A CHILD'S CURIOSITY
The day had been claimed by the rain, and Minato had been learning kanji for hours. He had gotten to the point where he could recognize common characters from pure repetition, but sometimes they started to blur together. The less said about his ability to write kanji the better.
Minato sat and watched the rain fall. Baba-san was in the next room at her shrine, and he was a little down because of all the gloominess. He kept thinking about things that no longer mattered. Fugaku was not going to be here until a few hours more, and he was not ashamed to say he was sulking about that.
Minato was so bored.
Finally, he lost his fight with boredom, and he went to bother the only other person stuck in this apartment with him.
"You were a shinobi?" he asked suddenly. That was not what he meant to ask, but it happened. He suddenly felt nervous but tried to ignore it.
She gazed at him dryly. Of course, she was probably judging him because it was obvious that she was once a kunoichi.
The woman looked to her shrine. She briefly closed her eyes, which was surprising because the older woman always hid her emotions. "Yes, Minato-kun. I was a kunoichi before the village was founded."
How old was this lady? Minato's perplexed face must have portrayed his thoughts because the elder in front of him chuckled. That was practically a cackle from that woman.
"How does chakra work?"
"Is your Kaasan not a nurse?" the older woman said dryly. Minato stared at her blankly, before he started to think about that as well.
Baba-san was right. His mother had been explaining the human body to him for months now. Of course, they could not do it every day, but she had not once mentioned chakra or how it worked biologically. She had started to explain how the body's functions worked and worked together, and that was beginning to be new territory for him.
Although his past life's memories were jumbled, he still had casual knowledge of how the body functioned. Despite this, he had not thought to question how chakras function in a human's body.
How did humans... even have chakra? Suddenly he had the realization that, oh fucking shit, he might be magical, and he had not thought to question it because everything he had known in his past life was able to be explained by science.
How far were the scientific findings here? Did the world even follow them, for fuck's sake, people could control elements-
Minato was going to get a headache.
"May you explain chakra to me, please?" Minato asked again.
The woman sighed at him. "You are the first three-year-old I have ever met who wants to know how chakra works, instead of how to use it."
Minato pouted. "I will be four in five months!"
"Hn," Baba-san grunted. Then she sighed and pat him to sit down in the middle of the room. "Chakra is energy, plain and simple. Everyone and everything happens, but not everything can use it. Those who have enough to specialize and focus on abilities that require chakra to use are far and in between."
"That is why civilians like you are conscripted, despite the fact you are not from a clan. There are so few people born with enough chakra to become shinobi that if it was optional, we would not have enough to function against the other villages."
That made sense, but it was dark. Really dark. Forcing children to become shinobi whether their parents wanted to or not sounded disturbing. Pile that on the fact that a parent could not deny it, and probably were not allowed to move away from Konoha once their child was found to have chakra due to their child being a resource, was just the lack of rights.
It sent shivers down Minato's back. How many civilian kids like him graduated from the Academy to be genin, and then died on the battlefield because no one cared about them?
A thought for another time. Baba-san had sat and let him think without interrupting him. He flushed in embarrassment at being caught not listening.
"Chakra is created and stored inside your body." she continued. "You have a natural storage of it depending on how large your chakra pool is. It is produced by something called 'chakra coils'. Then it flows through your body."
"So it's a secondary circulatory system, like, the lymphatic system, but for chakra." Minato blurted out.
The elderly woman stared at him, her face blank but considering him.
"You would have to ask your Kaasan. My limit of the circulatory system is where nerve clusters and veins are." 'So I can slit them' went unsaid.
Minato grimaced.
"Can you show me how to meditate?"
"You are too young to access your chakra. Clan children usually train from the moment they can walk and are given a shuriken, sure, but the chakra system is a delicate thing for a child," she said.
Ah, more years to wait. Minato put his head in his hands to sulk. So much waiting and not doing anything. It was going to drive him mad.
"To abuse and harm your chakra system so young could prevent you from becoming a shinobi entirely. That is why students wait to do it until the second year at the Academy. So you could meditate, but your chakra pathways are too undeveloped for you to do anything with the exercise." she said and eyed him.
"That sucks," he said. He picked at the threads of his sleeves. Sucks he was not going to grind like all those other self-inserts. Thinking on it, he wished he had read Naruto self-inserts at all. Instead, he was stuck with his limited knowledge. It was unrealistic, and he wasn't sure he wanted to grind in a place such as this anyway. The concept of grinding was a-.
Minato was going on a tangent.
They sat in silence for the rest of the day, and Baba-san had him read beginner poetry to practice his reading. Then she had him do the hand sign game again, but sequences this time. When he asked if the pattern meant something, she just smiled and did not tell him.
At least it was interesting, even if it got dull after a while.
"Kaasan, why have we not talked about chakra pathways?" he asked during dinner later that day. His mother's eyebrows raised at his question, and she set down her spoon to stare at him.
They had soup today, something his mother had started to prep before she went to work. A soup with a lot of vegetables he had no idea the name of. His mind was on too many other things to ask, but he added it to his mental list for later.
"Huh, did Sakura-san tell you about chakra today?"
His father grunted as he continued to eat. The burly man had gotten used to his family talking about the human body at the table. A few months ago, he had stared at Minato in shock about his child being able to talk about the sort of thing without stumbling over his words, but now he had accepted it.
Minato was always asking questions, anyway. He still had to make his cadence slow, or his words would sound like gibberish.
"Yes, I asked her what chakra was today. Did you know there is a chakra pathway? Can we go over it in your book?"
She nodded at his questions. "Ah, it is usually separate from the other functions of the body. I can go over it a little after dinner."
"Oh... why is it different?" he asked.
"It is easier for civilians to learn medicine if they study chakra pathways after they have learned about how the other systems work," she explained slowly to him, as she started to eat again. The woman was always so patient with him that he felt a rush of affection for her even as he thought about what she said.
Oh, he had not to think about that. Could his mother even use medical jutsu?
This was so exciting! "Oh, so can we-"
"Minato, finish your food." his mother interrupted him.
The boy grumbled, but obediently listened.
They did go over the chakra pathway that night. He figured out his mother was a civilian nurse, because there was a distinct difference, and she tended to people who had already been healed by medical jutsu or did not require it.
For one of the first times in this new life, he was learning something new, and he felt so alive.
The thing was, he was a curious child in both lives. He was sure of that as much as he was sure his name was Minato, and that he had been an overall devotee of knowledge his whole life. The lines could blur sure and he could forget every detail, but not the feeling of his joy.
There was a system of chakra pathways: the main pathways that trailed the spine and major nerves, the tenketsu points, and the concepts of chakra coils- oh, his brain was buzzing.
It also gave him a slight headache. Despite his racing thoughts, the fact that he was having trouble focusing on it all reminded him that he was too young to probably be thinking about all of this, but he could not help it.
Maybe he had been so bored that his brain had decided to hyperfocus on things he could actually learn, such as his fascination with anything medical his mother told him. Or he was just a nerd who was stuck in a useless body with nothing to do?
Minato knew then and there, despite whatever happened to him in the future, that he was going to figure out how the fuck chakra worked if it was the last thing he would do. It was magic or some crazy scientific phenomenon.
Also, healing sounded... unreal. Healing people with his chakra? That sounded miraculous.
Today had made him realize that he had been so focused on being a child soldier that he hadn't considered any positives. Okay, well, that came out wrong, but what he meant was that if he went to the Academy, he would be learning about all this.
And even though the thought of specializing his education in the properties of manslaughter made him sick to his stomach, that also meant he would have the means to learn jutsu and even how to heal people if he tried hard enough!
For the next week, he thought about this. His parents were worried by his quiet murmuring, and all the paper he scribbled huge circles on to help him focus, but he was truly thinking about it. What it would mean to be a shinobi, to his morals and character, his future, his relationship with his parents, and also-
How sick it was of him that he was just a little bit excited about it all.