friends and foxes
“Come on, Sakura-chan!” Fuki grumbled, big brown eyes pleading with him as she held out the box filled to the brim with makeup. Something which had been given out in kunoichi class before the summer break had come along. “Yuki-sensei said we ought to practice if we want to pass the exams…” she trailed off, ignorant to the way Sakurai’s stomach turned. He had worn makeup once before, at his mother’s insistence.
Boys don’t wear makeup, his father hissed in his ear, and Sakurai gritted his teeth.
“Everyone else has had a turn playing doll,” Ami said matter-of-factly. “Come on, Sakura-chan!” she whined, an echo of Fuki. “You’re our friend, aren’t you? And you want to pass your kunoichi exam, don’t you?”
Sakurai tore his gaze away from the earnest ones of his friends, sighing softly. “Fine,” he grumbled, and Ami harrumphed in triumph even as he resigned himself to his fate, blinking as his hands were snatched away from his control then. Ami lifted up a bottle of pale green nail polish, comparing it against him, shaking her head and switching it out for another shade of green.
“This one will look the best, I think,” Ami muttered, even as Fuki started on his face. A sigh escaped him yet again, the sound ever so soft, and Sakurai could only pray that his father wouldn’t be coming home that evening. It wasn’t like he was due to, he was aware, but sometimes it almost seemed like he had an inexplicably rotten luck.
Just like the luck which made everyone around him think him female. It was the only explanation for everything which had ever happened to him. Sakurai hated it. Yet luck wasn’t something that could be changed, could it?
“Red lipstick is too bold, I think,” Fuki murmured, even as the brushes descended on his face. Foundation and concealer were applied sparingly, eyeshadow and eyeliner being applied that much more generously. “You have really nice skin, Sakura-chan,” Fuki mumbled. “You’re lucky…”
Sakurai resisted the urge to snort and glare at such a statement. He was the most unlucky boy on the planet, with his appearance and his own cursed luck. Perhaps if he had actually been a girl, then that would have been a complement. As it was, the words only irritated him that much more. He wasn’t lucky. Not in the slightest. Nothing would ever change that fact either.
“Cat eyes is a good look for you,” Ami mumbled, staring at her then, even as they all stopped fussing over him and his makeup then. “Though maybe next time we could try the reverse…” Ami tapped her chin, and Sakurai squirmed ever so slightly under the intense scrutiny. “Look!” She held up a mirror, smiling as she showed him his reflection.
He blinked, staring at the face which was almost unrecognisable to him. Not that he particularly enjoyed staring at his face in the mirror – it was what had sparked the many issues he had to deal with daily.
“Your eyes are a pretty colour, so that’s what we tried to bring out,” Fuki said matter-of-factly. “Yuki-sensei says that you should emphasise your prettiest feature and… uh, how did she put it?”
“Draw attention to it,” Yuna, another of their friends, chimed in.
“Yeah! That was it!” Fuki stated, a grin curling at her lips. “For me it’s my hair, for you it’s your eyes, and for Ami it’s her lips. Or, at least, that’s how we think it is. Yuki-sensei might think differently, but we’ve gotta do our best for this next kunoichi exam.”
“Yeah,” Sakurai agreed weakly, thinking about everything they were learning right then and there for their kunoichi exam, which he, by all rights, probably shouldn’t be taking. He was a boy, after all, and none of his fellow boys were learning anything about seduction, sex, and poisons. “How are you all coming along with Fox’s Kiss?” he asked, glancing around at their group and wondering about how their immunities to the poison were coming along. It was yet another aspect of the kunoichi exam, and it was the only one which he didn’t mind. There were male poison users, and they had to be immune or nearly immune to their own poisons.
Not that either his mother or his father would approve. Though it wasn’t as if he had told them, and more to the point, he kept the academy-given doses of Fox’s Kiss far, far out of the reach of his mother. Haruno Kizashi wasn’t home enough to worry about him finding them – and besides, he was the one more likely to accept the fact of what he was doing. Sakurai shuddered at the thought of his mother losing it after finding out her baby girl had been taking poison. Diluted poisons, but poisons nonetheless as a form of mithridatism.
There were three types of poison the academy kunoichi classes made sure to employ the art of mithridatism against. Fox’s Kiss was the first, the next being Sakura’s Blossom – and Sakurai was just waiting for the jokes of him and his assumed name when the next year came rolling about – followed by Leaf’s Bane.
“Ugh, I hate that part of class,” Ami grumbled, rubbing at her stomach. “It always makes me feel terrible.”
“But you know what the final exam for ‘that part of class’ is going to be, don’t you?” Sakurai said, swallowing almost nervously at the thought of taking the undiluted form of Fox’s Kiss and not being affected by it. “At least Fox’s Kiss is the only one we have to be completely unaffected by. The other two we just have to have enough immunity to throw off its effects.”
“Well, unless you plan to specialise in poisons,” Fuki said pointedly, “it doesn’t really matter all that much. What are the chances someone’s gonna use them on us, anyway? It’s not like the boys have to immunise themselves to their effects.” She folded her arms with a huff. “Don’t you think that’s kinda sexist? Like… women are the only ones who are vulnerable to poisons and will use them in turn…”
“Poison is a woman’s weapon,” Sakurai muttered bitterly, reminded then on the ratio of male to female poison specialists. Kunoichi were poison specialists, the special title often given to a female shinobi sounding so wrong on his tongue. It almost felt like an insult. His eyes narrowed, the many times he’d heard that word ringing in his ears.
“What’s a kunoichi like you gonna do about it?”
The spat out title, branded like a cutlass, had someway sounded lesser when rolling off the tongue of a drunken chunin on the eaves of the Red Light District.
Careful, Sakurai, his father’s words echoed in his ears, if you’re not careful you’ll end up like that woman there. The phantom, tight grip of his father came to haunt him then, grasping at his shoulder and squeezing. He tensed at that feeling – the one he could never ever escape from, no matter how far he ran. You’ve got such a pretty face, after all. A face far too pretty for a man…
Sakurai had been catcalled far too many times to be able to refute that statement or ignore the disgust which came with it because he was a child compared to the adults who made those sounds at him.
“What’s wrong with being a woman, dattebayo?” a new, vaguely familiar voice rang out. Sakurai blinked, glancing curiously towards the speaker, and frowning both at her strange appearance and the way Ami tensed at her sudden appearance from the trees.
The new girl was tall and gangly for their age, her long blonde hair reaching her back, tied up in two thick tails on either side of her head. She would have been very, very pretty too, if it weren’t for the three thick dark pink-black markings which marred each cheek. It made her look far to foxy for a village like Konoha where foxes weren’t welcomed in the slightest. He had seen the state of the shrine of Ō-Inari after the festival celebrating the Fourth Hokage and his defeat of the Kyūbi. Some idiots had trashed it, what with Inari Ōkami being well known as a patron of foxes as such.
Even his father no longer worshipped that particular god simply because of the stigma attached to them within the bounds of Konoha. Something about that rankled Sakurai, not that he needed anymore of a reason to hate his father.
It was probably something to do with the idea of being discarded. Just like his father had been so quick to discard him when the full extent of his ‘girlishness’ came to light. Not that he even really wanted his father’s attention those days. All that did was spell an unmitigated amount of trouble for him and his far too pretty face. He had been discarded, left behind in Konoha because of something that he himself couldn’t really change. That was for the best though when it came to him.
“Ugh, it’s you,” Ami grumbled, lip curling as she stared at the whiskered girl with something like disgust.
Sakurai looked away from the new girl, already able to tell from Ami’s tone of voice that she didn’t like the other girl. In fact, looking at the faces of the rest of his friends, none of them seemed to like the blonde girl. Part of him wondered why that was – before deciding that was none of his business. All it meant was that Ami would shoo her away, and that would be the end of it.
“You’re not supposed to hang around with us, fox girl,” Ami stated, spitting the words out like they were an insult – though they probably were, knowing what foxes were to Konoha.
The aforementioned fox girl paused, lips tightening, eyes narrowing as her hands curled into fists. Blue eyes flashed, glancing around at all of them. “I was just asking a question!” she declared, voice high and ever so slightly wobbly. “’s not like I wanted to hang out with a bunch of meanies like you lot anyway!”
“Hmph,” Ami muttered, folding her arms as the girl whirled on her heels and stormed back off into the bushes. “She’s bad news,” she said declaratively. “My mother told me she’s the no good sort – the kind who’ll get into trouble.”
“Ne, my dad told me that she’s an evil fox spirit trapped in human form,” Fuki said. “’s not like she’s the big bad Kyūbi who attacked the village around the time all of us were born, but she’s associated with foxes.” Fuki drew three lines on her face with her fingers. “She’s got whiskers like a fox too. Don’t you think it’s suspicious?”
“Well, fox spirit or not, we’re not supposed to associate with her,” Ami said, and Sakurai could only blink, nod, and gaze at where the blonde girl had vanished off to. He had enough on his plate without worrying about foxes potentially in the form of humans. Not that foxes were particularly evil in his mind.
If occasionally he went under the cover of darkness to sweep away the debris which littered that shrine, abandoned things sticking together, then that was entirely his own business.
Though Sakurai supposed his mother hadn’t abandoned him as such. She just simply thought of him as something he wasn’t – something he couldn’t be. Compared to his father, she was always the better option.