Yon
Miho is almost 9 years old. Her memories are even more faded and she finds it pleasing to know her life is her own. It's proven day by day when fate doesn’t harm her for interference. Her plan to be a butterfly works wonderfully.
It's due to these faded memories that she only remembers a few things that will be coming up soon.
One, there is close to a year before Uchiha Itachi becomes an ANBU at 11. (She doesn’t need to change that.)
Two, this is around the same time the academy implements its rule to not allow students to graduate before 11. (Honestly you would think Sarutobi would’ve remembered his predecessors wanted a village because of their little brothers deaths.)
Three, within the next few years the white haired traitor's mother, who gave children to the pimp daddy Danzo, would die.
Four, she doesn’t care about that now and similarly didn’t last time.
Five, Orochimaru convinces the kid with the pimp mommy? To defect and make his creepy sex slave dungeon experiment village within the next five years. (What was his deal with minors?)
Six, Most of Yudai’s pretty relatives die within the next 5 years. (She doesn’t remember what she thought of Itachi or Obito, but she does remember they had fans? She did remember thinking Sasuke was not pretty enough to simp over, which meant he was pretty enough to mean not all of Yudai’s pretty relatives died? It’s fine, plenty of pretty things to look at in the world.)
Seven, Itachi joins a weird boy band that doesn’t want to destroy the world but ends up almost doing so?
Eight, Orochimaru quits the weird boyband.
She doesn’t think anything else happened before Canon other than those kids that wore green and had bowl cuts graduating?
Or was it only one Kid who was Gai’s minion of youth?
Whether it's one child or ten children, with Gai it doesn’t matter.
It seems her schedule is mostly free for shenanigans of her own makings for the next few years.
Which, while it seems like fun, it means the butterfly outfit she made won’t have any use. AND she’ll grow out of it by the time she no longer has to be a caterpillar and instead has to be a butterfly.
Maybe Takumi would like a butterfly outfit, for a relative?
That seems like a good plan.
Her butterfly work is done. For a while anyways, the entire list (or well the part she cared about changing) she had just remembered was all been dealt with, due to her team's extracurriculars.
Which brings her to an actual problem.
(There is no problem, she is just ranting in her head for lack of anything else to concentrate on currently.)
A really big problem!
(No, Miho, you’re being overly dramatic, even dramatic enough to have a conversation in your own head.)
Le gasp, it is so a problem. Noguchi Miho, the sneakiest of all the sneaky ninja(a bold and utterly false claim), cannot heal.
This is a problem, because all of the people expect the female of the team to be a healer, yes?
Well, now that she put it that way, she realizes this is probably a good thing after all.
Yudai is very good at healing. Miho can only assume he never pursued it in canon because no one realized he could be talented in it before his death. Or maybe it was prejudice, the Senju produced Tsunade after all, most healing techniques used nowadays are hers and Yudai is an Uchiha.
She doesn’t know, but Yudai is their very talented healer, Takumi is good enough at it that he could easily patch himself and others in the field, which is impressive, but he doesn’t feel a passion for it like Yudai does.
She on the other hand is terrible at putting people back together. Fish explode when she tries, she just doesn’t understand anatomy.
What she is good at is enhancing herself with healing chakra. She’s pretty sure it has something to do with the power of youth. She can heal herself to amazing degrees as long as she doesn't heal anything to do with her brain.
Suzaku believes it has to do with her training with Gai, the immense control she has over her body and the chakra enhancement they learned in the academy left her constantly fueling her body with small amounts of chakra to help with the pain. She had been healing herself for more than a year.
And while learning healing made it more successful at healing herself, she had gotten so used to her own body, that trying to heal anyone else’s would be bad.
She can also admit that she mainly worked so hard on mastering the self healing to such an insane degree because of her intense want to be able to heal a punctured hole in her torso so her opponents will freak.
During these last few months of grinding, Miho has realized she is a bit of an idiot.
She trained with Gai, she can self heal and is basically a tank.
She can take a hit and keep going while bashing the other over the head with an insane amount of power.
But her main goal is to be a sneaky sneak. She wants to be a rogue. She is a very good rogue. Which meant she had noticed recently that people had been inching away from her when she was around.
It was very subtle by the ninja, but the civilians were not as subtle.
So she asked Suzaku, who, being the eldest, understands humans the best.
The conversation went something like this,
“Sensei, have you noticed the way people flinch from me?” Her voice is slightly confused and it makes him frown. He hadn’t realized that the fear wasn’t something she had planned on.
His youngest student usually planned everything, even things that won’t happen simply because another plan happens first that makes the other one obsolete.
“Miho, at this point, most people know of your goal to be a sneaky person. They learned this from Gai gossiping about his youthful comrade during bar meetings with his yearmates. They assume you’re like him. And your behavior doesn’t dissuade them from it.”
He pauses, noticing the distinctly confused frown on her face and sighs.
“You picked up most of your facial expressions from Gai. You use it to mask what you are really feeling. But people don’t see that you are hiding things. They see you smiling with too many teeth like Gai, the glee that shines through your eyes like the world is beautiful and the sparkle that hits your teeth in the right light. You also occasionally do Gai’s sunset of youth when you think about youth at all.”
He notices a realization dawning in her eyes, and smiles internally. She is starting to understand.
“They look at you and see loud Gai. Even when you aren’t loud. They assume it is because you are holding onto your goal of being sneaky and leave you to it, but are still acknowledging to themselves that you and Gai are the same.”
Suddenly she smiles, it's not a nice smile. Rather feral in fact. And he knows that the next words that come out of her mouth will be exasperating.
“Oh, it will be a good cover. No one will ever assume I am actually sneaky and will believe that I am holding onto that dream for the rest of my life.”
Well, he wasn’t wrong. He can’t wait for everyone else to have headaches from her.
Miho found it disheartening at first, but perked back up and focused her energy into making her smile more blindingly bright, utterly naive, and completely fueled by youth.
She now takes immense pleasure in the flinches of people around her.
Yudai and Takumi have taken to observing her facade and started implementing pieces of her into their own.
Yudai’s facade is a blank mask of intense boredom. He is constantly disinterested. Until it looks like someone has upset her or Takumi. Then he will give a feral smile, (that he stole from her) towards whoever ‘made her upset’. He said something about coming off as an overprotective brother figure to herself and Takumi. He felt it would make it easier for everyone to think that a sibling bond is why he would stay on the team.
Takumi went with smiles. A demure smile always on his face, movements doll-like, and he only speaks a few sentences changed up for each sentence like a pre-recorded speaking doll.
People find him unnerving and tend to either forget he is an Aburame or believe that his bugs are puppeteering him.
Her team finds that hilarious and keeps their facades up until on missions. Where they drop into professional blank intensity.
They’ve had mission partners who are constantly unnerved by them during the mission and have considered their covers largely necessary.
After all, you should not conduct yourself the exact same way during missions and time off.
Allowing clients to see anything other than what you allow is unprofessional.
The world keeps moving, Miho keeps learning new things and freaking people out.
Life is good. For now.