The first birthday I really remembered celebrating with Duy came a little after that.
He approached it with the sort of intensity other men reserved for religious festivals or border disputes. He woke me before sunrise by throwing open the shutters and declaring that "THE DAY OF MY SON'S FOURTH YEAR SHALL SHAKE THE VILLAGE WITH ITS PASSION!"
I sat up in bed, stared at him, and said, "If you shake the village before breakfast, they may kill us."
He laughed like that was the finest thing anyone had ever said to him.
By then, my tongue control was solid enough that conversations no longer felt like I was hauling each word uphill by hand. I still sounded young, of course. Couldn't be helped. But I could say what I meant, ask what I needed, and argue with Duy on something approaching even ground.
This in turn had improved the house and worsened his life in nearly equal measure.
He made breakfast himself that morning. Rice, broth, greens, and two of the best eggs from the strongest hen. He cooked them with a level of concentration usually seen in bomb disposal, then presented the meal like a war hero bringing tribute home from the front.
"For my son," he declared, "whose youth grows stronger with each dawn!"
I looked at the plate.
Then at him.
Then back at the plate.
It was better than anything we'd eaten six months earlier.
"Thank you," I said.
He tried to pretend that did not hit him as hard as it did.
The eggs did their usual work. Clean warmth. Stronger recovery. A deeper sort of settling in the muscles after the morning's training. By then it was no longer theory. I knew what the best eggs from the best-treated hens did, and I knew the difference between one cooked right and one handled carelessly.
Preparation mattered.
That had become one of the central truths of my life.
Bad food could not be saved by optimism. Good food could absolutely be ruined by stupidity.
A soft cook after training helped recovery best. Broth built slowly and stayed. A richer scramble with the right herbs warmed the body and sharpened appetite. Eggs with too much grease sat heavy and wasted half their promise.
Cooking was direction. A conversation if you will.
The body answered according to how you asked.
Mine, especially, had begun answering in ways I could no longer dismiss as ordinary childhood growth.
I was still short. Still obviously a child. But not a fragile one. My frame had thickened through the shoulders and back. My legs had that spring to them that comes from real use. I didn't topple or stumble the way I once had. When Duy made me run, I ran farther. When he made me squat, I finished steadier. When I ate well after training, the food seemed to land exactly where it was needed.
The body answers, I wrote in my notebook later that week. If you build it well enough, it answers.
Duy had noticed before I wrote it down.
He noticed everything that had to do with my effort.
It took him longer to notice his own changes.
That amused me.
The eggs weren't just helping me. He ate them too. Not as regularly because he wanted to make sure I got more, but he ate them enough. Duy being a grown shinobi who trained like he held personal grudges against weakness, gravity, and common sense. Give a man like that better food, a little extra tonic, more recovery than he's used to, and things happen.
At first it was little things.
He recovered from missions faster.
His shoulders complained less.
He moved with a little more snap the day after hard training instead of dragging his left leg until noon.
Then one afternoon in the yard, while I was feeding the hens and pretending not to watch him, he opened one of the Gates. He hadn't talked to me about them yet so I couldn't exactly bring it up in polite conversation but by god the power that rolled of from him made me question my life.
His chakra flared hot and hard, but his body didn't wobble under it the way I expected it had months earlier. He held the strain, moved through it, then closed it without dropping to one knee afterward.
He stood there breathing hard, eyes wide.
Then he looked at me.
I looked at him.
"Well," I said, "that looked expensive."
He barked out a laugh, then sat down hard in the grass and stared at his own hands.
"I have been improving."
"Yes."
"You noticed."
"Yes."
He grinned at me with the wild delight of a man discovering his own limits had not been limits at all, merely rude suggestions. "Youth answers effort!"
A few days after my birthday, he took me into the village.
Not because we had to buy anything. Just because, for the first time, he trusted that I could walk the distance, mind my surroundings, and not put a fork in an electrical socket if left unattended for ten seconds.
There are many ways a father can express pride.
Duy chose to do it by announcing to half the district that his son was now "old enough to stride the streets of Konoha with youthful purpose."
I settled for not correcting him in front of witnesses.
The first stop was the library.
Tomi-sensei was at the desk when we came in, reading something that made her narrow her eyes at the page like she wanted to argue with the author personally. She looked up, saw me, and her whole expression changed before she had time to hide it.
Then she noticed Duy behind me.
That produced a different reaction I couldn't quite name.
I walked up to the desk and said, with all the solemnity the moment deserved, "Tomi-sensei, my father has something to say"
Tomi blinked.
Then she looked at me.
Then back at him.
Duy pulled a nice guy pose and said "Thank you for being the esteemed teacher who has guided my son's pursuit of knowledge!"
"You speak of me as though I've been running a private academy," she said.
I nodded. "You have."
That made her smile in spite of herself.
Duy clasped his hands. " My son has grown in wisdom, language, and suspiciously practical ambition under your guidance!"
"That last part," she said dryly, "was probably there already."
Still, she accepted the gratitude well. I could tell it mattered to her that Duy thanked her seriously. Not politely. Not in passing. Seriously. For all his volume, he was sincere in a way that made people either trust him instantly or need a few minutes to recover.
We stayed long enough for tea.
Long enough for Tomi-sensei to observe that I had gained weight in a useful direction. Long enough for Duy to announce that my birthday had marked "a new season of youthful advancement." Long enough for me to suspect she had become fond of him against her better judgment.
Before we left, she crouched beside me and adjusted the collar on my shirt with that practical sort of care adults use when they've decided a child belongs at least a little to their orbit.
"You're speaking much better," she said.
"I had motivation."
From the library we went to find Tsunade.
You see I kept the future of the world in mind, sure. Only an idiot wouldn't, carrying around the kind of knowledge I had. But I wasn't lying awake every night trying to outplay thirty years of history from inside a four-year-old body. I had time yet before the ugliest parts of the story came due. Before all of the preventable deaths and betrayals.
I was making plans, yes, but the small, useful kind first. Get stronger. Make the house hold. Build something with teeth in it. A man has no business fixing the wider world while his own fence is still falling down.
To Tsunade I had brought four eggs in a wrapped cloth pouch.
They were the best we had, and I'd already set them aside for Lady Mito.
Not all the hens had laid well that week, and giving away the strongest ones pinched harder than I liked. Good eggs after training mattered. Good eggs in a poor house mattered more than people who had never counted protein by coins understood.
But I had touched Mito's hand once.
I remembered that burden.
I remembered the way life in her felt spent from the inside not because she was weak, but because she was carrying something no body should have to carry.
My hens could not touch the seal.
That was nonsense.
But maybe they could support the body under it.
That was not nonsense at all and really I was hoping that I could get my father some better jobs and maybe a leg-up somewhere down the road. Quid-pro-quo style.
We found Tsunade at the hospital, where everyone around her seemed to be moving faster than usual while pretending it had nothing to do with her presence.
She spotted us, sighed, and said, "What now?"
I held up the pouch.
She looked at it.
Then at me.
Then at Duy.
Then back at me.
"…is that produce?"
"Eggs," I said.
"Should I be worried?"
"Yes," Duy said proudly.
"No," I said at the same time.
Tsunade pinched the bridge of her nose. "Wonderful."
I stepped closer and offered her the pouch. "For Mito-sama."
That made her hand stop midway to taking it.
Now she was paying full attention.
"What kind of eggs?"
"The good kind," I said. "From our hens. Better feed. Better handling. Better condition."
Tsunade took the pouch slowly. "And why, exactly, are you giving me eggs for Mito-sama?"
There are moments when the easiest answer is also the true one.
"Because she is carrying too much," I said. "And these help recovery if cooked right."
Tsunade went still.
Duy looked from me to her, sensing something heavy had entered the room and wisely declining to yell into it.
I continued, because if I had started I might as well finish.
"Cook them soft, not too hard. Keep them warm. Little salt. Broth is better if she's tired. No waste."
Tsunade studied my face long enough that I wondered if I had overstepped.
Then she looked down at the pouch again.
"You really think these will help."
"Yes."
Not fix. Help.
There's a difference, and I knew it.
She understood that too.
"All right," she said at last.
Duy blinked. "All right?"
"I'll take them."
That was more of a victory than I let myself show.
She wrapped the eggs carefully herself, which told me what I needed to know about whether she took this seriously.
At the door, she paused and looked back at me.
"Mito is my grandmother and as much as I like your instincts, Don't presume too much."
"I won't."
She held my gaze a moment longer, then nodded.
"Good."
After she left, the hospital room we were in went quiet.
Not silent. Duy had never once in his life permitted true silence to remain unchallenged for long. But quieter. As if even the walls had noticed that something had just shifted.
Then he turned slowly and looked at me with the expression of a man who had watched his son speak business with Tsunade Senju, hand her instructions for Mito Uzumaki besides, and somehow be taken seriously.
"My son," he said.
I braced myself.
"You are becoming alarmingly legitimate."
I stared at him.
Then he laughed, and after a moment I did too.
Because the truth was simple.
We still had a small house on the edge of the village.
We still counted coins.
We still fed the hens before ourselves some mornings.
We were still poor.
But now we had more than hope.
We had process.
We had buyers.
We had better eggs.
We were hoping for some connections.
We had work worth doing.
For a poor house on the edge of Konoha, that was doing pretty good.