Chakra
“Understood.”
What? Kakashi could feel it just like that?
Sakumo had decided it was a good day to start chakra exercises but Yuina needed to access it in order to do so. She had a bigger problem than access. She couldn’t even feel it despite being told chakra exists in everything. She started to doubt that chakra was its own separate entity until Kakashi accessed it and stuck a leaf to his head. It stuck even as he removed his hand, then glided over his body.
It wasn’t fair. Was she more incompetent than a three-year-old? Technically, she was three too, but she had an additional 33 years to draw on. Sure, none of that involved chakra, but it was a stab to her ego that a toddler was capable of something she wasn’t. She should be able to use it if it was commonly taught to children.
Yuina glanced between Kakahi, and his feats, and Sakumo unsure of how to admit she could not feel her chakra system. She tried a few more times as Kakashi played with the leaf. He eagerly looked up to Sakumo who placed his hand on his head in pride.
She even tried to go into a meditative state, but it only cleared her mind and didn’t help her current needs.
Time to rip the bandage off. She already felt like a failure. Yuina’s eyes fell on Sakumo before her eyes fell to the ground in shame. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be feeling.”
She felt her face heated as Sakumo kneeled in front of her to be closer to her height. He was still taller by doing so, but it bridged most of the height difference between them, offering a different view than typical.
He patted her head in a consoling way. It wasn’t okay though. She felt so incompetent. She hated incompetence.
“I’ll help you along.”
How was he going to do that? Sakumo removed his hand from her head and onto her collarbone.
Oh.
She could feel it. It channeled throughout her body and exuded every part of her being. Now she felt extra dumb. How could she not have noticed such a thing? She could feel it. It channeled throughout her. Her head to her fingertips to her toes.
Yuina moved on to the leaf exercise as Sakumo made Kakashi approach the tree to move on to the next one.
It was the first time Yuina thought deeply about chakra. Was it like thermal radiation that human bodies emit but were simply invisible to the human eye? Did that even apply to this world? Either way, it was the best comparison she had. Was she supposed to link her chakra with the leaf’s?
“Pool your chakra to the bottom of your feet to walk up. You’ll want to circulate a little through the rest of your body to prevent yourself from falling,” said Sakumo.
Yuina listened in as she started playing with the spade shaped leaf. It sounded like circulation was needed to counteract the gravitational pull. Otherwise, his weight would unbalance him. She got the leaf to stick to her, but moving it proved to be a harder endeavor. Threading it along the flatter surfaces of her body was one thing, but manipulating around smaller angles like her nose, chin, shoulders, and around her hands proved to be more difficult.
Kakashi nodded and mentally prepared for the exercise. He wanted to absorb everything his dad could teach. He could feel the eyes on him as he lifted his foot to the tree. Happy that it stuck, he picked up the pace until forced to slow down with his sixth step. He would have slipped if he didn’t pace himself. Kakashi stopped on the first branch he came across to look back down to his dad and Yuina. She didn’t seem to be grasping the concepts as fast as him, but he was relieved to see her playing with the leaf sufficiently.
He didn’t know why he worried. It was just like training. Give Yuina a little extra time to observe and she would keep up. Always mere steps behind him. He was the older one, after all. He needed to guide her in these matters.
Kakashi jumped back to the ground, sending a shock up Yuina’s spine. She nearly had a heart attack. He was still a toddler and she would have been frightened if even an adult jumped off.
No, no. That was her old world. Yuina reminded herself of the occasional ninja she would see doing stunts around the village.
“Good job Kakashi.” Sakumo’s smile made Kakashi’s heart swell.
Yuina gulped as they looked expectantly at her. Theoretically, she should be able to do the same. If she can make a leaf stick to her, she should be able to stick to a tree. The tree was much larger and sturdier. It was falling that she was scared of.
“You can keep practicing with the leaf if you want.” Quality was important. It was better to be assured of one’s own skills than to have a multitude of unreliable uses.
“No!” yelped Yuina. “I got it.”
Sakumo said to pool chakra on the bottom of their feet and circulate some through the body. Her sandals were an intermediary though. She had less control of the leaf over her clothes, and her sandals were even thicker.
Yuina steeled herself as she approached the tree. She thought about running towards it hoping it would help, but it would be a spectacular failure if she fell that way. Slow and steady wasn’t how races were won. Someone people claimed that was the message of ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’, but she assumed the message was don’t do things halfway, don’t be arrogant, and natural talent means much if you don’t actually use it. She prescribed herself to be more on the side of be attentive and thorough. Speed came with skill and she didn’t have that cultivated yet.
She lifted a foot. She didn’t know the chakra makeup of a tree, but she refused to lift her second foot until she felt her chakra bond with it. She gets her second foot up, and she tilted her body forward to help lessen the pull of gravity so that her chakra required less precision. She took a third step when she heard a crack. She peeked down the best she can where the bark split where her foot had been. Her chakra and the tree’s weren’t at equilibrium then. Or was it too much force?
Yuina took another step and felt relieved as her next step avoided splitting the tree further. Feeling more comfortable, she went for it. It wasn’t too bad—
Her foot slipped downward, but she caught herself. Full attention. Full attention was needed. She felt relief when she finally made it to the branch without once falling to the ground.
Yuina walked back down the tree, not quite trusting herself to jump. In hindsight, jumping would have been less terrifying than facing the ground as she walked down a tree. Falling walking upwards meant the chance of falling on her back. Falling when walking downwards meant the possibility of eating dirt, and even if she knew it was coming, there wouldn’t be a way to prevent it.
Kakashi prevented himself from wincing when she slipped. A partial reminder of his near mistake and his desire for perfection. He wanted to point it out as Sakumo congratulated her because there was no way he missed it, but told himself she just needed a few more minutes to catch up. He was 48 minutes older, so it only made sense that she needed a few more minutes to catch up.
“I think I need more practice.” The people jumping around the village always made it look so easy. Even Kakashi made it look easy.
“So you don’t want to come to the lake with us?”
“The lake?” Was Sakumo going to teach them to fish? His gear was leaned up against their house.
“There’s still walking on water.”
Yuina paled. Water moves unlike trees and is very much a liquid. But also, she didn’t want to be alone. “One minute!”
Yuina ran to her room and grabbed a notebook, pencil, and eraser before running back downstairs.
“I’m ready now.”
They started walking but within a few minutes Yuina was asking for a piggyback ride. She wasn’t ashamed. To the contrary, she leaned into it and stuck her tongue out at Kakashi who was adamant he was old enough to walk on his own. His lost.
Yuina became lost in thought as she rested her head on Sakumo’s shoulder and watched their surroundings as they went to a more remote part of the village.
She couldn’t leave the village without permission. It wasn’t a good idea either with how weak she was. It meant that any understanding she had of the world came from within the village walls. Even then, she longed for her own world. She loved Sakumo and Kakashi, though. Maybe she could drag them to her world somehow. If she could arrive, then maybe there was a way back – though her hopes weren’t high considering traversing worlds had required her death.
“Does your head hurt again?” asked Sakumo worriedly. He would cancel their plans to take her back to the physician.
Yuina needed to get better at hiding her feelings if Sakumo could tell something was wrong. It was curious. Even though her memories were just settling in, she was always herself, yet her actions and behaviours were never questioned. Here she was questioning things again that could easily be explained by being in a different world. Chakra is a change in physiology, so why wouldn’t child development be different? Then add in more of an old-time upbringing than a modern one. She was probably overthinking it.
“Just a little.” More than a little. “But I’m okay.”
Sakumo stared, looking for deception before exhaling. “Let me know if it becomes too much.”
“Promise.”
The area by the lake was surprisingly quiet, void of other people. She could almost pretend they were beyond the village lines. She slid off Sakumo’s back and approached the water. It was so clear she could see her distorted reflection through the small ripples, making her immediately take a few steps back.
The grey-ish white hair wasn’t hers.
The cheeks and nose were too rounded.
The irises were even darker than before.
Yuina was still adjusting to her age. She was still unsettled every time she saw herself.
“You know, you didn’t like reflections even as a baby. You used to cry or crawl away.” It explained why she didn’t have a mirror in her room, but Sakumo’s story reminded her of videos she had seen of animals reacting to themselves.
“Pft.” Kakashi looked the other way.
“Why are you laughing? You once cried to me because you misplaced your toy,” Yuina narrowed her eyes and puffed her cheeks.
“Did not.”
Yuina stared harder. “Yes, you did.”
“Nope.”
“Tou-chan, tell him it’s true.”
“He’ll tell you you’re wrong.”
Sweat forms on Sakumo’s head as he got pulled into a childish argument. “It is true.” Sakumo remembered finding the toy. He had gone to return it only to come across Kakashi accusing Yuina of stealing it and hiding it from him. Yuina tried to comfort him, but Kakashi had been swinging his arms around to keep his distance, adamant she was lying.
Kakashi gawked and felt betrayed as Yuina smugly smiled.
“Now how about the lesson? I can show you how to fish once we’re done.”
Kakashi’s mood improved, excited to learn more and be a little more like his dad.
Water was noticeably harder. It was much harder to grip water, even when proceeding with caution. The water was calm, but it wasn’t still even then. It felt like forever before her foot had a solid grip with one foot and then it took less than three seconds until she fell in knees deep. Liquids really were much harder than solids, and she still had difficulties with solids.
Kakashi was getting the grip of it, even though he was unsteady, but not before falling in a few times. It was harder to hide his faults with water. It was enough to break their previous tension, and they promised each other to never speak of their failures to others.
She’d be practicing more later and no doubt Kakashi would do the same.
She stopped her attempts before him, too embarrassed to keep failing in front of everyone. She turned to the notebook she brought as Kakashi kept improving.
Today was Yuina’s first real interaction with chakra. It only made sense to start note taking to experiment. She didn’t know how she would get a sufficient answer about what it was otherwise. Her notebooks had been waiting for such an opportunity to have its pages filled.
Allegedly, chakra all have elemental affiliations. Sakumo said it was for another day, but it got her wondering whether all the elements were the same in this world. It wasn’t something she could test for a while and without proper equipment, but she couldn’t stop the theories. She missed the lab. She missed experimentation, whether it was for research, completing a client’s request, or for hobby’s sake.
Chakra was something she could start investigating now. It was one of the more obvious differences between Earth and the Elemental Nations. She wondered about its potency. About its forms of measurement. What units would it be called? Whether there was a based nature of chakra or whether it was all elemental in nature – and what that meant for inanimate objects. Water. Wind. Lightning. Earth. Fire. The five elements were all made of multiple chemical elements, which only irritated her more. Reducing elements to those five was archaic thinking. There was also Ying and Yang, which oddly sounded similar to the old concept of aether.
It also didn’t include bloodline limits. She didn’t know the full extent of it, but apparently there were techniques only capable through blood, which differed from a family technique. It made her head spin. It was like an acknowledgement that there was more to chakra and elements than it seemed, but Sakumo didn’t have answers and he was no idiot. However, even from basic analysis, it wouldn’t be inconceivable that the five elements were just common chakra compositions and therefore widely accepted as the elements. It’s not like people denied the existence of things like iron. She had seen the weapons.
But there were also questions about visibility and sensibility.
Yuina practiced for maybe 15 minutes after the guys excused themselves to go fishing before she stopped.
Then there were questions about visibility and sensibility. She needed to know what chakra felt like to even notice it, but Kakashi used it so easily. And what they were doing was chakra manipulation. It wasn’t even considered a jutsu. Was chakra transformative into jutsu or where jutsu still inherently chakra? There was also the matter of hand seals. They were names the same as the Chinese zodiac from Earth. Surely, they held some purpose.
All these observations were currently above her understanding. She would need to practice and learn a lot more before she could analyze it to any useful depth.
Yuina made notes to revisit later along with any theories and hypothesis that crossed her mind with fervor.
“Let’s try fishing now.”
Yuina looked up. It must have been a few hours based on the sun’s movement. Kakashi practiced the whole time? She would have to really make it up later. She couldn’t fall too far behind him. She should be stronger than him to protect him, but his hyper focus on learning new skills was intimidating.
They followed alongside of the lake towards the woodland area and continued on upstream until Sakumo approved the spot for fishing.
“What fish are there?” asked Kakashi.
It had to be freshwater fish and a smaller breed to swim in a stream.
“Char, sweetfish, and trout are the most common in this area.”
“I want sweetfish.” Yuina was suddenly more interested. Despite previously living relatively near an ocean, she had never fished before. Never really had the desire. This wasn’t so bad, though. It was nice to see the glimmer in Kakashi’s eyes as he tried something new and Sakumo was so relaxed even through stream fishing involved more effort than the imagery of people sitting around calmly at docks. It must be expertise.
“I want trout.”
“We can try for both,” said Sakumo. They would usually eat whatever was given to them, but give them a choice and it was a quick tell that Kakashi and Yuina’s preferences differed a fair bit. His words motivated his kids, as they made it into a competition to see who could catch a fish first. He let it slide. It was good that they got along well. There was no need to intervene unless things turned sour.
He wondered what kind of situation it would have to be that would require him to step in. Hopefully, Sakumo would never have to know.