Literally a Slave Death Camp
When Emma woke up the next morning, she just lay there, not for the first time kind of hoping that maybe she’d open her eyes and find herself back in time, in Sydney, in her old body.
She opened them. No such luck. Whatever. It had never been a serious hope. She could tell her eyes were sore before she opened them, anyway.
“Ugh, fuck,” she mumbled in English. The curse sounded particularly harsh thanks to her babyish voice.
Emma gave her face a rough rub. At some point she got out from under her sheets. The only good thing about summer was that it was too hot to stay in bed.
Emma trudged over to the bathroom and began her morning routine, washing her face with cold tap water before dragging a comb through her unruly silver hair. Going through the morning routine of years helped her feel more like Uné and less like Emma. That was important because Uné was the one who knew how to throw shuriken, and Emma wasn’t.
By the time she was done cleaning up, she was already noticing the hunger.
“Breakfast,” she muttered to herself, trudging towards the kitchen. At least she was a decent cook. That was something both Emma and Uné shared. She didn’t know why her brother was trying to butt in on her territory now, but she wasn’t having it.
Speaking of, that kid was long gone by now. She didn’t even need to check. If coming home early was once in a blue moon, then leaving the house late was… once in a purple moon.
She checked the fridge. There was some gohan left over from last night. Emma heated it up on the stove while she cooked an egg and some fish. It wasn’t as good a breakfast as jam and toast, but gohan was alright. It was kind of like rice, actually, just rounder and stickier. The other difference was that it obviously didn’t come from a rice tree. Before gohan was cooked, it was called komé, which was a part that came from a plant called the iné. Just like mangroves, it could only survive in water, at least at first.
The Hatake Clan grew drier plants too, like the mugi and the awa, but her ancestor must have slept with his clan head’s wife or something because Uné’s familial branch was the one who got to live in the man-made swamp. It wasn’t unhabitable but if it wasn’t for the medaka fish, they’d all be swimming in mosquitoes.
After breakfast and a quick morning shower, Emma decided to head to the academy early. Maybe if she got there first, she could grab a seat at the back and avoid the teacher's gaze. All of the little delinquents sat at the back, but being hassled by eight-year-old thugs was way less scary than being stared at Point Blanc by an actual shinobi. Emma stuffed her books into her bag and left the house.
She paused only a little to check the iné in the paddy right in front. Uné had planted these with Dad. Even with him gone now, time moved on, and soon these would be ready to harvest without him.
Well, as long as she didn't mess it up, at least.
She knelt down for a quick inspection but couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. With nothing left to do, she started the trek towards town.
Technically the iné fields were inside town as well, given that they sat within the walls of the Town Hidden in the Leaves, but that was just what they called the most urban part of it—town. It wasn't like Uné made the rules.
As for the town proper, like all the way up until the walls, its name was a bit of a mouthful, so typically everybody just referred to the place as Leaves. Leaves. The town that nobody left without the permission of Lord Third.
Emma walked along the paddy fields, the iné plants swaying in the gentle breeze. Ugh, the sun was already blazing. Disgusting!
One of her neighbours, a clanswoman who sometimes gave her eggs, was trying to rouse a cat that would absolutely not budge. That was a mood. Emma looked at the cat longingly and sighed.
The woman noticed her.
“Uné-chan! So early? Do your best at school today!”
“Thanks, Aunty Kuwa,” she said with as much energy as she could muster. A kuwa was a big stick with a bit of metal at the end, used to loosen up dirt. Uné held one for the first time a few months ago when Dad taught her to till her first field. Come to think of it, that was a hoe in English, right? Aunty Hoe.
Of all the clans in this shinobi town, she had to be born into one with the most incredible naming sense.
On the one hand, the Hatake Clan was one of the most relaxed old shinobi clans in the village. If she had been an Uchiha, she didn't think her extended family would have been so understanding about… what Dad did.
On the other hand, Uné could still remember the exact moment she discovered that scarecrows weren’t named after her weirdo brother, but the other way around. Mum, Hatake Iné, had been named after the plant.
Emma didn’t know what Uné meant in Chinese yet, but she hoped it wasn’t something stupid.
The closer to the town centre she got, the noisier and more bustling the place was. For a town with so few people, it sure was lively. If only they could share some of that energy with her.
Dad was the one who enrolled her in shinobi school anyway. It was free education but maybe if she really wasn't feeling it, she could drop out after learning how to read and write.
As Emma neared the academy, she could hear the chatter of her classmates. Some were discussing their training, others were talking about the latest rumours in the village. Emma ignored them, slipping into the classroom and choosing a free seat at the back. The day had only just begun, but already she felt drained.
“Uné-chan!”
“Hello, Snitch.”
Emma mustered as much disgust as she could and projected it through her eyes. Rin winced at her display of doujutsu.
“Uné-chan…”
“That’s still my name, yeah. What do you want?” Emma squinted her already squinty eyes. “Here to gather more of my secrets to snitch about, you snitch?”
Rin fidgeted with her fingers and her nervous, chubby face turned down towards the floor.
…Talk about making her feel bad. To her frustration, Emma could feel the hostility draining from her face. Damn it! Cheating, adorable toddlers!
She sighed and leaned back on her kindergartener-sized chair. “Stop snitching to my stupid brother, or else.”
Rin nodded.
“Sit down already.”
Regaining some of her peppy energy, Rin took the seat next to her and the two of them chatted idly about nothing, and their classmates.
Whatever. It wasn’t really Rin’s fault anyway. She was a Nohara. Emma had heard plenty about them from her elders.
Back in the Sengock period, the Noharas constantly undercut the Hatake Clan with inferior goods. Of course they couldn’t farm a field worth a damn—it was literally in their name. Unfortunately the other shinobi clans couldn’t tell a turnip from a carrot, so the Hatake clan lost a lot of clients that way because they didn’t want to pay 'a good, honest price for good, honest herbs’.
Then, when the Hidden Towns were being formed, the stupid Noharas tried to bar the Hatakes from joining. Thankfully reason had prevailed, and Lord First realised that one good potato was worth fifteen Nohara potatoes. Grandpa Hakusai said that if it wasn’t because there was already an agreement that the Nohara Clan would join, the Noharas might be living in Sand right now.
Basically, Rin couldn’t help being treacherous any more than Uné could help having grey hair, or being a fucking crybaby. It was just genetics.
But the problem was that they were supposed to be friends. It was OK to be a born sneak, but friends were supposed to have each other’s backs!
It was lucky that Emma had gained her memories back. All she could do now was try to groom Rin. Direct Rin’s desire to commit treachery towards people that weren’t her. As for Rin's future boyfriends or whatever, Emma wouldn’t pray for them. The shinobi world was dog eat dog.
“Rin-chan!”
Oh. He was early today. Uchiha Obito. Emma would think something like ‘speak of the Devil and he’ll appear’ but, haha, there was zero possibility the simp would ever have a chance.
His eyes widened. “Oh, you’re here too, Uné-chan!” She was right next to Rin.
How could somebody be so down bad at his age? He was only a little older than she was. Honestly, it was a good thing they didn’t have Twitch in this world, or Obito would have no future at all. It was bad enough that he saw Emma’s brother as his rival, which was absolutely delulu.
As somebody who had been fourteen once, Emma was old enough to know that dreams were fruitless. Beautiful lies, told by parents to children, that they could do anything, be anything. It still hurt a little that Santa was made up.
Obito would never be Rin’s boyfriend. He would never be Niisan’s rival. She didn’t think he would be a shinobi, either. A few older classmates had already tried to graduate early and failed, and they were leagues ahead of them both.
The Uchiha Clan were supposed to be full of geniuses, but if the Hatake could produce somebody like her brother, then it made sense that the Uchiha could produce somebody like Obito.
It wasn’t to anybody’s benefit if his lunacy continued in the long term. Being the only other adult in the room besides the teacher, it would probably fall to Emma to break it to him one day. She had already decided that if things didn’t work out for him in whatever sinner cure job his clan gave him, he could always help her out on the farm.
As Emma thought about the ugly truths of the world, Obito started blabbering something or other to Rin. She zoned him out. It was really hot, and she didn’t have nearly the energy to deal with it this morning.
Thinking back to the cat from earlier, Emma shifted into a relaxed posture, only a little awkwardly thanks to the muscle aches, and closed her eyes.
"Uné-chan."
When she opened her eyes again, after the Uchiha-brand white noise machine had run out of steam, Emma found Rin looking expectantly at her.
“Did you do the maths homework? The last three questions were so hard!” Rin said. Rin pulled her exercise sheet out of her bag.
Emma nodded. Emma hadn’t been much for diligence, but Uné had been studious and the habit hadn’t really changed after Emma’s reawakening.
Under Rin’s expectant gaze, Emma sat up and reached into her own storage, retrieving a perfectly completed exercise sheet.
…It hadn’t been easy.
Uné was on the younger end of the class, and they were already working on polynomial algebra. While Uné had been a diligent but average kid, Emma had been a lazy but high-performing one, at least by her world's standards …and so long as the subject didn't rely on rote learning.
Polynomials should have been challenging but manageable. Sadly, the people here calculated them using some sort of weird… tally grid…
She must have missed the explanation during class because neither half of her could understand it.
It had almost been enough to give her a mental breakdown. The only reason she eventually finished the sheet was because she could see where she went wrong by converting the questions into regular people maths.
"Oh, neat! Can I copy?" Obito asked. Unwilling to interact with him so early in the morning, Emma simply waved her hand in welcome. She glanced at Rin's sheet. Except for the last question, and the much neater handwriting, the answers were just like hers.
Glancing at the sheet further to the right. …No, she did not want to deal with that for now.
Eventually their teacher arrived and no sooner did he settle the students down than the lessons began. Sensei began scrawling on the board at the front, drawing grid lines with funny circles and dots. As usual, the notation was only familiar to her Uné half, while Emma had to do the mental gymnastics to line the maths out to what she was good at. Between that and the roundabout way in which they solved for individual points, it had taken Emma quite a while to recognise they were probably doing calculus.
Privately, she wondered why their teacher didn’t just teach them to solve on the continuous function and be done with it, but she doubted the answer would satisfy her. Probably something about deriving historical proofs, or maybe building character.
Unfortunately they never specifically revisited the polynomial stick chart that had troubled her last night. More and more, she was convinced the class had gone over it in that hazy period after Dad left…
She would probably have to do something about that. Her pride as a fourteen year old was on the line here.
How, though? Rin didn’t seem like she understood it much better than she did, and her Uchiha pet definitely didn’t. Niisan definitely would, but asking him would be putting the car before the horse.
…Maybe the best answer was just to suck it up and ask her teacher for help. It would sting. Maths was the only thing in class that the Emma-Uné merger was good at. Then again, anything was better than asking for help from children. Unless she could find an adult clansman to help her, if they even still remembered academy mathematics, that would probably be her only choice.
Eventually, it was time for kung fu again. Emma reluctantly left her seat and followed the class into the yard.
The warm-ups and drills seemed to go on forever in the afternoon heat. Sometimes it wasn’t so bad, but today just had to be footwork day.
“Too slow, Hatake! Are you dodging an attack or sowing seeds? Move those bum muscles or lose your head!”
Emma wanted to glare at her teacher, but it was too scary. What kind of lunatic school put a professional killer in charge of primary school? Oh, right. An academy for child soldiers.
Thankfully, the gruelling drills had only started in the mid-afternoon. On Saturdays, Sensei liked to bring them out when the sun was at its highest.
When it eventually ended, what followed was, ironically, Emma’s favourite part of kung fu lessons: sparring. The lesson was structured so that everyone had a chance to fight, two at a time, duelling in front of their teacher. Maybe that wasn’t the best use of time, but fighting amongst even trainee shinobi could get dangerous, so it was better to be safe than sorry, someone had once explained to her.
Emma was the fourth to go up. Her duel was brief. Very brief.
Within thirty seconds she found herself utterly crushed by an older Inuzuka girl. Nobody found that strange, because it wasn’t.
For one thing, the girl was a lot bigger than her. For another, there were technically a lot of shinobi clans in Leaves, the Hatake Clan included, but there was a big difference between being from House Hightower and being from House Baelish. Everybody knew students from the major clans had an upper hand for one reason or another.
Also, maybe, perhaps, Emma just wasn’t particularly good at kung fu. That was fine though.
“Namiashi, you’re up next.”
Since she lost, her turn was over. Emma tried not to look too happy to retreat to the comfort of the shade.
Rubbing her swollen forearms, she found a spot next to Rin. Most matches lasted a lot longer than Emma’s did, which was great. Technically they were all supposed to be watching and learning, but Emma wasn’t sure how they expected her to do that without a Sharingan. So, for all intensive purposes, she’d get to slack off until it was magic lesson time.
It was a little weird with her brother gone, now. There used to be a lot more awed whispering from the girls. …And wasn’t that a gross thought, now that she was fourteen and wiser.
“Uchiha, your turn.”
Emma watched idly as Uchiha Obito ran up with more enthusiasm than was warranted. He wasn’t quite as weak as she was, but it was a near thing. He definitely made up for it in tenacity, though.
Wow, just look at him go. Five punches to the face and still fighting back.
Emma looked down. Rin was tugging on her sleeve.
"Uné-chan... is your Oniisan doing okay?"
Caught off guard, Emma blinked in confusion. “Huh?” She studied Rin’s face, trying to glean any hint of the intent behind the question, but all she could find was genuine concern. “Why wouldn’t he be?”
Rin hesitated, her eyes darting around them, briefly lingering on the still fighting Obito, before she leaned in close.
“I heard from my dad that Kakashi-kun has been demoted back to genin. My dad says it’s been doing the rounds,” she whispered.
No way. That proud little weirdo was demoted? Emma’s emotions were a whirlwind of surprise, amusement, and concern. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or be as anxious as Rin was. To think that her smug, prideful brother had been demoted.
Part of her was genuinely worried. That had to really sting. As she understood it, demotions weren’t handed out lightly. Shinobi basically weren’t demoted unless they were considered mentally unsound or they really, really screwed up. Even Dad hadn’t been demoted.
On the other hand, part of her wished she could have seen his face when he got the news. It wasn’t really a big deal when people like Uné failed, but the greater the pride, the more shocking the fall. Smug, proud, masked Niisan had been demoted. Shinobi basically weren’t demoted unless they were considered mentally unsound or they really, really screwed up. Even Dad hadn’t been demoted!
Emma snapped back to reality. Rin's cute round face was still looking at her expectantly.
Aha. Now this was more like it. Snitch to Big Sis Emma, not about Big Sis Emma.
“That really worries me, Rin-chan,” she cooed. “Can you tell me everything you know?”
Heh. Emma would make something of her little friend yet.