4

Today was a beautiful day.

At seven in the morning, as the sun's first rays came up over the horizon; as the birds started chirping and the faraway murmur of an awakening village reached my ear that was the only conclusion that could be reached with any honesty.

A cloud drifted on by, one of a wispy bundle. My back continued to soak in early-morning dew while my foot bounced to an unheard beat and a gust of wind blew several strands of hair into my face.

A teenage boy exploded off the side of a tree with an angry scream to hit the ground with a thump and a swear. With the squeak of a body sliding over wet grass and gathering enough stains to turn orange into yellow. More swearing.

Today was a beautiful day.

As if to give emphasis to this thought of mine, a larger cloud among the multitude momentarily broke its cover, letting a ray of sunshine through. A solid line of it. Near entirely circular as well. And, thankfully, nowhere near my position. Or Naruto's as he did an inspirational speech. Or promised to climb a tree before he went to sleep tonight.

I wouldn't have handled that well, I think. If anything could ruin this day, it would be that.

Glass-half-full optimism had never sat well with me.

…Anyway. Where that solitary beam of light ended up, I had no clue. But it had been very pretty to look at, I suppose. Very dramatic if it came down at the right time. I was sure that, somewhere, a lesser protagonist than the ones in this clearing was having the time of their life with that.

I was only being objective...this world was that sort of place. And, I suppose, I was also being just a little silly. Just the smallest amount that I could get away with while in the debatable safety of my mind. Yes. Debatable.

The sanctity of one's thoughts when you were a ninja is mostly a suggestion. Cold reading was a basic skill in this profession, just for a start. The best of us could get someone's life story from the brand of cigarette they smoked and how many times they went to the bar. The number of jutsu that were meant to loosen your lips was beyond counting as it was and… And what I was getting at was that, when you slept with a Yamanaka, you gave up some things.

I believed that what I'd exchanged to have Ino as my closest friend was worth it, but what I'd given up was no small thing.

I'd resigned myself to never having a private thought again years ago. Not that Ino had been rifling through my brain like it was an unguarded filing cabinet or anything, I would have noticed if she had been, she wasn't her father, but I was resigned to it by now. The possibility that it could happen.

…The thought of her doing that, finding out my deepest, darkest secrets was sort of freeing, to be honest, as much as it was terrifying. Cathartic? Possibly. Unadvised? Definitely.

This sort of thinking is what you got when you couldn't talk to anybody about anything without risking a kunai to the eye, I suppose...and I must have been more tired than I'd thought.

My early morning brooding was normally reserved for when I had nothing to focus on. Which I did at the moment. I suppose.

What use there was in observing natural energy when you couldn't even use it without turning to stone, I had no idea. It was just something I'd been up to lately, between comments on nature's beauty. I hadn't gotten much out of it so far besides a moderate jump in my abilities as a chakra sensor, but it was what I'd been up to lately.

It wasn't much. And I could be doing something more useful. Something that I could reasonably apply sometime within the next year or so. Or my lifetime. Anything.

Anything at all.

…At least the day was nice.

I yawned widely, making my jaw crack while I scratched a cheek. Orange began to shift to yellow in the sky as a leaf tumbled and twirled past my vision. It was just the first of many as Naruto hit the dirt once more, the crack of broken bark now an old friend.

More of an acquaintance really, but the sentiment was there.

"You need to use less chakra, Naruto. Again." I forced myself to sit up with a roll of my shoulders and a flex of my will; every ounce of water in my clothing was pushed back and behind me all at once, a fine mist. Comfort returned. "A lot less."

"Yeah, I know. Less chakra. Less chakra. Yeah. Damn it…" Naruto grunted back as he clambered back up onto his feet with a scowl. Not at me, thankfully. But at the tree. The tree that looked like it might have been a few more tries away from falling down, thanks to the large chunks that had been torn out of it. Poor thing. I felt kind of bad for it. "You don't have any more advice?"

Plenty. But none that he was ready to hear.

"Not really. It's your chakra, Naruto. I can't control it for you. You'll have to figure it out on your own," I told him for the third time that day. I didn't mind it though. Much. At least he was asking. "If you don't want to keep beating your head against the wall, then you know what to do."

Naruto growled again, louder. Then he made a fist in front of his face, eyes narrowed as he let the next two words out in a hiss. "Leaf exercises."

If Naruto hated anything, which was hard to imagine seeing as this was Naruto, it was leaf exercises. He had his reasons.

His reasons were stupid, and I'd told him so, but he had them.

Making a leaf stick to his forehead wasn't cool enough. It wasn't a real jutsu, or so I'd heard. It was useless, or so he'd said. It was too hard to do to be worth it when he could be learning how to set things on fire with his mind, he'd told me.

He'd said that. Once.

A long ten seconds of disappointed silence and a look had convinced him to never say that in my presence again.

"Leaf exercises," I agreed. Water and dirt continued to neatly fall from my form, from my head on down as I rose to my feet; chakra control was the furthest thing from worthless and I'd fight to make someone else die on that hill for me. "How are you doing, Sasuke?"

I looked over in his direction before he could say anything...and, much like most other things I tended to look at, how Sasuke was doing was revealed to me at a glance; his story, his journey towards tree-climbing competence as it were, might as well have been written in the air in foot-high letters. It might as well have been.

He'd taken a black and blue knee a while ago and had yet to move.

A while ago, being nearly fifteen minutes.

Most likely because he couldn't. Literally could not. Not appreciably; badly hidden winces and the twitching of abused musculature was not what I considered appreciable.

That said enough, I think.

"I'm fine, Haruno."

"I see."

"Do you?" Sasuke asked, his question an exercise in bad faith and a denial of observable reality; I wasn't blind. "I'm resting."

Of course. He was just resting. I should have known. That explained everything.

Boys being boys explained it better.

Boys.

"You do seem tired," I agreed pleasantly, my hands moving in a familiar pattern as I got right to it. Slow. Deliberate. Exaggerated for Sasuke's viewing pleasure, something that I couldn't really call a pout crossing his features as he attempted to subtly lean away from me and the cool green that coated my fingers. "I don't think you need to be told to stand still, do you?"

I wasn't sure what he'd been expecting when he'd come around this morning... But it hadn't been Naruto and I moving around as if we hadn't had seven shades of hell kicked out of us the day before, unlike him. Or maybe it was just Naruto's wellbeing and ability to walk without hissing that had raised his hackles.

He'd turned his health as compared to mine and Naruto's into a contest from that point on, or so it felt. There was no other reason as to why he hadn't asked me for help.

His not asking me for healing had to have been a conscious choice. It wasn't as if me being a healer of some small skill was a secret, after all.

Another choice had been me not offering. To be sure, just to be clear, but I couldn't do all the reaching out. Some of it. Not all of it. But I'd do it this time though. Just this once. Before his misplaced pride took any further hits thanks to Naruto overtaking him on this exercise.

Pragmatism won out over my sense of schadenfreude in the end.

He clenched his teeth but did, in fact, stay still as I continued my advance. If he could have escaped with any speed, he would have. But he couldn't. He recognized his coming doom for what it was and accepted it with all the stoicism of a man walking to the gallows.

How dramatic.

"Comparing your healing rate to mine is just absurd. Or Naruto's for that matter." These words came out just loud enough for him to hear; the small flinch that got me before I'd even touched him told me I'd hit on it. "So that's it then."

Wasn't it a little early for him to feel like he was falling behind? We hadn't even been a team for an entire week yet. These worries of his were clearly unwarranted and always would be. Unlike mine.

I only barely avoided giving in to the urge to smack him in the back of the head.

With my fist.

He averted his eyes from mine, his teeth clicking together in pain as I started working on his left shoulder. "Not you. I know better." He slowly shook his head as I touched up the area around his neck on my way to his right. "How is he still…?

There was another loud snap as a tree lost yet another percentage of its structural integrity in a burst of wood chips and sap.

"He's got a bloodline limit."

Sasuke jolted and, as he let a slow and pained breath out through his nose, I welcomed the delayed feeling of satisfaction. It might not have been a slap, but… I took what I could get. "What?"

"He's an Uzumaki. Regeneration and gigantic chakra reserves come with the territory." A wave of the hand down his back removed a line of bruises like an eraser over a whiteboard; Sasuke became visibly more relaxed as the cessation of pain registered. "As well as hyperactivity. Find something else to beat him in before you cripple or kill yourself. Something to do with I Spy, maybe?"

He made eye contact with me again, brows furrowed and forehead scrunched. "Are you making fun of me?"

"No." A little. "I'm just saying that you shouldn't try and compete in a healing competition against someone who can regrow their internal organs."

His forehead scrunched even harder yet, his questioning look turning into a questioning stare. "Can he really?"

Seeing how Sasuke had shoved a hand through his chest in another life, I was pretty sure; the fox might have been helping, but it wasn't as if I could say that, now could I? "I'm not going to test it. But, yeah. Probably."

He frowned at that and broke eye contact. "Hey, dumbass!"

God damn it.

"Fuck you, bastard!"

"Why didn't you tell me you had a bloodline limit?"

"Why didn't I tell you I have a what!?"

"A bloodline limit, dipshit!"

What have I done?

"What the fuck is a bloodline limit?!"

Gave two idiots a reason to fight, it seems… That was my fault. I should have seen this coming. I'd given Ninja Jesus and Ninja Antichrist a reason to interact. What other outcome could there have been?

I had to wonder how Ino was doing right now. Better than me, I suspected.

I'd have to ask when I saw her again.

==========

Sakura had been right to not be excited.

Ino didn't think that often. Sakura was great, sure. Wonderful, yes. A real prodigy that Ino would never, ever refer to as such, without a doubt...but Sakura could stand to lighten up a little.

When Sakura was right though, she was right.

Being a real ninja wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Actually, so far, it sucked. It sucked real bad. It sucked so bad it had Ino thinking thoughts.

Bad thoughts.

"How much trouble would I be in?" Ino softly asked in a seemingly random non-sequitur, on her knees, her head lowered and fingers digging deep into the loamy earth beneath her palms as she gave in to despair. "How much?"

The vole she was hovering over said nothing back as it looked up at her with tiny, cute, and very wide eyes. Very wide for a vole. Which wasn't all that wide but it was the thought that counted.

It was just the cutest little-

"For what?" Choji asked to her right, halfway through a protein bar as thick as her wrist. This question broke the spell that she'd placed over the vole, that spell being one of hope that she tracked her prey through movement; it vanished into a pile of discarded leaves and weeds that she'd personally pulled from a flower bed and it was gone. "Why would you get in trouble?"

"It doesn't matter, Choji." Ino sighed as she forced herself upright to violently pull another weed out, being careful not to disturb the peony next to it. "It's nothing. Don't worry about it."

She didn't even know what she'd get in trouble over anyway. There was nothing to tell. She'd just known she'd have gotten in trouble over something. Something like force-feeding her teacher all forty pieces of his shogi board as an act of symbolic revenge against the ninja system as a whole… Or something oddly specific like that.

An incensed glare at Shikamaru made his positively glacial work pace speed up momentarily, the fear of a light beating the next time he tried to take a nap giving him all the motivation he needed.

That she was getting paid to take care of an elderly woman's garden, an elderly woman that had called them 'very nice kids' and given them candy, only did so much to cool her temper. She'd been promised fame. Excitement. Recognition! Not pocket money and ume lozenges!

She wasn't going to refuse the pocket money or the candy though, even if it wasn't what she'd been promised. She wasn't ungrateful.

"Daddy and I are going to be having words though," Ino made a promise of her own, tone full of menace as she moved that piece of sour candy from one cheek to the other. Keeping D-ranks a secret from her was a betrayal of the bond between father and daughter and she was going to make sure he understood that, the traitor. "He'll rue the day. Oh, he'll rue the day he-"

"Hi, Ino."

Ino's tirade was stopped dead in its tracks by those two words. She was moving one of her bangs behind an ear before she was able to consciously recognize it and stop herself, long hours at the flower shop letting her ignore that she'd just dropped a double handful of dirt in her lap and had left some in her hair.

Her best friend blinked placidly at her over the red fence in the client's yard, waiting for a response.

Ino didn't even bother trying to clean herself up. No point when the damage was already done and witnessed. She just sighed again and, pretending she hadn't just made a fool of herself, pulled up another weed. "Hello, Sakura. What are you doing here? Did your sensei already dismiss you?"

"Yes, actually." Sakura nodded. "He finally showed up an hour ago with a D-rank. I just wrapped it up and here I am."

"An hour-" Ino looked up, eyes narrowed, letting Sakura's comment on how she'd finished her mission in less than an hour slide by without comment. It was Sakura, so that went without saying. The sun was just overhead, so that meant… "Five hours!? He took five hours to show up?!"

She'd thought that Sakura had been kidding!

Not that Sakura made things up all that often, almost never, but that had sounded just too ridiculous to be true.

Showed what she knew though, clearly.

"He was too busy looking for his stuffed dog to show up on time. Or something." Sakura began her explanation for her teacher's tardiness with something nearly as ridiculous. "He lost it two days ago and he's worried about it." Sakura took a lean on the partition between them, arms crossed over the top with a small grin on her face; that was as good as any other person smiling from ear to ear. "He's been finding it hard to sleep without them nearby, he says."

Were they talking about a jounin or a child?

"You can't be serious," Ino said with a hushed tone, the thrill of gossip overtaking her.

Sakura leaned forward until her top half was over the fence, that smile still firmly in place as she spoke back with just as much volume. "Entirely."

"Oh my god."

The day had just become a great deal brighter. Which wasn't much of a surprise.

Sakura tended to do that for her.

==========

Asuma, for a second, thought about saying something. Just for a second...but he decided to turn his head and light up another cigarette instead.

Ino had put in the work. More than Choji and Shikamaru had combined. They could pick up the slack on this one… And there was nothing wrong with making ties with fellow Konoha ninja, even those outside of your team. Nothing wrong with that at all.

"Nooooooo…" Ino gasped, not nearly as quiet as she thought she was as she met the Haruno girl in the middle. It couldn't have been more obvious that she'd forgotten about the job if she'd tried. The pink-haired kunoichi that Kakashi had called 'a miserable monster' whispering into the blonde's ear, brushing her off with some of the finest chakra string work Asuma had ever seen, was the most important thing in her entire world. "You're kidding."

Also, he was half sure she'd have tried to kill him if he had. He'd seen how she'd been looking at him as she'd been working. That had been some pretty impressive killing intent for a newbie.

He blew a ring of smoke out, the rush of nicotine a calming one.

Having to do the paperwork and evaluations for when your genin tried to kill you would have been hell. And then he'd have to deal with his dad pulling the disappointed parent card too.

It just wasn't worth it.

Asuma then frowned and looked back, past his student and her friend, cigarette in between his fingers as he was struck by a sudden realization.

Hadn't that fence been blue when they'd got here?