Cooldown

I let out an annoyed sigh, tossing aside the book I had been reading.

It finally happened.

Icha Icha wasn't managing to keep my interest any longer. The initial curiosity of actually reading Icha Icha, the story within the story of Naruto, had passed and the wonder I had held towards the writing was drying up. Patterns were emerging. It was growing too predictable to hold my interest. Frustrations were brewing with the way things were developing and unfolding.

I was becoming too familiar with the work and the author.

This wasn't anything new for me. It always happened, sooner or later. Be it music, a written work, or even something as mundane as an activity or food; I always overindulged and sank myself into it so completely, the moment I finally hit the point of familiarity, the crash utter of disillusioned and disgust would soon follow.

It would begin slowly. Some small detail I would notice and think to myself 'that could have been done better' or 'I would have done that differently'. Then I would begin to pick at threads, pulling here, stretching there. Seeing what made it a whole the way it was, trying to imagine what would change if something were altered, how it would ripple out and knock things over. Until at some point the threshold was crossed and I could no longer see what I had once thought so interesting or delightful about that thing.

Here it was a simple thing. I just didn't care about sex and women as much as Jiraiya did. Sure, I was in the middle of puberty and constantly horny. And, the man may have a legendary appetite for the fairer sex... But I had come from a place with the internet. I had probably been whacking it to more extreme stuff online than he had ever even imagined possible, and now I had already resolved myself to refraining.

And the ratio of smut to interesting content was just too skewed for me to bother with it any longer.

Day two... Three more to go.

I realized that I was also going a little bit stir-crazy by now.

No space to train. No room to mess around in. No internet to browse. No techniques I could really work on. Not while I remained under ANBU watch following the utter shitshow the second exam had become. The Hokage had decided to play it off coolly, keeping the rest of the exam going and pretending as if the fighting had all been a part of it. A sort of unexpected disaster the genin teams had to be ready for, you know? Totally normal, nothing to see here.

We weren't even allowed to talk with any of the other teams lodged in the tower. Though with Gaara around that was probably for the best.

To make matters worse, most of my clones had been popped after I had confirmed that Orochimaru was gone and I had switched places with the clone that had been hanging around with Naruto and Sakura. I was just left alone with my thoughts and the orange-covered book.

And wasn't this just a perfect metaphor for my time in this world?

At this point in the story, Naruto and Sasuke had risked their lives and nearly died already like a dozen times, when counted together. They had faced the long odds and stared death in the eye, time and again. Meanwhile, I just sort of fucked around and played every situation as it suited me, steering well clear of the real dangers.

The closest I had gotten to a real fight was against Zabuza and there he had been dealing with a lot more on his plate than just little old me. As much as the whole shitstorm with Orochimaru had left me more than a little wary of running into him again...

I hadn't really been in any danger during the whole thing.

But that was precisely why I didn't play it like canon. I had no assurance of surviving, even if I tried to stick to a half-remembered script. And even assuming I did survive... what then? What exactly did I achieve that way? I didn't even know where the story of Naruto had headed in canon.

With the Sharingan already activated and now matured, I had zero reasons to risk my life. None at all. Sure, I enjoyed a good scrap and having my metaphorical teeth at other people's throats. But fighting was only fun so long as you were winning. The moment fortune ceased to favor me... It'd probably be over with that. The End.

I didn't even have a demon in my gut to soften the blows. And now I'm whining about that again.

Sighing again, my convictions re-summed and re-examined for the third time this day alone, I slammed the back of my head into the pillow. Right, cabin crazy. Boredom. Getting antsy and jittery in here...

Maybe I should just meditate?

No. An emphatic no.

I'd just go around the bend ever more than I was already.

Long, intense meditation usually made me loopy. It made me have realizations, which seemed incredibly profound and deep at the time, but which would in hindsight make absolutely zero sense. It had to do with the fact that I'd be 'getting out of the box' a little bit too much, looking in at all the nonsense crafted into the commonly agreed-upon reality and then scoffing at it all, thinking myself above it.

Deep meditation can be destructive like that.

But those realizations were usually no more wondrous or earth-shaking than the nonsense one would spew while drunk or high.

It just was.

Though that did make me wonder about the possibilities of getting high with a new body. My previous one had somehow been largely immune to all the psychedelics I could get my hands on. Shrooms barely made me feel a tingle. Nutmeg just enhanced tactile sensations, especially the feel of my clothes against my skin, followed by a killed hangover. Booze made me hyper-social and even more fascinated with breaking stuff or playing with swords, and weed just made tastes more vivid.

Though fly agarics had given me interesting dreams when properly processed...

I think I saw some amanita muscaria back in the Forest of Death, but... I suddenly felt wildly uncomfortable, the way I always did when I started thinking about fungi too hard.

Because mushrooms are really terrifying when you really think about them, and probably what engineered all life as we knew it on Earth, predating animals and plants by billions of years, existing all across the earth as one great interconnected proto-intelligence, learning and constantly adjusting all around them like some great, big neural network, an overmind with a meta-consciousness so far beyond—

Let's think about something else, now.

What else did I bring with me? I couldn't go around training with any of my tools, but maybe I could devise some interesting chakra control exercises, or... Oh. Right. That.

I remembered now.

Something I had been putting off for a while now. Something important.

Alright, it's as good a time—actually, it's the best time for this, now that I think about it.

I get up and retrieve the storage scroll, rolling it open to the spot where numerous symbols and lines converge and surround a single kanji - that of 'book'. I run through the handseals, a little bit annoyed that I've had essentially zero success with cutting down on them when it came to this jutsu, as I retrieve the item enclosed within.

It had something to do with the fact that the scroll was performing the jutsu, in effect, rather than me doing something complex with my chakra that could be simplified through practice.

Regardless, I slam my palm into the spot.

Chakra and smoke accompany the item that I now grasp in my hand.

"Huh, what'cha doing Sasuke?"

If I was getting bored, then it went without saying that Naruto had been just about sticking to the walls, bouncing around like a crazy fox. The whining sounds he kept making weren't that far off from the real thing, either. Yip, yip, yip.

Not even Sakura could keep him contained and calm for long, as some time after noon today the novelty of staring at me finally started wearing off and her irritability finally began boiling over into physical violence. Which was a bit unusual, since I remembered their relationship being nearly entirely built on gratuitous amounts of comical violence. At least in the anime. But here they were much more civil about it, most of the time. Maybe it was just my less stand-offish nature causing fewer frustrations in our team's dynamic?

Regardless, we would now see just how bored Naruto was.

"It's a dictionary."

He blinked, looking suddenly a lot less interested.

And I got it. I had been putting it off for a long while now, too, and I had bought the damn book. And it wasn't cheap, not even for me and my clan's monies. Lesser seal script was literally the stuff used for sealing and that made it Serious Business.

"Oh... That's uh... I mean, I already read all my scrolls, so y'know, I kinda get it. But a dictionary?" Naruto said, squinting at me.

It had been a bit of a surprise, just how many different types of scrolls Naruto carried with him. I had him pegged as an idiot—and no doubt about it, he was an idiot—but that was not due to him being unwilling to crack open a book. Poison remedy scrolls, jutsu descriptions, random tactics lectures that I recognized from the library...

The sight of him reading had triggered some long-forgotten memory left in the dark recesses of my mind, of Naruto sitting on the floor of his apartment, surrounded by books and scrolls as he held a handseal with something balanced on top of his head. He must have been pretty young since I remembered him wearing a t-shirt and shorts, too.

It was weird, given how little I had actually seen him read until now, in the Academy or during our time together as team 7.

Maybe he was just shy about being seen actually working hard?

But where Naruto had gotten discouraged by the mention of the dictionary, Sakura had positively perked up and begun inching closer to me. All the enervation she had suffered from dealing with Naruto for these two days seemed to vanish like smoke in the wind, as she had sat up in her bed to peer at me with large, doe-like eyes filled with hope and expectation.

I see you, Sakura. But just because I see you doesn't mean I want to read with you.

I sighed again. I just had to get on with it, if I wanted to learn sealing myself.

"Is that a book about sealing, Sasuke-kun?"

Huh?

"You..." I look at her, frowning. Oh, right. She's the would-be academic, except that just meant she occasionally got the exposition dump in the anime rather than actually knowing all that much useful stuff. "That's right."

"I thought I recognized that book, it's one of the original Uzushio prints, isn't it? There was a copy of it in the Hokage's personal library," she said, scooting over next to me.

Too surprised, I remained where I was.

When had she been in the Hokage's personal—no, we did visit the tower while at the Academy occasionally. But how could, no I suppose that was to be expected of her. It was... just surprising how easily I had forgotten again that she was an actual human being and not just a vapid fangirl whose entire purpose in existence was to moon over 'Sasuke-kun'.

"Huh? What about the old man Hokage? And what's Uzushio?" Naruto asked, suddenly interested again now that the pinkette was getting involved.

She looked at him, appearing surprised. "You don't know, Naruto? But, I thought..."

But then she shook her head, sighing with the realization that of course, Naruto wouldn't know.

"Know what?"

Sakura shook her head.

"I thought you would know all about it, mister I'm-gonna-be-Hokage-y'know? The First Hokage's wife was from Uzushio. The pattern on your back, it's the same as on Kakashi-sensei's vest, too. Haven't you ever noticed that?"

I was suddenly just as lost as Naruto was. We exchanged looks and now Sakura realized that I didn't know either, which changed her tone from condescension to surprised hesitation. Should she keep talking, or stop before she potentially put her foot even more in her mouth?

"Keep talking. This is the first I hear about it," I said, realizing that for all I had read stories about Naruto back before—often detailing greatly his actual origin and his secret super powerful bloodline limits—I didn't actually know a thing about his actual ancestry and family.

The most popular theory had been that Naruto was the Fourth Hokage's kid...

But I vividly remembered that Kishimoto had denied that in some interview or another. And given the whole 'hard work trumps genius'-theme and how much Sasuke's heritage played into his genius, I figured that he had stuck to those guns until the end, rather than giving Naruto a special heritage too. I did vaguely recall that Naruto's mom was a redhead... But only because of the sheer amount of porn of the two floating around.

Even as someone who wasn't even peripherally interested in the series, I had run into that incest stuff.

I guess she will be coming back at some point...? I thought, looking at Naruto. Well, good for him. I hope they don't really bone each other, though.

"Well... Uzushio was one of Konoha's oldest allies, until they were destroyed during the Second Shinobi World War. Their symbol was the red spiral, so to honor that relationship Konoha still uses it in their flak jackets..." She trailed off, frowning at Naruto. "You really don't know any of this?"

The wide-eyed blond shook his head, looking intently at her, hanging on her every word.

"The old man Hokage—well, I just know that, they're both not around... My parents, I mean." He looked away.

"Huh..." Sakura blinked and something in her eyes softened. "Well, I don't know much, but... The First Hokage's wife was a woman called Uzumaki Mito." Naruto's head swiveled back, eyes goggling nearly out of his head. "And you're apparently distantly related to the Senjuu, too—to the First and Second Hokage's clan."

That was... not entirely unexpected, but still slightly surprising. Just slightly. Damn it, Kishimoto.

What was the First Hokage known for again? Mokuton jutsu? Was that in the cards for Naruto? I think I might have read about that before, but it had never left any impression on me. I mean, controlling trees and wood is kinda lame, when you really think about it.

That said, it was apparently immensely powerful for some reason. Though it didn't really fit Naruto's style. Using elemental ninjutsu, that is. Or maybe that was the reason; he wasn't going to learn any until he found mokuton? But didn't he have some elemental Rasengan stuff going on at some point, too?

I really didn't remember.

"Anyhow, Uzushio was really famous for their sealing. I think that was a big reason why the First Hokage married her. To secure an alliance and gain access to their sealing skills," Sakura continued, moving on from the subject of Naruto's clan.

"They..." Naruto swallowed heavily, his throat thick with emotion. "They were? But, what does the dictionary have to do with that?"

"Just as you use handseals for jutsu, you write seals with seal script. Or, so I've at least understood it," I answered.

"But... Can't you just, I dunno, write it normally?" He looked conflicted. As if he wanted to know more about sealing, but at the same time struggling to step into a subject he clearly knew so little about. "Like, like, on the explosive tags, it says 'explode', right?"

I nodded.

"Sure, it's in the middle of the tag. But that's more for the user's benefit. Kind of like a label. It would probably work better if written completely in seal script." Or maybe not. The composite character for explosion was made up of 'fire' and 'violence', which, was pretty descriptive and resistant to being misunderstood. I shrugged at Naruto's confused expression. "I don't actually know. But the squiggles around the character for 'explode' are all in seal script. So if I understand that, wouldn't I be able to make them myself? Or even improve on them for my specific needs?"

He looked a little skeptical but didn't argue with the logic.

Sakura chose to interject again then. "But Sasuke-kun, why are you looking to learn seal script? Even most experts on sealing don't do that anymore. Not when the village has such extensive libraries and references on working seal configurations..."

That was a good point...

But that was just how I was.

If I couldn't learn something from the ground up, inside out, I hated it. The fact that I had only been able to code using a few very specific languages had put me off software engineering so much that I never pursued it independently, despite being repeatedly told that I had a temperament and mindset very much suitable for it.

Because if I couldn't build—or at least understand—a computer from the smallest building block all the way up to the most complex function, then I didn't want to even try. Because if the march of progress was so far ahead that I would have to spend years playing catch up, only for there to have been more new technology and knowledge piled up than there had been before I had even started...

Just the thought made me angry. I felt a certain spiritual kinship with the late Terry Davis in that regard, strangely. What good was a computer for me if I couldn't make my own operating system? If I couldn't make my own compiler and own language? In that regard, I had always preferred tinkering with logic controllers, Raspberry pi's, arduino's and the like...

Very much a case of sour grapes, I knew. But I didn't care.

I simply hated it irrationally, which sapped all motivation from me, unless I was being forced to do it by some external pressure.

But here, with sealing, it seemed as if it was programming all over again, but just... frozen in time at a certain point in development. Less interconnected, less seeded and loaded with the logic of others. Meaning I could catch up and become a master of it in my own right, not just a specialist in an increasingly narrowing subset of some minor field.

That, I could get behind.

Even if I had been putting it off until now.

But fuck if I could explain this to anyone else in words without sounding crazy.

"I want to learn sealing," I said instead, simply, with the tone of voice one might use to describe taking up a casual hobby. "And, well... I'm worried about unintended consequences and implications with using, or mixing and matching at least, strings of character that I don't fully understand."

Sakura nodded, even as Naruto looked a little lost again.

"Things tend to explode even with only a little going wrong, with sealing," she told him.

"Huh."

"I mean, just look at the kanji we use. It's pretty obvious just how much can go wrong with sealing if you think about it for a few minutes," I added to her remark.

"Huh?" Naruto repeated, looking at me.

I smirked, deciding that an example would serve us best here.

"You know the character for special, right?"

He nodded.

It wasn't as if I had done an in-depth study on all the strange characters in kanji, so obviously, I was re-using an example I had noticed before. The whole point of this was to be that in-depth study, as far as seal script went.

"Write it down. Here, I've got some paper and a pen..."

The demon container frowned at me but obliged after a second. I looked down and nodded, extending my hand and putting a finger under the character. I looked to Sakura, smiling slightly.

"What does it say?"

"Umm... Special?" she replied, almost hesitantly. A little nervous, I realized.

I moved my finger just slightly, covering the first half of the character.

"And now?"

She blinked, leaning in a little closer to look at the half she could see. Recognition lit up upon her face. "Temple."

I moved the finger again, covering now the other half instead.

"C-" Sakura choked back a laugh, eyes going wide. "Cow?!"

Realization flashed on her face and she started laughing.

"Wha—Wait, d-did I write it wrong?" Naruto was panicking now, looking at Sakura's reaction.

"No. You wrote it right, Naruto. After all, what better way to say 'special' than to imagine a cow in a temple."

He blinked, then chortled as well, erupting into raucous laughter and falling over onto his back a second later, probably imagining it. Sakura's subsiding laughter redoubled and even I found myself chuckling over it, not entirely immune to the swing in mood.

How long had it been since I had laughed with someone else? Well, whatever.

"Or how about the character for fox?" I asked.

Sakura kept chuckling lowly, but paid attention, while Naruto seemed to freeze. The subject of sealing and foxes hitting just a little bit too close to home, I could imagine.

Still, I wanted to say this.

"I'm a hundred percent sure that the character was written wrong somewhere along the way and typo just stuck. See here..."

I wrote the component symbols, comparing them again, pointing them alternatively to the two looking over at my paper.

Melon beast. Clawed beast.

Naruto blinked owlishly, jaw agape as he tried to process the slight difference. Then he started laughing, even harder than Sakura had been before, and she too found it funny enough to fall on her back to roll with the amusement.

I let them laugh it out, smiling and chuckling a little as the minutes passed.

"I never really thought about it like that..." Sakura said, still out of breath as she wiped the corners of her eyes. "I had read somewhere that the origin of the word kitsune came from the yipping sound that foxes make—kitsu, kitsu, or ketsu, ketsu... which combined with the honorific -ne formed the original word... But that was based on an old temple scripture, which seemed pretty outlandish otherwise."

Ketsu? As in 'butt'? Huh... So the Kyuubi might in fact have a magnificent rear, instead? I shook my head, exhaling the rid myself of the horny thoughts. Where was the bonk when I needed it?

"Well anyhow, I figured I might want to look into it properly to try and figure it out if I wanted to get good at sealing."

She smiled brilliantly at me.

"Yes, of course. I've wondered about it, too - does it matter which way the character is written? Not merely the radicals, but left and right? We read right to left, or up to down... But the characters themselves are usually written left to right. Does that mean it is cow-temple as written or temple-cow as read?"

I... hadn't even considered that.

My turn to: "Huh."

Naruto nodded, as if impressed only now that Sakura was looking so interested. "This is that writing stuff you were talking about earlier. About, how it's really strong, right?"

Not exactly, but... I could imagine that the case would turn out to be true. So I shrugged. Easier to let him think that than trying to explain the slight difference that it made in my mind.

"In that case..." Sakura licked her lips, looking at Naruto with analytical eyes, like a piece of meat she was about to chop up for weighing. "Maybe you should ask Naruto? Or... we could all work on this together?"

I frowned.

This didn't sound like one of her usual come-ons or date plans.

"What do you mean?"

She hesitated and I could see the sheer depth of thought behind her eyes for a moment as she struggled to give an elevator pitch over a subject she probably thought deserved a full lecture on. "May I?"

I nodded, handing her the pen she was reaching out for.

She drew a very simple character on the paper. Only a handful of strokes. Then she raised the paper and showed it to Naruto.

"What does this look like? I don't mean what it means, what does it look like?"

"Uh... Well, a mountain, obviously."

I blinked. It was the character for 'mountain', but I thought it looked more like a crown than a—"Ah, now I see it."

Sakura nodded.

"The reigning theory is that writing, and seals, are a first-order simulacra, directly mirroring a phenomenon, blurring the lines between pictography and ideography—and when you add in the kana, you have phonograms, but that's beside the point. They're not always drawn up in a way that has to make sense, because the resolution with which it is copied is so detailed that we can't really understand it, just like with handseals and sealing, and because like with the kitsune, there is inevitable degradation and corruption of ideas, meaning that it evolves with time..."

She swallowed, realizing that she was losing us.

"Anyway, the Uzumaki are supposed to be really good at seals and a lot of scholars think that maybe they didn't really invent their characters, so much as they... maybe just discovered them?"

Like some form of magical runes or something?

I nodded, slowly, turning to look at Naruto.

Meaning each character might have a depth which went beyond the purview of a simple dictionary. Like... I struggled to find a good analogy. Like loanwords, back before. Sanguine, meaning confident optimism, eagerness, but also having connotations of blood due to its Latin origin.

"Like, some sort of bloodline limit? The Uzumaki inherit a talent for sealing?"

She shrugged, grimacing. "Well, Takajo-no-Uesuki-no-Murakumo and the Poet of Lightning Falls both seem to think so, and they're experts on sealing history according to the books I could read..."

I nodded, turning introspective again.

It made a certain amount of sense, pieces falling in place in my head to form a picture—or a hypothesis.

Back before, the religious leader Dalai Llama was thought to reincarnate as a baby after he died, and to find him his followers would wander the lands to test numerous children with a set of the Dalai Llama's old toys. It was thought, as far as I could remember, that the reincarnated spiritual leader would recognize his old toys and thus choose them without fail among a myriad of other toys.

Which, when you really thought about it, was just a way to screen for a very specific type of personality. For very specific preferences and ways of looking at the world, unmarred or corrupted by external factors like societal norms or expectations.

Newborn children, quite literally the moment they popped out of the womb, had specific preferences and interests that would practically define them for the rest of their lives. A scientifically measurable phenomenon, by measuring how long certain images would capture their attention; boys liked to look at things, while girls liked to look at people's faces.

And it wasn't just some novel, pointless difference either, as I remembered from Norway, where a hospital had managed to dramatically cut down on suicidal tendencies among newborn babies born with mutilated or unclear sexual organs, by utilizing a test very similar to the Dalai Llama's toy test to determine each child's gender, rather than arbitrarily trying to decide on one or another.

Essentially allowing the child to choose their gender before any outside influences could warp their perceptions and values that would run contrary to their nature.

But those were epigenetic differences, though.

Not heritable traits, but rather how the fetus's brain developed in the womb, based on which parts of its genome were activated - which parts were coding or non-coding DNA, as its brain developed. But as far as the Dalai Llama's personality traits went... I had no idea whether they were genetically determined or not, though.

As far as I knew personality traits weren't particularly heritable. At least back before.

In anime logic, though...

My focus returned to Naruto.

If the Uzumaki clan really had some sort of heritable factor which made them better suited to understanding seal script—possessing some sort of crouching moron, hidden badass-gene—if he really embodied the tired cliche of not actually being dumb, but merely being a fish asked to climb a tree... Then it might just be worth it to learn alongside him and comparing notes.

I cracked open the dictionary, choosing a character at random, and wrote it on the paper alongside all the other scribbles, before turning it to Naruto.

"What does this look like to you?"

He peered at me suspiciously again, before squinting at the character, turning the paper this way and that.

"It kinda looks like a baby."

'Child,' the dictionary said.

I scoffed. It was a terrible sample size and could easily just be a fluke, but... Well, why not just try it?

"Naruto. We're learning seals together now." And noticing the hopeful expression next to us, I sighed. "What about you, Sakura? Feel like joining our little study group?"

"Yes! I'd love to, Sasuke-kun!" she immediately agreed, of course.

It wasn't optimal, having to deal with her... But with this, I was pretty sure that I had secured Naruto's—at the very least, nominal—cooperation.

But he was staring at the paper, at the numerous characters we had drawn there, with one hand... With one hand on his belly, clutching at the cloth there. Oh, that's right Naruto... It's not just your heritage, it's literally what determined your destiny the day you were born. So now what? What will you do about it?

He looked up and our eyes met.

"Yeah. I'm in."

I smirked. There's a good boy.

It was only a couple of hours until Naruto was bouncing on the walls again.

Usually at this point, if I had to deal with him and couldn't just leave, I'd tell him to pop a few dozen units and have them go train on fundamentals again. The drop in his chakra usually seemed to calm him down for a while, and even as all the excess chakra from his clones returned to him, it was still at a level below before, enough to keep him manageable for another few hours.

But seeing as how we were confined to our quarters until the second exam was over...

I guess I'll have to think of something to distract him...

Something which wouldn't take us out of the room, but wouldn't make things even more unbearable. Just telling Naruto to make a bunch of clones in a confined area was just asking for a circus.

Didn't I want to work on my chakra sensing, too...?

I close the dictionary, just hard enough that it snaps shut and their eyes turn to me, Naruto's furrowed brows clouded and Sakura's blinking with surprise. Guess she was having fun.

"Let's take a little break. How about a little game, Naruto?"

"Suuure?"

As usual, he regarded anything I would suggest with the utmost caution. A healthy approach to cultivate, really.

"Have you noticed how your Shadow Clones can still sense things around them, even when they don't have eyes or ears?"

Naruto blinked. "They can?"

Oh right, he might not have done any experimentation with the Transformation jutsu in battle yet. Well, I just needed to remind him.

"Remember how I used your clones in the second exam plan's first phase? How they knew to transform back when I threw them?"

A light went up in his eyes and he nodded. Beside us, across the table, Sakura was now paying rapt attention, even though she had been enjoying the studying and book learning well enough.

"That's a skill known as chakra sensing and with practice, it can become even better. In fact, you already know how to do it—it's the way you can feel how other people use jutsus close to you, or when someone is molding a huge amount in preparation for a strong jutsu. Like when Kakashi and Zabuza fought each other."

"...Or when you used that fire jutsu on the bridge," he added, solemnly.

"Right."

"Kakashi-sensei could feel it right away, too," Sakura said, sniffing as she looked down at the table.

Damn it, did I seriously traumatize my whole team with that one thing?

Was there some sort of morality balance at work; I inch even a little towards being an utter bastard and everyone else gets PTSD? Well maybe. I hadn't been exactly an expert on the stuff, but I had read more than most on the subject. If they felt shame about how they acted then, and let their thoughts constantly return back to that moment, each repetition of that memory would become that much more sinister and haunting.

That, and it was their first real mission, too.

So I guess without the emotional buffer of 'Sasuke died!' and 'Sasuke's alive!' keeping them occupied, the massacre had become that much more prominent in their minds. How many did Zabuza end up getting in canon anyhow? I think most of them ran off when Inari showed up, so probably not too many.

Wasn't this why we had that long-ass walk back? To decompress? Fucking do your job, Kakashi.

I couldn't really blame him for this, though. It pretty much was all me.

"Right... Which means it's something we need to learn. I could sort of feel that Orochimaru's jutsu when he did something big, but if we could feel smaller jutsu it could allow us to avoid ambushes and stay safe."

I didn't know how to dress this up as a morally good thing now, or as some miracle method by which we could avoid having to slaughter our enemies in the future, so the best I could do was remind them about the fact that we were still tiny fishlings in a massive damn ocean.

"It's not really that good, though, is it?" Naruto asked. Frowning with recollection. "I can't really tell anything until the clones hit something. But I guess it could be useful to learn."

"I heard that sensor-nin need to have very good chakra control. Ino-pig's family are supposed to be good at that kind of stuff..." Sakura supplied, frowning now as she thought about her friend-cum-rival.

I still thought that whole thing was pretty toxic, but I doubted she would listen to a word I had to say about it.

As far as chakra control went... That actually made sense.

"Yeah, the way I've gotten it to work is by molding a small amount of chakra and then trying to sense from that what's going on."

"Huh?" Naruto squinted at me, confused.

"See, chakra affects chakra. So when a powerful jutsu is used, it affects nearby chakra more than it does other things, so by having a little bit of chakra molded and seeing how it reacts. Like... still water, or a taut string or the small bones in your ear, being disturbed by sound."

His confusion didn't seem to abate any by that explanation.

But that was only proof of my own inadequate understanding of how it worked. It wasn't something that the Sharingan could see and understand, technically lacking the need for handseals, and being mostly an internal process. Nor had it really been explored in the anime as far as I remembered. So I was sort of left at the level of a normal genin here.

I had managed to get this far by virtue of my Sharingan seeing chakra and having the memories of Shadow Clones to work with.

"Okay, I admit, I'm kind of guessing here. But, I think that Shadow Clones are better at it than we are, since they're chakra constructs. Like they can have eyes and ears, but they can also do away with them entirely in a way we can't."

Naruto nodded and Sakura looked a little dispirited, realizing that I had obviously planned for this to be something to be done by Shadow Clones.

Sure, if she could become a competent sensor-nin she would have a lot more to add to our team—however long we would remain one, given that I was planning on ditching them as quickly as possible...

Actually, that was a good reason to encourage her to work on that. Once I left her in the dust, she'd need every advantage she had, so plying her crush on me to her future advantage was just fair compensation for ditching her. Right? Anyhow, what was I, right—but while having Sakura be a competent and dedicated sensor-nin was a good idea, having Shadow Clones be able to give us the direct information would simply be better.

Like, throw out a clone and have it ping your surroundings, send it out to scout ahead or then leave it behind for surveillance... It would give both Naruto and me a lot more versatility.

"Let's make a competition out of it—who can learn sensing first wins."

"Win what?" Sakura asked, looking up intently.

"What kinda competition?" Naruto wondered.

I shrugged.

"Haven't thought that far. I'm open to ideas."

Naruto immediately jumped at the chance: "Losers buy the winner ramen at Ichiraku!"

Sakura and I sighed in unison, before looking at each other.

"I guess food at winner's place of choice has worked well enough until now..." I assented grudgingly.

If Sakura did get it working first, pampering her by going out to eat with her would be a more than a fair trade for whatever insights she could give me on how to do it myself. And Naruto was always easy to deal with, even if I was already sorta tired of ramen after just the one time.

Which was weird, since that kind of carbohydrate-rich and salty food would have been right up my palate back before. Probably something to do with this body's digestion and nutritional needs, since I hadn't felt the need to salt anything a single time as Sasuke. Didn't he like tomatoes, too? I hated tomatoes before.

Would need to test that.

Sakura nodded, filled with a renewed sense of vigor immediately. "So, now what kind of game can we play in this room?"

"And without filling it to the brim with clones," I added with a meaningful glance to Naruto.

"Yes." She nodded immediately.

An idea was forming in my mind on how to do it, now that we had started talking about it.

"How about this..." I began. "Me and Naruto will play rock-paper-scissors. The winner gets to do either a weak jutsu—like a Transformation—or just mold chakra. As much or as little as they want. Meanwhile, you," I say and point at Sakura. "And our clones—transformed into smaller objects all around us to save space and so that they can't cheat by looking—will have to tell us which of the two of us is molding chakra. The clones can just pop when they think they know and then Naruto and I can tell who it was.

"Whoever gets it right, let's say ten times in a row is the winner. Sound reasonable?" I asked them, turning the palm of my hand up as if weighing something.

"Yeah, yeah! Let's do this!" Naruto grinned, obviously having a clever ploy in mind.

"Hold on," Sakura said, raising a hand in objection and pouting. "How many clones will you be making? It's not fair if you both just have a dozen when I'm alone."

"Good point." I nodded, but then thought about it. "But... Let's not put any rules down yet. We don't know what affects the clones' ability to sense chakra. Maybe having more chakra makes them better sensors? Or maybe less? The point is, we're trying to get better at it and train."

She frowned but nodded anyhow.

"But for starters, let's limit ourselves to one clone, Naruto."

"Aww..." He grumbled but nodded.

We both made a single Shadow Clone and then had them transform into a shuriken, tossing them on the floor next to Sakura as she turned her back to us.

So, Naruto and I faced each other, holding up our fists as I raised three fingers. Two. One, none.

Back before I had had a crazy good intuition for rock-paper-scissors. I didn't know how it worked, I just knew to trust my split-second gut feeling and I tended to win a lot. Ro—Scissor!

Naruto throws out a scissor.

Draw.

Our eyes met. I raised three fingers again and he nodded.

Three fingers. Two. One, none.

Scissor.

He threw out paper. And goggled, looking somehow betrayed by his hand. I smirked at him, but aside from a little grimace, he didn't let the loss show. This wasn't even the real competition yet... Now, should I do nothing and say that I did to throw them off, or should I play nice?

I had told them that the winner could use as little or as much chakra as they wanted, and the more you molded, the easier it obviously was to sense. Both for you and for the other two. But I hadn't told them that I could just not mold any chakra at all and wait for whoever was antsiest to try their luck and lose since I could then say that I hadn't been molding any and point out they had just been guessing...

With games like these, there were a lot of dirty little tricks you could always play. Though given that the point was to cultivate our skills, I guess I should play nice.

Left hand in half-tiger, I molded about three Transformation's worth of chakra around me.

No one reacted. I looked at Naruto, who was looking at me curiously.

Oh boy... I guess we had our work cut out for us.

I had to up it to twenty Transformation's worth, approaching Body Flicker levels, before anyone noticed a thing.

"Okay, this isn't working," I finally said, accepting defeat.

"Obviously," Naruto echoed, mulishly. Sakura, too, looked disappointed with how little luck we had been having.

I exhaled, rubbing my brow.

We needed to re-think our approach here, since we had obviously jumped in at the deep end of the pool with this game. Our fundamental ability to sense chakra was too lacking, so obviously we couldn't get it to work. This wasn't like teaching them to walk up trees, even by the canon way, since there at least there had been a solid example and proof of it working.

Okay, so, back to basics.

"For now, let's forget about the game. Instead, let's just try and figure out how to sense chakra in the first place well enough that we recognize the feeling."

They looked slightly mollified by that suggestion.

"Naruto, if you would please?" I asked, my eyes rolling red.

"Hey, isn't that cheating?" he asked, still adopting the ram seal.

I shrugged. "I'll take any advantage I can get, so long as I can actually get something out of this."

The blond frowned, then switched to the cross seal and produced nine clones. Suddenly the room felt a lot more crowded. "Then, I'm not gonna hold back either."

"That's fine. All is fair in love and war, as they say," I replied with a smirk. This wasn't really either, now that I thought about it, though. But maybe it would motivate Sakura, so whatever.

Naruto grinned and began just pumping chakra into the air around him, bleeding with power as only he could. My eyes could see the flame-like waves roiling off of him like a bonfire as the air itself wavered with his power.

It was kinda too bad this wasn't Dragonball, where a massive aura was actually useful.

Focus.

I tried to mold my chakra and isolate the feeling of Naruto's chakra pushing against mine. Slowly, with the help of my eyes' ability to actually see the fluctuations right in front of me, I started to get something of a hang for the sensation.

"Got it," I said out loud.

None of the close-eyed clones replied, nor did Sakura, too busy trying to get a feel for the chakra on their own.

I heard movement outside our room's door. So, letting go of the chakra I had been molding to sense Naruto's, I stood up and walked over. Opening it to look outside, I stared blankly at the masked ANBU standing there.

The mask offered good concealment, with the eye-slits designed to occlude the eyes and give the impression of only a blank blackness behind the mask. But my eyes pierced that little bit of design easily enough, allowing me to engage the woman before me in a staring contest on equal ground. More than, actually, since I could make my eyes glow and spin even without actually throwing any genjutsu around.

Usually, the glowing and spinning got to people pretty quickly.

Sensing that I wasn't going to ask, the ANBU woman instead gave up first, causing me to smirk at the petty victory.

"You are causing a disturbance," she said, all business.

"We're not allowed to train?" I asked, challengingly.

She didn't reply, returning to her quiet, oppressive-to-most staring.

"You are causing a disturbance," she repeated.

I sighed.

Stubborn, or just that socially stunted?

"What kind of disturbance? 'Helping genin teams outside the tower to find their way' or 'inciting the sand guy to start murdering people'?"

"Yes."

Wonderful. A comedian. Or a mathematician. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference. Though I had walked right into that one.

I sighed again and turned around, looking at Naruto.

"Bring it down to about a half so the nice ANBU lady can say she did a good job."

Naruto nodded and exhaled, adjusting his chakra output accordingly. It wasn't like he had been going anywhere near his all-out before, but compared to a second ago, the room seemed somehow a little less alive.

"Better?" I asked the ANBU lady.

She said nothing.

"Good." I nodded happily and closed the door, since she wasn't going to act like a normal human being.

And blinked.

Sakura was doing something. My Sharingan could immediately spot the chakra threads she was making, connecting the fingers of her left hand to the right. Right, chakra affects chakra, so maybe...

Brought my hands together flat, as in prayer, and created five strings of chakra between both hands' fingers.

Immediately I could feel a sort of humming or vibration through them. But I couldn't tell where it was coming from, just that it was happening. So it seemed kind of useless at first glance. No, maybe I can adjust this to use with several Shadow Clones, spreading them around to see if there's a difference between them. The human eyes and ears both worked by measuring twice and calculating the differences to guess at distance, so with enough practice I'd probably become able to do it with a bunch of clones, too.

It wasn't much, but it was a start.

I could probably refine it alongside the other sensing method and get something decent worked out with a few days of practice. Still, I sighed. Between this and studying lesser seal script, the next few days are just going to be an absolute hoot. I can just tell.