Returning Home
Coming home to Kiri shouldn’t have felt as good as it did. She had just been ‘home’ to Konoha, but it had felt like she was in a foreign country. She was rooming with Chojuro, sure, since Iruka had her room, but it was home here.
For instance, she didn’t get yelled at for being too loud in the morning or a look for drinking too much coffee.
Instead she and Suigetsu got to pester Iruka in the morning as he looked dead over a table.
Iruka glared at her over the cup of coffee being handed to him. He was on his first cup, like a child, and Chae-Seon was pouring her third. He scoffed as he watched her throw a little sugar in it and chug.
“You know, maybe you would be taller if you didn’t drink so much coffee.”
“Yeah, Jong-Min’s been saying that since we became friends, along with calling me midget. You wanna pick a fight you have to try harder”
Suigetsu laughed, punching Iruka’s back. “Yeah, she’s going to be on her third cup by the time you manage to finish your first.”
Iruka looked up at her like she was a monster. “Is that even healthy?”
“No.” Haku glanced at Chae-Seon. He was so much nicer after the coffee had been served. “That doesn’t stop her, though.”
Chojuro had his own cup, half filled with milk like a fool. “That’s not coffee.”
Chojuro glared at her. “It still has caffeine in it.”
“Not enough.”
Iruka glanced at her as she filled her second cup. He had barely gotten through the first half of his. “I’m beginning to think there isn’t enough caffeine in the world for you.”
Chae-Seon stopped where she was. Her coffee sat in front of her, but he watched her knock back a good third of the cup before turning to him. “You know, you might not be wrong.”
Yeah. Kiri was comfortable.
Jae-Un pestered the man repeatedly, but something about having her teacher just start speaking to her in Japanese and expecting her to follow orders made her begin to remember the bits and pieces of the language, despite having very little actual knowledge of it.
There was a wall of water closing in on her, though, so she didn’t have time to try and yell at her teacher in Japanese. “I surrender!”
“Surrender?”
“Yeah!”
Chae-Seon backed off, giving her a look. “I’ll allow it this time, but you need to stop panicking when you get caught and start trying to find a way out.
“The day you become a chuunin is the day I stop letting you surrender.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now go wash up and meet Iruka. Your lessons starts soon, right?”
Jae-Un nodded, racing away, leaving Chae-Seon with Mi-Na and Ji-Su.
Iruka had gathered how to say he was going from point A to point B, but he hadn’t expected his name to be roped into a joke about it by the three cretins Chae-Seon called students.
Iru and Suig were, apparently, the names of two villages within Kiri (though one had been razed in the war, its citizens absorbed as a neighborhood of the same name in a larger nearby town).
‘Suig-esso, Iru-Kaji’ had become a new phrase for the three to use whenever the two were in the room, even if he was “Iruka-sensei” to Jae-Un, and Suigetsu was ‘Sunbae’ to the three of them. The rules regarding respect in Kiri were drastically different, as far as he could tell. While they were more rigid in some respects – your respect had to be earned, and if you were a child, your respect was assumed for a military power – they were also looser. People who were younger often didn’t consider their older peers as their ‘sunbae’, or senior, unless they were their actual superior on one or more missions.
As such, the jokes that were lobbed at him and at Chae-Seon’s professional team – another concept that had a certain Kirigakure unique-ness to it – were not considered disrespectful or rude in the slightest. Instead it fostered camaraderie with the younger generations.
Iruka had met quite a few shinobi through his own Korean teacher and through Chae-Seon’s team that felt a fierce, familial protective instinct over the genin. In Konoha, he had been aware that many people tried to distance themselves from the Genin. They were green, and they were soldiers, and they would have to learn the same lessons everyone else did – teamwork was paramount, the village was their truest loyalty, and the enemy would consider their lives forfeit.
The longer Iruka was here, the more he learned from the Kiri shinobi. He had to wonder if this cultural exchange would help change Konoha for the better.
“Iruka?” Chae-Seon punched his arm, something it seemed was both a reprimand and a signal of affection with Kirigakure shinobi, before glancing in front of her again. She always knew what was going on around her. She was never fazed.
“Yeah?”
“What’s going on in that head of yours? You’ve been glaring down the road for a few minutes.”
“Nothing.”
“Yeah, right.” She kicked a small rock up at him, looking him in the eye. “You keep telling yourself that. But the second it becomes a threat you let someone know, yeah?”
“Yeah, of course.”
Jae-Un was suddenly on his shoulders, her legs wrapped around his neck in an effort to choke him. She had taken to sneak attacks lately, basing them off of her role models’ (something she had forced him to never reveal). He knew Chae-Seon had her reservations for the girl, worrying she would be taken into front line fighting.
No way was that happening, though. The girl was getting better every day, getting the drop on him more than once in a way that would be deadly if she wasn’t being purposeful in restraining herself. She would be made into an assassin or similar if there was ever cause for it, not a front-line fighter.
“You’re getting better at that.” Chae-Seon cuffed her palm against Jae-Un’s shoulder. “Your next goal should be getting the jump on him and taking him down. Don’t show too much mercy just because you like him. Then you get in the habit, and you die.”
“Ne, seonsaengnim.”
Iruka scoffed. “You’re turning your team into monsters.”
“Good. Monsters are damn hard to kill.”
And wasn’t that the crux of it. The crux of why she was an excellent pick as a Jounin sensei. She had a long vision, and she had the war experience to back it up. She didn’t just protect her Genin while helping them gain the skills to go up in rank. No, she taught them how to kill or be killed, how to leave the battlefield standing and with as few enemies as possible.
She taught them how to be shinobi, something he could respect. He had wondered after her team and her brother’s had crossed blades with Zabuza if it wasn’t a bad idea to put more focus in the Konoha Genin curriculum on battlefield-type experiences or on practicality in the field. He, granted, had limited experience fighting in the field.
But he had seen the consequences after the invasion of the oversight. The teams weren’t thinking long view when they were fighting for their lives. They were astounding for Genin, but they had also been a liability. They didn’t adapt to different groups, or to quickly changing circumstances.
And here he saw a team under the command of a Jounin, not one under their tutelage. And those girls were thriving for it. She had the right idea, as far as Iruka was concerned, when it came to teaching her Genin.
“You’re staring into space again, Iruka.”
“Ah, sorry.”
“Just stop it, will ya?”
“Of course.”
Jae-Un giggled. “Are all the Konoha shinobi such pushovers?”
Chae-Seon pushed her head a little to the side while Iruka laughed nervously. Kiri was so damn strange sometimes. Had he been expected to fight it?
“Don’t listen to her. You don’t have to live here indefinitely – you’ve got a couple more weeks here and then we drag you back.”
“What will I be doing about teaching the language if I am not entirely fluent?”
“You’ll teach basics. Last I heard you’re getting someone going with you to teach higher level Korean, as needed.”
Iruka nodded. “Alright.” A thought struck him. “What if we did a language exchange program?”
Jae-Un glanced at him. “A what now?”
“People from Kiri come to Konoha and learn Japanese, people from Konoha spend time in Kiri like I did and learn Korean.”
“Let it get to that first.” Chae-Seon was rolling a senbon around her fingers. “The alliance has to be settled first.”
Iruka nodded. She wasn’t wrong.