By the end of my first year at the Academy, I had grown tired of classes. I had been there, done that once before. That is not to say it wasn't worthwhile.
Every week I sparred with a different adult. The mean ones kicked my shit in, I got sent to the Academy infirmary more times than I'd like to admit and so I kept a hitlist of people I was going to hurt as soon as I was able. Kuma-sensei called the matches early when they went that way, he even broke the ribs of an Inzuka that tried to use direct harmful elemental ninjutsu. The way he was looking at him, without interference from other ninja, I was sure he was going to be bludgeoned to death with the big ass stick sensei pulled out.
More often than not it was composed ninja that I sparred with. They were always above my level and used speed and moves that I had to adapt on the fly to. Most of them stayed behind after the spar to question my thoughts on how I did and then give advice about what they saw. By the end of the year, I had gotten to the point where I was able to offer advice back to them.
The other students in the year were progressing as well. Everyone was stronger and steadier than when we began. Kuma-sensei didn't let anyone languish behind the class. His dream was to make future Konoha pillars and he was putting all of his efforts to make it a reality.
Most mornings for me started before the sun had made up its mind.
If Dad was home, we trained together. If he was away on a mission, I trained alone. Endurance first. Speed second. Stance work throughout. Wrapped posts. Fence posts. Trees I didn't especially like. The yard had become a catalog of surfaces and what they could teach me. Some mornings my knuckles split before the wood gave. Some mornings the wood lost the argument first.
Then came chores. Set out the completed shine, start a new batch, send for a runner to deliver on our orders. Feed and water for the animals. Check the latches on the pigs, because they had the moral character of bandits and the patience of saints. Chickens. Goats. The yard. My alchemy on them, then on myself, until that strange reserve in me began to feel thin and instinct started whispering that more would be wasteful instead of useful.
After that I washed up, ate, packed lunch, and went to the Academy.
At lunch I usually sat with Choza. Not because he was the only one I liked, but because if a boy consistently chose to spend his free time near food and shade, you could depend on him in practical ways. Mikoto joined us often enough that it stopped feeling notable and started feeling normal.
Then came class. Basic shinobi theory. Reading. Writing. Numbers. History. Survival work. More drills. Sparring. More correction. Then home again.
Feed the stock.
Check the fences.
Eat.
Sleep so hard it felt like falling down a well.
The months passed that way, and the routine did something good to me.
For most of my early life in this world, I had been braced.
I wasn't running around flinching at shadows or staring at the road like an invasion might come around the bend. But somewhere under everything, I had been waiting. Waiting for the house to fail. Waiting for the village to turn mean. Waiting for my body to betray me. Waiting for remembered pieces of the future to arrive before I had enough beneath me to survive them.
A man with too many priorities will tell you time flies.
A man with no direction is just a hamster running in a wheel being praised for cardio.
For a long while I had been doing a great many good things for myself without yet arriving anywhere. Then, slowly enough not to notice day by day, that changed.
We were no longer poor in the sharp-edged, humiliating sense of the word.
We still counted. Still planned. Still stretched every coin farther than it wanted to go. But we had crossed a threshold, and people who had never lived below it usually did not understand how real that was. We had meat every day. Better eggs. Better broth. Better recovery. Dad no longer had to come home with that careful, casual look men get when they've stretched a mission payout, a favor, and a bit of luck into one more week of dignity.
The yard fed us now. Not the way I wanted cattle to one day. But it fed us enough to matter.
My body showed it. I could splinter trees without chakra. Speaking of chakra, my situation had improved there too.
Tree walking no longer dumped me on my back every time I got ambitious. I could hold it now. Not beautifully, and not with the sort of effortless balance some older children managed, but I could do it. I had enough body under me to keep the current from throwing me around, and enough control to reinforce myself in short bursts when I needed to. Sustained reinforcement was still beyond me. Dad could do that. Dad had a grown man's engine under the hood. I had a promising little furnace and a great deal of stubbornness.
Let me tell you chakra reinforcement was a trip. I went from splintering trees to obliterating them. I got a little froggy one evening and tried it on a big boulder. I said a quick prayer that I wasn't going to destroy my hand with physics and lashed out with full force. The Boulder cracked on impact and pieces of it were shorn off the sides from the force trying to find a way out. My hand was numb but completely intact. For all that I felt like an old man in a child's body, the giddiness and joy I feel at breaking things makes me feel my age.
Dad had changed too.
When I thought about the stories I remembered, it still felt strange that Guy had not even been born yet and Duy was already farther along than he ought to have been. Cleaner. More controlled. He could open through the Fourth Gate now without it looking like a man trying to drag power out of a body that hated him for asking. It still cost him. The 8 gates was not free. But it had stopped looking like desperation and started looking like craft.
Measured against the life I remembered, he was leagues ahead.
Measured against what the future still held, it was not nearly enough.
But foundations do not need to be impressive. They just need to hold.
Once a man can breathe, he starts noticing all the things he was missing while he was trying not to drown.
I joked more.
Not wildly. I still had standards, and being trapped among children all day put most of my humor in a no-fly zone. But I joked more. Laughed easier. Said what I thought without sounding like I was issuing practical recommendations to a room full of incompetents.
Choza noticed first.
He was sitting with his lunch box balanced on his thighs under the Academy wall, chewing with the solemn focus of a monk at prayer, when he looked over and said, "You laugh a lot more now."
"I always laughed."
"No," Mikoto said from beside us. "You mostly approved with a bored gaze. "
That was so exact I had to respect it.
I turned and looked at her.
She did not immediately look away anymore when I did. That had changed over the year too. Not all at once. Just a little at a time. A question here. A comment there. An opinion offered without making me drag it out of her first. She was still quiet, but she was quiet the way a well-made knife is quiet, not the way empty rooms are.
"Approved?" I asked.
She nodded once. "You used to sound like an old man deciding whether we were behaving sensibly."
Choza swallowed and said, "That's true."
"I hate how quickly you joined her."
"I support accurate statements."
That made Mikoto smile into her lunch.
I should say this clearly: I liked both of them more than I had expected to like anybody at the Academy.
Choza was obvious. He was easy to read, loyal in the way straightforward boys often are, and never insulted by practical truths. If I told him his stance was bad, he wanted to know how to fix it. If he told me a dumpling was worth stealing, he usually had supporting evidence.
Mikoto took longer.
The Academy had a narrow planting strip along one side wall where somebody, sometime in the past, had decided children ought to learn that plants existed and then mostly abandoned the effort. The beds were cramped, half-neglected, and full of soil that needed help. Which meant I loved them immediately.
Mikoto did too.
That became ours in the quiet way things become shared before anyone names them. We weeded there after lessons sometimes. Loosened roots. Checked leaves. Watered what the sun had been rude to. Choza joined us often enough, though his contribution leaned more toward moral support and eating nearby than horticulture.
One warm afternoon, while I was kneeling in the dirt breaking up a hard patch around a cramped little herb that had no business trying so hard in bad soil, Mikoto said, "You look happier."
I glanced up at her.
Choza froze halfway through a dumpling.
"Happier," I repeated.
"You joke more," she said. "And you don't look like you're waiting for the next shoe to drop all the time."
There are moments when a child says something so exact you briefly resent her for it. The resentment passed quickly.
I pressed the loosened dirt back around the roots and said, "The house holds now."
Mikoto was quiet for a second.
Then she asked, "So you have enough room to breath?"
"Enough to look up sometimes."
That sat between us a moment.
Choza, deciding the air was safe again, stuffed the rest of the dumpling into his mouth and said, "I trust lunch every day and I'm cheerful all the time."
"That's because your priorities are simple young master," I said.
The summer came on after that, and the Academy loosened its grip.
We still trained. Of course we did. But the shape of the days changed. More light at home. More time in the yard. More work. More room to notice the life we had built instead of only rushing through it on the way to the next demand.
By then, Tomi had become part of the shape of our days too.
Not fully. Not in the legal, official sense. But she was there often enough that the house no longer felt like it was hosting a guest when she came through the door. She knew where the cups were. Knew which chair Dad favored. Knew which goat was mean for shits and giggles and which one was only mean when startled.
Dad, meanwhile, had turned courtship into a campaign of overwhelming sincerity.
The first time I caught him practicing romance from one of Tomi's paperbacks, I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched him for a full three seconds before speaking.
He had one hand over his heart, the novel in the other, and an expression of such painful earnestness that I thought he was auditioning for a role in a romance film.
"Even the moon must envy your quiet light," he whispered.
I leaned against the doorframe.
Then I said, "That woman is about to be manipulated by a duke with bad intentions."
Dad nearly threw the book into the stove.
"You've been standing there."
"Yes."
"How much did you hear?"
"Enough to believe literature deserves legal protection."
He straightened, trying to recover the dignity of a man caught quoting bad fiction at his own reflection. "I am studying."
"You are stealing dialogue."
"It is courtship language."
"It is contraband."
He ignored that. "Do you think it's too much?"
"Yes."
"What if I say it more sincerely?"
"That will somehow only make it worse."
Apparently I was wrong.
Tomi liked him more for it.
Not because the line was good. It was not. But because he meant it, and that was always the trouble with Dad in every part of life. He did not perform sincerity. He inhabited it. He charged into it at full speed and assumed the rest of the world would either catch up or be knocked down by the wake.
That was a dangerous trait in war.
In love, it turned out, it was pretty effective.
Two days after I caught him with the book, Tomi stood in our kitchen with a teacup in both hands and told the story of him actually using the line on her.
She was trying to act as though it did not matter.
This fooled nobody.
"He looked directly at me," she said, "while I was shelving returns and said, 'Even the moon must envy your quiet light.'"
I stared at her.
She stared back.
Then, just slightly, looked away.
"Well," I said, "that's awful."
"It is."
"And?"
She watched the steam rise off the tea before she answered.
"And he meant it."
Yes.
That was always the problem.
He meant it.
That summer, for the first time in either life, I stopped feeling like I was merely preparing to live and started understanding that I was already in it.
That may not sound dramatic.
It was.