “I found you!”
“Shisui.”
This guy.
She looks at him. She’s.. What, she’s almost ten, so this guy is like, thirteen or twelve. He’s got his jounin vest on and everything.
“What’s the occasion?” she says. “Someone died?”
Shisui laughs, which causes Sasuke to laugh too, trying to be in on the joke.
There’s no joke, though. Shisui may talk to her occasionally, but he’s Itachi’s friend first and foremost. That’s how it is. It’s good that her brother’s managed to find one not dead friend, though who knows how long that’ll last.
Or, was Shisui friends with Itachi before Tenma? Then why didn’t he point it out..
Maybe she’d just made him feel awkward about having friends.
“Good one!” Shisui says. “You’re a riot, Kaeru-chan. But really, can’t I just have a talk..?”
He’s doing a full roll out with the hand signs, using Sasuke’s own body to shield his fingers from view. Divide and meet up: Training Grounds 44.
This is why she hates it when this guy shows up.
“You know what they say. You can talk when you're dead.”
“That’s definitely not what they say, Kaeru-chan.”
But he leaves, so it’s fine. And then it’s just her, and Sasuke, and then it’s just Sasuke.
-------
“I’m worried about Itachi.”
She’s surprised. She’s so surprised, that that was what Shisui wanted to talk about. Look at the surprised look on her face.
“And what does that have to do with me?”
They're having this conversation in the Forest of Death for a reason. Nobody ever goes here except for when they run the chunin exams... the place is too dangerous for lone genin and not worth the time of most chunin and above.
Of course, she’s still a genin.
“You know the way Itachi thinks,” Shisui says. He’s eating his lunch as he talks to her. It looks clumsily handmade, though not the type of thing a mother would make.
Does Shisui have a family? Not, like, the clan. Actual family.
“Village, then clan, then family,” Kaeru says, voice bored. “We don’t talk that much, Shisui. Never have. Anyone could tell you that. Itachi could tell you that.”
“Village, team, clan, family,” Shisui corrects. He’s slightly patronizing, in that way of his.
“Itachi doesn’t have a team,” Kaeru says, yawning. “They don’t make genius’s keep sticking in teams. Right? Just look at you.”
“I was battlefield promoted,” Shisui says. “It’s different.”
Just look at him.. Battlefield promoted at six, or whatever. Never even got the chance to use his awakened sharingan to cheat at schoolwork.
“It’s not that different,” Kaeru says. She’s done here. He didn’t even bring enough food for her.
“Kaeru.”
The thing she hates the most about Shisui is that he’s a liar.
“Nothing good will happen to him in ANBU, Kaeru,” There’s a pleading, desperate quality to his stare, his voice, the way his shoulders sink. “He listens to you. If you just--”
He wants her to tell him because it would be hypocritical to come from him. Will he let her peel back his sleeve, see the tattoo for herself?
“I think one of my teammates is going into ANBU after we hit chunin,” Kaeru says to Shisui, voice oddly empty. “The Aburame.”
A blank pause.
“Yeah,” Shisui says. “I’ve seen his profile passed around. He’s a shoo in.”
“Nothing good’s gonna happen to him in ANBU,” Kaeru says.
She’s done here.
-------
The Hyuga scion’s younger twin had been sacrificed to save his older brother from having his eyes stolen by Cloud ninja, or something.
So now there’s no more twinsies in that compound, right. Just Neji, all alone with his little caged bird seal.
They’d taken her and Itachi to pray at the family shrine, the one that had a huge portrait of Madara and a long, engraved list of every Uchiha that had died before Konoha was founded, Izuna’s name highlighted from all the years of people’s fingers drifting across that one in particular.
The elders had said kind words about the dead Hyuga twin, and the nobility of his sacrifice.
In her opinion, his real mistake was having children.
-------
“Wanna take the exams?”
Their sensei is a careless sort, the lightning scars across his face not making him think one second more about the consequences of his actions.
“Yes!” Maruten booms excitedly, rushing over. “Yes, yes, yes! I’m going to be chunin at ten, jounin at 12! I’m going to be just like my uncle!”
“I doubt that,” their sensei says, eyes unreadable. “We’re trying not to have so many 12 year old jounins, these days.”
“Can’t be that hard,” Kaeru says. “Give them a year, and then you’ll have 13 year old jounins.”
“Thank you, Kaeru.”
“Come on, you two!” Maruten says. “I’m not sensing much excitement.”
“Our chances of success are low,” Tatsuma observes. “Why? Because the exams are not set in Konoha. It would be better to wait until they come back.”
“That could be years!”
“It will be years,” their sensei says. “Two years, to be precise.”
“Two years!” Maruten repeats. “We can’t wait two years for better odds, Tats! Please!”
Tatsuma hesitates, then nods.
“Participation increases our chance of dying, but also our odds of later success,” he says.
Now, both of them look at her.
“I don’t want to,” Kaeru says.
Does she have two teammates, or two puppy dogs? What the hell is this atmosphere?
She can withstand two ten year old boys.
..
....
-------
She finds Sasuke on the verge of tears, for some reason.
“I’m not crying,” he says.
Sure, kid. Get better at lying.
How old is he.. Like seven. She was there for his seventh birthday party. She remembers this. Definitely.
“So, why aren’t you crying?”
She stares at him, crouched down to be level with his spiky little Uchiha hair.
“I’m not crying..” Sasuke insists. “Because... Because... Because Itachi is going to become a chunin, and then he’ll have more time to teach me stuff, and then I’ll show it to all of those jerks at school, and then they’ll throw themselves at my feet asking me to teach it to them because of how cool it is, and then--”
He pauses, clearly not having thought that far ahead.
“And then you say but that’s not as cool as what my big sister taught me,” Kaeru says, helpfully.
“What?” Sasuke wrinkles his nose at her. “But you never teach me anything.”
“My only goal in life is to teach you that life is all about self fulfillment,” Kaeru says, giving his forehead a flick. “If you’re not happy, nobody’s happy.”
“Mom says not to listen to you when you say stuff like that,” Sasuke says. “She says you like to...” He trails off, pausing as he needs to sound out words above his reading level. “Con-found young minds.”
“I’d only do it for you, little brother,” Kaeru says.
“Liar,” Sasuke mutters.
“That’s not me, that’s your brother,” Kaeru says, suddenly reminded of why she came here in the first place. “Oh, yeah. My team’s gonna be taking the chunin exams as well. Sorry, Sasuke. I tried really hard to get out of it.”
He gives her a look of such deep betrayal.
“Look, as long as we fail out in the first couple of rounds, I can still come and sit with you in the stands, okay?”
She’s nothing if not reasonable.
Somehow, he looks even more betrayed.
-------
They don’t fail out in the first couple of rounds. In fact, were Itachi not also present and visibly soloing the challenges designed for a team of three, they would be in a pretty solid position as the ones to beat.
But as long as the rest of the exam is just the typical tournament style bracket, it’ll be fine even if she loses. Her mom, her dad and Sasuke have all crossed the border just to watch Itachi win, so she’ll be kind of annoyed no matter what happens.
At least, that’s what she thought until she realized that for the Land of Waterfalls, they had set the final area that the contestants would be fighting in as a flooded lake with scattered tree trunks, many that looked deeply unstable and prone to tipping.
“You’re joking,” Kaeru says.
“That is incredibly unlikely,” Tatsuma points out. She can see the little flickers as he sends some of his insects into the water. Giving an Aburame time to prep is not something she’d ever willingly do. If she’s up against him, she’s resigning.
“They’d better be,” Maruten says, looking really, really worried. All of his attacks kind of require something to stand on.
“You two are both worried. Why?” Tatsuma says. “We have all mastered water walking.”
“Yeah,” Kaeru says dryly. “I dunno if Maruten has mastered water-rolling.”
“I’ll figure it out,” Maruten says, staring at the field with a determined expression on his face. “I’m the mastermind, afterall!”
“As long as you're the master of your own mind,” Kaeru says.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Water users prefer genjutsu,” Tatsuma says, inflectionless. “We are in a water arena, with Takigakure’s representative using water.”
“There’s also Itachi,” Kaeru says.
Both of them turn to look at her.
“Itachi. Genjutsu is his preferred form of attack.”
“Wow, Kaeru. That’s the first time you’ve ever willingly brought him up.”
It looks like Maruten is tearing up a little.
“I’m so proud of--”
She kicks him into the water.
“Come on,” she says. “No one’s ever gonna be nice enough to let us preview a battlefield ever again.”
-------
The tournament roster is enough to really make anyone regret becoming a ninja. Four rounds total, but Kaeru’s going to be damned if she fights in more than two. Just enough to make chunin, because all this experience has given her is the burning desire to never participate in a chunin exam again.
‘I’ll kill every child in this village before I have to do this again’, or something.
No, wait. That’s the mist graduation exam.
Her first opponent is a mist ninja. Maybe that’s why she thought of it.
The girl-- Ruka, that’s right. She mostly looks very young and very nervous. Straight hair cropped at the neck, hands already clasped in a preparatory seal as they wait for the match to begin. Wait, she’s younger than Zabuza, so the graduation should have already stopped happening?
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
The girl just gets paler, hands shaking a little.
Kaeru can’t have actually scared her, right? She’s not very scary to look at. Maybe it’s because she looks so similar to Itachi, right down to the deep, deep marks under her eyes, and his antics in the second trial with the crows had freaked her out.
But she’s wearing the opposite colors, see? Kaeru wears the Uchiha red, instead of the Uchiha blue.
Taki has these beautiful chimes they ring to start each match. Lovely.
Let’s get this over with.
As the chimes continue to ring, Kaeru surges forward, leaping from her perch on top of the tangled tree root to land solidly on the water in front of Ruka. The girl gasps, leaping backwards as her hands curl to form a tiger seal.
“Water Release: Water Shield Technique!” she blurts out, shakily finishing the jutsu. The water surges up around her, a shield of water protecting her in all directions. Spikes shoot from it to push Kaeru into staying out of melee.
Poor girl.
Kaeru can feel the Taki jounin in the crowd wince as she patiently walks in a circle around the shield, just waiting for the girl’s chakra to run out.
“Knock knock...” She says, voice soft. “Come on, Ruka.”
The shield itself trembles, but stays up.
“You can’t win by staying in there, you know.”
No response.
Kaeru raises an eyebrow. Really?
“I don’t have all d--”
Hands grip her ankles from underneath the water, yanking her down.
Fuck the chunin exams.
Kaeru shuts her eyes completely as she hits the water, reaching down to grab at the hands that are tugging her downwards. Okay, mist girl. You got me.
There’s tons of water breathing techniques, though Kaeru doesn’t know any. Presumably, Ruka does. Drowning them both won’t get the right results.
She feels her lungs constricting as she uses up her tiny gulp of air to pull Ruka into a hug, tracing the two handed seal onto the back of her neck as water bubbles escape into a last ditch curse.
“Lightning Release: Depth Charge.”
Her vision goes white.
-------
“I’ve never seen our sensei move that fast,” Maruten says, speedily eating a whole bag of snackfood as he attempts to put the meat back onto his weirdly skinny frame.
Kaeru blinks at him, hoping the black spots quit dancing in her version while she’s too weak to kill them.
“I think he thought you were going to kill that girl for real,” Maruten continues.
“My hands hurt,” Kaeru observes.
“Like, we could have had a diplomatic incident with Kirigakure! Do you think anyone else is going to get a forceful intercession? Do you think I could get one?”
Kaeru flips her hands back and forth in front of her face. Yep, bandages from the fingers to.. Almost her elbow. Ow.
“You could get one,” she says. “Just almost die.”
Maruten seems to deflate at that comment.
“There’s no use anyway..” he says, voice sullen. “I lost.”
She gives up on getting rid of the black spots in favor of turning her head to stare at Maruten. He does look a little.. Drenched.
“Who was your opponent, again?”
She hadn’t looked past her own.
“Mangetsu,” Maruten says, voice souring. “That guy from the Houzuki clan.”
That name seems.. Almost familiar.
“He’s strong?”
“Kaeru, we met him in the previous trial. The guy can turn into water.”
Okay, she remembers now.
“He’s gonna be one of the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist,” Maruten says, the sourness of his voice giving way to a tinge of admiration. “I think he’d be a shoo-in to win the whole tournament, if Itachi wasn’t also here.”
“Great,” Kaeru says drily. “Two of them.”
She closes her bandaged hand into a fistbump, offered to Maruten.
“We can watch ‘em duke it out together.”
He doesn’t bump her hand.
“What are you talking about, Kaeru? You won.”
Damn it.
“And you’re fighting Tats next.”
Damn it.
-------
The only significant change to the field Kaeru can see is that one of the larger trees is on fire. It appears they aren’t bothering to reset the arena between fights, undoubtedly some bullshit about showing off your skill at adaptation and not because it seems like it would be a huge pain.
“You are late,” Tatsuma observes. “Why? Because you did not want to face me.”
“Absolutely right,” Kaeru says. “Mind if I surrender now? I’m injured. You won’t get a ton of high scores from taking me down anyway.”
“Incorrect,” Tatsuma says, “I would get many high scores merely through forcing you to reveal your abilities.”
“Come on, Tats.”
“In addition,” Tatsuma says, “Your pretense at surrender will not phase me. Not after listening to your lack of desire to ever attend another chunin exam. Let us fight without this charade.”
The cheerful little chimes ring out.
“I’ll show you a charade,” Kaeru says, and slaps one bandaged hand onto the water. “Fire Release: Ash and Smoke.”
When used in a forest, it actually does have ash and smoke, though at the moment all it’s producing is a lot of steam. Kaeru shakes her hands a little, the pain from the lightning burns making her seals clumsy as she sets up her next move.
The steam billows and whirls, covering the entirety of the battlefield in it’s warm billow.
Tatsuma undoubtedly has bugs already on her, so the smoke screen will do nothing against him, but the point of this fight is to get a promotion, and in her previous fight she’d done nothing in particular except use one technique when she was under water, where no one could see her.
Presumably, Tats already earned his promotion back against-- who had Maruten said he’d fought? Kayui. Trap specialist from Kumogakure. So for him, this is just tipping his percentages.
Kaeru sighs, patiently waiting for Tatsuma to finish his show.
“I know where you are, Kaeru,” He says, right on time. “It’s too late.. My bugs are tracking your every move.”
“Yeah?” Kaeru says, voice casual as she continues moving to various points around the arena. “You want to come close, finish me right off?”
A pause.
“As you know, I use Kochu insects,” Tatsuma says. “Do not worry, Kaeru. Though their poison induces paralysis and then death, we have plenty of medical ninjas on hand. As long as you surrender before it’s too late, of course.”
She hears gasps from the crowd. Did he not reveal this in his previous fight? Tatsuma hosts these little guys as his main insect of choice.
“I think I’ll risk it,” Kaeru says.
While Tatsuma of course did not reveal how long the poison takes to a crowd that contains both civilians and ninjas from other villages, naturally Kaeru knows how long the poison takes. It’s fast acting, so she gives it a minute for paralysis and then another few minutes til death.
Plenty of time to win.
“Hey,” she says. “Want to see something cool?”
“Absolutely not.” She can hear the wariness in his voice. “Unless you find the act of surrender, ‘cool’.”
She sticks her final kunai in the tree that had been merrily burning this entire time.
“Lighting Release,” she says, changing the name on the spot to better fit the circumstances, “Magnetic Garrotte.”
Connected by wire, the five kunai she’d set at different corners of the arena electrify, rising up at the edges of the mist where the judges can see them but Tatsuma cannot. Then, they tense, and, metal calling to metal, home in on Tatsuma’s location like a shark toothed noose.
He hears the crowd gasp before he hears the crackling of the kunai, giving him enough warning that he doesn’t die, catching the metal with one hand to keep parts of it away from him as he fails to stop another from giving him a deep scratch across his cheek.
It’s only enough to hold off the inevitable, though, as Kaeru steps in front of him, another kunai held patiently in her hand.
“I surrender,” Tatsuma says immediately.
“‘Kay.”
Kaeru sighs, helping get the tangled net off of him as the kunai still fight to try and get at his metal glasses and waist level kunai pouch.
“By the way,” she says. “Am I poisoned, or not?”
“You are not,” Tatsuma says. “I trusted that if necessary, you would fake being slowly immobilized and dying.”
“Why not just say ‘I trusted you’d surrender before then?’”
Tatsuma looks at her.
Kaeru looks back at him.
When their sensei comes to escort them off the field, both of them are laughing their heads off, Kaeru occasionally coughing from the smoke while Tatsuma’s insects chitter and echo his small chuckles into a true cacophony of sound.
-------
Apparently, the Takigakure Village Head’s heir had managed to get through the tournament without a single injury, due to fighting Kabuto in the first round, a person who had promptly forfeited for reasons that boiled down to chakra exhaustion and sounded a lot like politically giving face to Takigakure, and then because Itachi had scared him so bad that he had, in turn, surrendered almost immediately after standing in an arena with him.
Classic.
Well, at least the rest of the tournament isn’t until tomorrow.
“So, what’s that got to do with us?” Maruten says, bouncing around as their sensei tries to give them a tournament rundown.
“Nothing, really,” Their sensei says, a vexed look on their face. “You know, I hear all these stories about genin that do nothing but gossip. I bet they’d care about my stories.”
“I love your stories, sensei!”
A Konoha med nin rolls her eyes as she redoes Kaeru’s bandages while another gets to work on the gash on Tatsuma’s face.
Her, Mangetsu, Itachi, and some Suna nin named Maki were all that were left in the tournament..
Maki looked like the beginnings of a seal specialist, which had been good for her so far, but would be no good at all against Itachi, but her promotion was already assured and Itachi wouldn’t kill her so whatever.
Mangestu, on the other hand.
Ugh, why did she not just surrender to Tatsuma! Then this would all be his problem.
She slaps her forehead, immediately causing one of the wounds on her palm to start bleeding through the bandage.
-------
She should have known better than to count her blessings, because a night of rest means a night of Itachi coming to pay her a visit.
And how’s he going to start this conversation? Not with a congratulations, she can bet on that.
“Our family has noted that you haven’t come up to greet them,” Itachi says, which is such a strong non-starter she kind of wants to give him a round of applause.
“I’m injured,” Kaeru says, wiggling her fingers at him.
“Yes,” Itachi says. “They are worried.”
And?
Kaeru yawns.
“I’ll head up after I lose tomorrow,” she says. Go away.
“You put on an extremely strong showing for Konoha today,” Itachi says. “Father is proud to have two of his children enter the final rounds.”
Kaeru changes her mind. After she gets knocked out of the round, her whole team can just start heading back. She’ll make Maruten carry her.
Ah, Itachi is waiting for her to say something.
“What?”
“You seem close with your teammates,” Itachi says. His voice, if anything, is more wooden than when he conveyed what he thought to be their father’s sentiments. “It’s unusual, for Uchiha.”
She doesn’t want to deal with this.
“No it’s not,” she says, and goes to sleep.
-------
She sleeps through Itachi’s win against Maki-from-Suna, only to get dragged right back out onto that stupid piece of water and ashy tree remnants by her overly cheerful sensei.
“You can do it, big sis! Beat him up!”
Ah, is that.. Sasuke?
Kaeru squints up at the stands for the annoying colorblock of the Uchiha. Yep. She hadn’t checked any time before, but they certainly are there, no doubt currently shifting awkwardly as their mother tries to make Sasuke quiet down.
“Sorry about that,” she says to Mangetsu. “I’ve won too much, so now the kid’s got standards.”
Mangetsu laughs, revealing his own set of sharpened teeth. He’s only a little bit taller than her, shoulder length white hair and purple eyes giving him a really striking set of characteristics.
“I get it,” he says. “My little brother’s about that age. If he were here, he’d be doing the same thing.”
“Well,” Kaeru admits. “I was all set to surrender to you so that you and Itachi could go at it, but now I’d feel bad.”
“That’s okay,” Mangestsu grins. “In order to make it up to my brother missing out, I was definitely planning on telling him I’d beat both the Uchiha Twins, one after the other.”
“How about this,” Kaeru says, grin echoing the future Swordsman as the chimes once more ring across the water. “I’ll give you such an obvious scar that he’ll have to believe your story.”
“Water Gun Technique!”
Pelts of water erupt from both of Mangestsu’s hands and the tip of his sword, sending up huge impact sprays in the water around her as Kaeru jumps backwards to dodge away from them. She can’t do the covering steam again. Losing sight of Mangetsu is not a recoverable strategy. Can’t fire lightning back, which is always the annoying thing. Plenty of environmental water, no environmental lighting, making everything such a chakra drain.
Well, there’s one solution to this.
A staff unfolds from her belt, it’s three sections clicking together to form one.
“Quit that, Mangetsu,” she says, raising her voice. “Show off your sword skills. I heard that’s your thing.”
The water bullets stop.
“I don’t like to brag,” Mangestsu says, “But that’s something I do have some knowledge of.”
He unsheathes his own sword.
“That’s more like it,” Kaeru says.
A/N: The oxen and the donkey were toiling side by side, and the oxen turned to the donkey and said: stop slacking off, and take up your side of the yolk, or I will die under this weight, and you will be left to pull it all alone. and yet, the donkey refused the yoke, until one day the oxen really did die. And when that day came, the oxen's carcass was placed on the donkey's back, along with the rest of the weight.
no, the donkey cried.. the weight is far too heavy...
but there was no one left for him to ask for aid.