Chapter 2: Little Eternity

Published: 6/7/2016

Edited: 4/16/2017

Dear Suzu,

I'm afraid we won't be able to meet up for a while, kiddo. I'm currently sending this to you from out of the country. Something's stirring down south, and I've been asked to look into it. If it's true, we need to keep a careful eye on it—we don't need any enemies setting up shop in our neighborhood. I'll be investigating thoroughly, so I expect to be away from the village for some while.

Sorry about this. While I'm gone, start thinking up names. I can tell you without even reviewing the manuscript that all of our names will have to change—mine, yours, Minato's, everyone's. Start editing what you can now so we'll be farther along when we finally do meet up.

Until then.

Your friend,

Jiraiya

I did very well in the Academy. The schoolwork of a six-year-old child, even a ninja child, was laughably easy when armed with the memories of two decades' schooling; and as for my performance in PE, it was excellent. I was an active child with unfairly well-developed mental acuity, so I improved at an exceptional pace. It wasn't long before there was talk of skipping grades.

I didn't realize it back then, but with the perspective I have now I rather firmly believe that proposition had been my first encounter with death. Skipping grades, after all, meant an earlier graduation, and an earlier graduation meant an earlier deployment. Fortunately, Auntie Reiko and Uncle Souhei—possibly hoping that the intervening years might bring the war to an end—cited concerns about removing me from my age group and declined moving me ahead. They caught a lot of flak for it, but they held firm in their decision.

At the time I didn't give much thought to their choice, though I was glad I wouldn't be separated from the friends I had blessedly been able to make. Now, though, I sometimes find myself wondering what sort of grisly death I would have died if they hadn't held me back. I barely survived coming out of the Academy at age nine. Seven or eight would have seen me killed for sure. After all, great potential—which is what I suppose the instructors must have seen in me—did not automatically guarantee great skill. I was good, but even at that age Akihiko and Yoshiya had outshone me in their fields of expertise.

I learned a lot from them both. Yoshiya was an invaluable resource; he was one of the few people who were willing teach a six-year-old how to mold chakra. He was perfectly capable of using chakra himself, so despite the dire warnings issued about the potentially lethal consequences of trying to access it before we were ready, he had no issues with instructing someone he thought could handle it. He ignored the standard Academy explanation of physical and spiritual energy and instead offered me this advice:

"Chakra is something that can only be created with balance. People who aren't well-rounded are useless at using it. It takes both physical and spiritual health. Chakra with different ratios of energy can be made and can have useful properties, but unless you master both sides of it, you'll never be able to use it right."

He might have only been parroting someone else's words—and I suspected he was, because prodigious though he was, he was six—but he sounded very sage.

"I think you'll manage pretty well, since you get good grades all around," Yoshiya mused. He didn't know about my offer to skip grades, so I refrained from making an ironic comment. "You might even have larger reserves than me. You're better at taijutsu, so your physical energy doesn't cap you at the same point mine does." He grinned crookedly. "Bet you my control's better, though."

Cheeky. I didn't have anything to reply with, though, so he went on and explained how to meditate on the hara, the center of the body's chakra network, and how to manipulate the energy there. It was an odd feeling—like flexing a muscle that I hadn't known existed—but when I pushed the energies together warmth welled up within me. For a brief moment, it swirled in my stomach before it leaked away, draining in all directions. A buzzing sensation fizzled out just beneath my skin, and for a moment, I thought I could feel something in the air around me.

"So?" Yoshiya asked expectantly as I blinked through the odd sensation. As soon as it was there, though, it was gone; everything cleared away until the empty classroom felt just the same as it always had.

"...It went away," I said after a moment, dropping the tiger seal from my hands and looking down at my stomach.

"The chakra? It's probably because you didn't direct it," Yoshiya figured. He reached behind him and snagged a blank piece of paper off the desk. He ripped a piece off and handed it to me. "Here, use this. If you mold your chakra and send it up to your forehead, the paper will stick. It's the first exercise Dad ever taught me."

"Send it up to my forehead?" I repeated. That did sound familiar. "How do I do that?"

"You close the tenketsu you don't need," Yoshiya replied. "Most people can't intentionally put out chakra through tenketsu that aren't in the hands or feet, but they still bleed chakra if you leave them open. But if you close the right ones the chakra naturally flows where you want it to go."

"Close the tenketsu?" I considered this, and sat still for a moment. I tried molding chakra once more; warmth swelled up within me, easier and a little faster this time. I focused on it, and there was silence.

Yoshiya looked at me intently.

"...Um, how do I close the tenketsu?" I asked as the chakra spilled everywhere again, dissipating.

Yoshiya looked puzzled. "You close them," he said, as if wondering what else there was to say. I sent him a blank look; he responded in kind.

In that moment, I understood that some people were born with perfect chakra control in the same way that some people were born with perfect pitch. That was probably as far as I was going to get with Yoshiya today. I would just have to practice and find out the rest for myself.

Yoshiya wasn't the only one helping me improve, though. In fact, though Yoshiya was talented enough to already know all three of the Academy's signature ninjutsu, his skill level with chakra was so far above mine that we reached a fundamental disconnect whenever he tried teaching me beyond a certain point. Contrarily, I was good at physical activity, so Akihiko was able to share a lot of his wisdom about our clan's taijutsu style, Hurricane Gale, with me.

In polite speech, one might say the Namikaze clan was made mostly of slender, shortish people with small builds and low punching power. If not going out of the way to be nice, however, it sufficed to say that were made like toothpicks and we weighed next to nothing. Hurricane Gale, consequently, was a very non-confrontational style that relied on redirection and torque for its strikes. Emphasis on kicking attacks and leg-work was heavy; even our men had somewhat below-average upper body strength, so we drew power from the hips instead. We were also the type that flew—soared, really—when we got hit, so learning how to roll and fall was pretty much the only thing one did when learning in the first tier.

I was still in the first tier, and most of my offensive techniques were basic, Academy-standard attacks. Akihiko, however, was learning from the fourth—something that would have been unprecedented had he not been born after Minato—and he delighted in sharing his martial knowledge with me. I think he might have been trying to groom a better sparring partner for himself. Yoshiya, in the words of Akihiko, was good for agility training but useless for practicing almost anything else with. He held nothing back when I asked for tips.

With both of their help, I became a lot more comfortable in my own skin. My sense of space improved drastically in those first few months, and with Yoshiya's paper-improvised leaf-sticking exercise, I was also able to occupy myself during my lessons in a non-disruptive way. I grew a lot as a shinobi just by being around those two. They were unnaturally talented.

The Academy teachers noticed this—noticed in general that the three of us were developing very well—and they kept us lumped together as often as possible. It was a brand of favoritism that was, in hindsight, extremely damaging to the other students. The Academy instructors locked themselves into a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy because of it: they knew that a majority of us would die before our careers would really even start, and as a consequence, they tended to pool their energies on the select few they figured would probably make it. The other children's instruction suffered for it, and because they ended up leaving the Academy with educations that were only half-done, they died right away if they were put into battle. It was only later on during the post-war reforms that the practice of balancing teams—that is, practices like propping up the dead-lasts with the top-ranked graduates—was implemented.

As it was, the three of us received a lot of extra attention. In class spars and other group activities our instructor would only make a short pretense of monitoring the other students before he dedicated the rest of his time to hovering over us and providing as much feedback for improvement as possible. After school hours, Akihiko monopolized the teacher's time by requesting as many spars as he could give him, and Yoshiya was forever begging instruction in advanced jutsu off of whatever sensei he could find. As for me, I was allowed to sit with the older years for the after-school kuniochi course, which was specifically geared for teaching young girls the ninja techniques that boys weren't usually called upon to put into practice.

These lessons were easily my favorite part of the Academy. We learned acting techniques, accents, forgery, different styles of flirting, and even singing and dancing. Generally the classes were regarded as superfluous—if it hadn't been wartime, Infiltration and Espionage would have used them to scout out good future spies, but alas—because the fighting had long since progressed past the point of spying and was now firmly entrenched in gritty, open combat. The kunoichi course wasn't shut down, though, because above all that extra "junk," the teachers provided us with a lot of tips and practical advice about being females in a world of male shinobi. It ranged from basic things like how to handle unwanted advances from clients and comrades to things I had never even considered, like the making and application of a seal that concealed the scent of menstrual blood from trackers. They also warned us about the difficulties we would face due to our gender; first and foremost among them was the fact that we would, plainly, stand out.

"When you're young in particular, enemies will look to make you targets right away," Erina-sensei cautioned us. "They do it for a lot of reasons. Taijutsu specialists will make a point of focusing you down on the battlefield because they know they have the upper hand in physical strength. Because a lot of us girls tend to be gen-, nin-, and iryou-ninjutsu users, enemies will also generally try to take us out right away so they can eliminate our ability to recover the wounded while simultaneously shutting down as much of the potential area-of-effect damage as possible. In interrogation we often bear the brunt of the questioning because they try to take advantage of our naturally high empathy, and in a similar vein, they always target the kunoichi first when trying to extract intel through torture." Erina-sensei let out a short sigh. "They usually try softer approaches first if you're caught alone, but if you happen to be captured alongside your squad, there are generally two routes that those situations take.

"The first route goes like this: if they know that it's likely you have the information they want, they hurt your teammates and demand you give up what you know if you want to ease their suffering; this is one of the methods of exploiting empathy that I mentioned earlier. The second route, though, is the one where you are tortured. It's generally agreed amongst ninjas that females tend to have a lower pain tolerance than men, at least in matters of sudden acute pain. It has a lot to do with the cyclic nature of the concentration of hormones in our bodies, but that's an explanation for another time. What really matters is that enemies will try to take advantage of this. It takes less work to bring us to an extreme point of suffering, so it makes us more vulnerable."

"You tend to have higher-pitched voices, too," the lone male chuunin-sensei who had been sitting at his desk in the corner put in quietly, with eyes cast down at the papers before him. "You tend to have more piercing screams…" His pen went still. "...It has a bad effect on your comrades, if they hear it."

We turned to look at him, but he added nothing else and seemed to refocus on his work. Erina-sensei let out another sigh.

"And there's that, too," she said. "You might not be able to manage it if it comes down it, but if you think you can keep yourself stoic, you might be able to help your allies hold out. Do your best, if you find yourself in that situation someday."

The rest of the lesson lingered on unpleasant scenarios. We were instructed on the protocol for handling cases of rape and sexual abuse, and of the various counselling services available to us if we ever found ourselves in need of them. We were also warned that psych evaluations were frequent and standard, and that it was in our best interest to seek help when it was required. Those types of issues tended to get worse before they got better, Erina-sensei informed, so it would come out sooner or later—best to get it squared away before it became too hard to handle.

Speaking now again with an older and somewhat more experienced perspective, I can say that while this was true, to an extent, things were not necessarily as stringent as Erina-sensei had made them out to be. What the village administration tended to deem as an "acceptable" threshold of mental imbalance was uncomfortably high. Ninjas often acquired some very quirky habits as part of their coping mechanisms, I knew, and because of that some leeway was called for in evaluations, but the practice of deploying shinobi even if they displayed troubling tendencies was disturbingly common.

Though Akihiko—and occasionally Yoshiya—usually walked home with me, the class ran late that day, and both of them had already left by the time I was let out. I trudged back to the House on my own, quietly kicking pebbles as I went.

Surprisingly, Minato was home when I made it back to the House. He had been assigned an apprentice recently—an antisocial apprentice who had declined every one of Minato's invitations to dinner—and had, consequently, begun leaving earlier in the morning and staying out later at night to fit in all of his usual training. We children were usually forced into bed long before he made it back home, so it was a rare treat to see him these days.

He was sitting at the coffee table in the sitting room with fuuinjutsu supplies scattered all about him. That probably explained why he didn't have a crowd of six-year-olds crawling all over him; we usually knew better than to bother him while he was working on his seals. Still, I couldn't help but tip-toe quietly over and try to peek over his shoulder.

Minato leaned to the side accommodatingly, giving me a glimpse of some incredibly complex kanji, and I eeped before realizing that of course he knew I was here. Even if he had managed to not hear me, after all, he would still have been able to sense me. He wasn't just a jounin; he was a sensor, too.

"I thought it was you, Suzu," Minato said warmly when he turned his head and saw my face. "Your chakra seems to be becoming distinct lately."

That was probably because I'd been practicing the paper-sticking exercise a lot. Perhaps it was making my reserves grow. I nodded a little jerkily, shuffling my feet and twisting my fingers together.

"What, are you being shy today?" Minato teased and poked me in the stomach. I squeaked, found myself falling over onto the floor, and was subjected to a few seconds of affectionate tickling.

"Ah, it's good to be at home," he sighed happily after I'd managed to squirm my way out of his grasp. He let himself fall onto his back next to me. "My student—his name is Kakashi, by the way—is a handful, you know. He's only a little older than you, but I doubt he'd appreciate it if I tried tickling him."

I burst into giggles just at the thought of it. Imagine that, proud and haughty Kakashi Hatake in a tickle fight on the floor. Minato rolled onto his stomach and grinned at me.

Seeing an opportunity for revenge, I darted a hand out and aimed for his side. Starting, Minato jerked away and out of reach. His heel hit the table, making it—and everything on it—rattle.

"Oops," he laughed after he'd whipped back up into a sitting position and made sure he hadn't sent ink flying everywhere. He glanced back at me and scratched the back of his head. "You've gotten pretty quick, Suzu! You startled me."

"Sorry," I said, wide-eyed, as I scrambled to my feet to see if I had screwed up whatever it was he had been working on.

"It's fine," he assured me when I paled, seeing that his brush had rolled over the sheet, leaving a black smear. "I didn't have anything important out—I was only practicing."

"Practicing?" I looked at the paper. It wasn't a scroll; it was a large sheet of washi paper printed with a grid pattern, and each of the boxes had a kanji painted in it. All of them were crazily complex, with probably at least twenty strokes each, and I couldn't read a single one of them.

"Yup, practicing." Minato nodded as he cleared away the mess, picked up the brush, folded the ruined sheet, and got out a new one. "Nothing's more important in sealing than a steady hand."

I oohed appropriately as he deftly wrote out another block of lines. I still couldn't read it, but it had the fire radical. Explosion?

"Want to try?" he asked. I glanced at the mess of lines he had just drawn and gave him a doubtful look. He laughed; then he painted a simpler kanji. I still couldn't read it, though. It looked like water, but it had a dot and an extra hook on it.

"Eternity," Minato supplied. "That's the eternity in 'perpetuity,' if you know it. The kun-yomi is nagai, and the on-yomi is ei. It's a great practice character because it has all the basic brush movements in it."

Hesitantly, I took the brush when he offered it to me, and he let me sit on his lap so I could reach the table.

"The brush movements are what give the character its shape," Minato murmured as he put his hand over mine and drew the kanji out again. "Like that. Think you can do it?"

Holding a brush was nothing like holding a pen. It had to be held perpendicular to the paper, which resulted in a wrist bent at a decidedly uncomfortable angle. My hand trembled uncontrollably when I put tip to paper, so my dot came out looking like a blob, and the line I drew looked like a portion of a sideways EKG. When I finished, the kanji looked like less of a character and more of a disfigured monstrosity.

"Aww," Minato laughed as I began turning beet red. "Don't worry, Suzu, that's normal. It's hard, right? That's why you need practice. I shook like crazy when I first started out, too."

"Draw it again?" I requested before pursing my lips. Minato obliged, plucking the brush from my hand and painting out another pretty eternity. I observed him carefully, taking note of the places where he slowed down or rotated his wrist. I probably had him fill a whole row himself before I tried again.

"Oh, that's not bad," Minato complimented my second try. Next to his perfectly portioned writing, the round, bulky corners and too-fat lines of my character still seemed pretty awful, but it was at least more legible than my first attempt had been.

I ended up finishing off the rest of the practice sheet, though I had him write again every couple of tries to make sure I was getting the right idea. By the time I had reached the end, Minato looked a little impressed. He pulled out a thinner brush, dipped it in the ink, and circled a few of my last attempts.

"These ones have good motion," he told me with a little look of pleasure. "Aim for something like this when you try again. These are pretty good for a novice."

"Really?" I wondered as I glanced between one of his characters and mine.

"I'd say so." He smiled at me. "You may have some talent for this, Suzu!"

Talent, huh? When I made myself recall the things of Earth, I did often find memories practicing the arts. A lot of the focus had been in music, but a fair chunk of time had been drawing and painting, too. Perhaps those remembered moments were enough to give me a bit of an edge in calligraphy.

"Here, you should keep this." Minato picked up the paper and waved it a few times to dry it; then he handed it to me. After a moment, he took on a thoughtful look and nudged me off his lap. "I think I still have my old calligraphy set upstairs," he said as he stood. "I'll give it to you, so you should practice, okay?"

"Okay," I said, a little dumbly, as he went into the hall and up the stairs. I guess I was going to start practicing calligraphy, then.

I looked down at the sheet I was holding. Minato's handwriting was large and slanted, but it was lighter and airier than mine. Maybe I had used too much ink; my characters were heavy and dark, and perhaps a bit undersized, in comparison.

Still, I thought as I looked down at two of our kanji side-by-side, perhaps there was a hint of beauty here. Something about these two eternities, one big and one small—one steady and one wavering—made them look a little bit like brother and sister.

A/N: Just a few notes:

(1) "That's the eternity in 'perpetuity,' if you know it": Japanese nouns are often composed of two or more kanji, and Minato is basically saying that the word "perpetuity" (永遠) has the character for "eternity" (永) in it.

(2) "The kun-yomi is nagai, and the on-yomi is ei": Japanese characters usually have a least two readings, kun (the Japanese reading) and on (the Chinese reading). In the case of 永, you could read it as either nagai (which is what you do if it's standing alone) or ei (which is how it's pronounced if it's in a compound. This is why 永遠 is read eien.)

永 is nice in that it only has one of each reading, which is not always the case.

.

I can confirm that calligraphy is monstrously hard. The first character I ever learned was 永, too; in fact, most of that scene was transposed directly from my first ever experience with calligraphy, down to having my instructor hold my hand to write the character. Needless to say, it came out looking ugly as hell. As for lines looking like EKGs, that also happened to me; I shook like crazy the first time I used a skinny brush. (Coincidentally, the hardest of the strokes in 永 by far is the last one because it's got like three different thicknesses. Don't underestimate the difficulty of that little tail.)

I'll try work up some momentum and use it to ride out the first couple of chapters, so hopefully it won't take too long to get the first arc or so out. It's summer, though, and I have an aunt in need of cheap labor while she moves houses, so we'll have to see… :(

As always, leave me your feedback!

Cheers,

Eiruiel