Chapter 3
Her schedule becomes much busier after that.
She gets up an hour before training with Gai-sensei and goes to get Naruto. He’s taken to setting up traps again to dissuade her, growing more complex and subtle by the day.
She’s getting very good at dodging and disarming them.
They train with Gai-sensei for two hours. Usually running laps and doing katas focused on fluidity and strength. He seems to have taken Sanji’s creed as a personal challenge and she’s usually wearing mitten-like weights over her hands or has her arms tied behind her back.
After training, she returns home to practice katas with her father, using a smaller bokken.
She has a very short amount of time to shower and get dressed before Naruto arrives for breakfast with her family.
Sometimes Gai-sensei joins them, and she never knew embarrassment before she had to watch her parents try not to swoon over his every word. She suspects both Okaa-sama and Otou-sama have crushes on him.
Naruto grimaces next to her and they eat their food in double time and shout their goodbyes as they run to the Academy.
They eat lunch separately.
It’s Naruto’s idea, and rather ingenious if she does say so.
They sit at opposite ends of the same table while Ino, Sakura, Shikamaru (sleepy guy), Chouji, and Kiba are spread out between them. She knows their names now. Ino made sure of it.
Ino and Sakura try to get her involved in girl talk, Chouji alternates between talking to her about cooking and to Shikamaru about classes, while Kiba and Naruto discuss what kind of cool ninja moves they know and will learn next year.
They’re close enough that it still feels like they’re spending time together, but the conversation and slight dispersal of the seating positions mean they’re “technically” not eating a meal together.
After the Academy day is over, she goes to the market with her mother to buy groceries. Once they get back, she prepares their lunch boxes the moment groceries are put away, making extra due to the sheer amount of sharing that goes on, with Naruto yelling ridiculous suggestions as Okaa-sama measures him for new clothes.
He seems to be going through a growth spurt, now his body is getting the nutrients it needs.
They finish their homework together in the kitchen while her mother makes dinner. Otou-sama usually arrives in time for them to finish setting the table and they eat dinner together.
On Wednesdays and Fridays they get ramen from Ichiraku’s. Every other weekend is when the Hokage checks in on Naruto, so she’ll not see him for the entire two days.
After Naruto leaves for his curfew, she helps wash the dishes while her parents ensure she’s up to speed on their family history.
She goes to bed early, because she learned quickly not doing so made Gai-sensei’s training that much worse to bear.
They move up a year.
It’s almost a shame, because towards the end there the teacher had begun warming up to Naruto, if saying “Good luck Ketsugi, Uzumaki.” counts as “warming up”.
She supposes she maybe should’ve had a bit more faith in the teacher, even if the woman does have an unhealthy idealization of the World Government-level tyrant Usagi-hime and is completely, totally wrong about pirates being poor role models to aspire to.
Now they’re going to have a new teacher and begin the whole rigmarole over again.
At least their classmates are already used to him, and they get a three week break before the summer term starts.
Her new birthday’s the weekend before classes start up again too, so there’s that.
Naruto’s being stalked.
She notices it a few days into the break, when Okaa-sama begs for them to act their age for once and go play outside instead of just training or cooking.
Naruto knows a good swing set outside the Academy and they spend half an hour trying to see if they can get the swing to go all the way round.
Yes, she has the memories and partial mindset of a twenty year old, but this is the dream of every child who has ever been on a swing, including her, and they are in an anime ninja world.
If there’s anywhere it’ll be possible to fulfill this dream, it’s here.
She’s managed to go almost horizontal on her swing while Naruto whoops in glee behind her, and on the backswing she spots a blur of dark hair hiding behind a tree and watching them.
No, she thinks, slowing a little while Naruto kicks with increased vigor and whoops again once he touches tree branches, the person’s weird pale eyes remaining fixed on his swinging. Watching him.
The stalker follows them everywhere.
She’s getting reasonably sure the stalker is a girl, because just about the only place she doesn’t follow Naruto is the boy’s bathroom.
She’s almost on par with the masks for stealth otherwise, remaining far enough away that it’s not obvious she’s stalking but close enough that she always has a clear line of sight to Naruto.
She’s definitely a member of one of the village clans. Her skills and the symbol on her high-quality clothing attest to that much. But what’s her interest in Naruto?
She waits a minute after Naruto enters the bathroom, and then walks towards the stalker.
The girl knows better than to run and draw attention to herself, but she does backpedal a bit.
“Look,” She says, not unkindly. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know why you’re watching Naruto. I don’t think you want to hurt him, and I’ll let you off so long as you don’t. Just don’t steal any of his underwear, or invade his privacy and make him uncomfortable, or we’ll have problems. Am I clear?”
The girl blushes tomato red. She opens and closes her mouth several times. She flees.
She sighs. The stalker may have just been too shy for her own good, but it’s always wise to nip a potential yandere in the bud before obsession really takes hold.
That weekend they get an addition to their morning training.
Gai-sensei comes striding onto their training field with a boy about their age trotting along behind him. He has a braid and very bushy eyebrows.
“This is Rock Lee!” Gai-sensei says proudly. “He will be joining our most youthful training!”
“I am Rock Lee and I am eight years old.” The boy introduces himself. “I am honored to meet the students of Maito Gai-sensei!”
“I’m Uzumaki Naruto and I’m seven! Imma be the Hokage, believe it!” Naruto cheers, waking up more with the chance to say his dream.
“Ketsugi Mayu. I’ll be seven two weeks from now. It’s nice to meet you, Lee-senpai.” She bows to him.
“Ah! It is I who should be calling you senpai, as you were students of Maito Gai-sensei before me!” Rock Lee insists, eyes shining. What a polite boy.
“Heck yeah! Just call me Naruto-senpai!” Naruto boasts, hands on his hips and nose in the air.
“No, don’t make him do that...”
“HOW YOUTHFUL!!” Gai-sensei roars, tears of joy streaming down his cheeks. The only person she’s ever seen cry more than him is Franky. “It brings me much joy to see my students getting along so well! Yosh! LET US RUN 50 LAPS AROUND KONOHA ON OUR HANDS!!”
“Yes, Gai-sensei!!” Lee yells back.
“Lee!”
“Gai-sensei!”
“Lee!”
“Gai-sensei!”
She and Naruto share a horrified glance. Oh god there’s two of them now.
There’s a lot of falling on faces, and 50 laps around Konoha do not get completed. They do manage 20 circuits somehow, and Gai-sensei tells them all he’s extremely proud of them.
That’s what’s nice about Gai-sensei. Even if you couldn’t quite reach the goal he set the first time, he’s always encouraging and takes every effort as something to be celebrated and built upon. He makes you want to succeed, but not worry about failing to get there.
They’re doing cool down stretches when Lee’s stomach growls.
Her eyes narrow.
Naruto catches sight of the look on her face and begins snickering.
Gai-sensei, cheerfully oblivious, straightens up. “Yosh! Mayu-chan, would your parents mind if we imposed upon them for breakfast?”
“Of course not Gai-sensei. They’d be delighted to have you.” She smiles.
Lee curls into himself a little, beginning to retreat. “Then I shall meet you all here tomorrow! Have a good morn—”
Her hand clamps down on his arm. She keeps smiling. “Training breakfasts are at my house. Here’s the address for you, so you can join us.”
Lee blinks, eyes shining suspiciously. “Ah...uh..is this...okay?”
“Don’t fight it Lee!” Naruto calls behind her. “Or she’ll hunt you down to feed you, believe it!”
“I did not hunt you down!” She yelps indignantly. “You set traps when I left you food!”
“I just wanted to say thank you!” “With chalk dust?!”
And so Lee joins them for breakfast.
He’s loud and a bit awkward, effusively thanking her parents for even the smallest of things and easily getting caught up in Gai-sensei’s pace.
He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body though, and can be surprisingly level-headed and reliable when not overexcited. Which, admittedly, is a lot of the time.
He also likes her curries, which Naruto wrongly insists are “pure LAVA on a plate, Mayu-chan, curry’s supposed to be sweet and savory, not burn your mouth off!”
She’s just glad she now knows somebody who can appreciate what a real curry is rather than the sweet, spice-less sauce that cowards attempt to pretend counts.
Her parents are convinced he’s somehow Gai-sensei’s long lost son. To be fair to them, the eyebrows and enthusiasm are very...similar. Their theorizing ran rampant when Lee mentioned he lived in the Village Orphanage while assuring her he did, in fact, get enough to eat.
Gai-sensei isn’t exactly dissuading these theories with how much he mother-hens the boy either. She suspects he overacts and exaggerates his normal robustness a little bit for Lee, to stop the boy from glancing around during training sessions or meals like he can’t quite believe he deserves to be here.
She can’t exactly criticize, since she and Naruto and Okaa-sama and Otou-sama are also doing all they can to make Lee feel welcome.
The weekend of her birthday isn’t like any birthdays she’s had before in this life.
For all that she grew up in Konoha, she never had any friends before Naruto. Running laps was a much more productive use of her time, even if her mother worried about her being lonely.
A quiet dinner in with her new parents was enough for her.
Naruto missed her sixth birthday because he had to spend the weekend with the Hokage, then insisted on trying to draw Luffy for her from the stories she’s told him as a late birthday present.
It’s not a very accurate drawing—Luffy’s straw hat is upside down and he’s got lasers shooting from his eyes and looks like a distressed noodle overall, but it hangs on her wall all the same.
Naruto has been pulling a vanishing act sporadically throughout the week, which she wasn’t overly concerned about.
She knows about birthday preparations, and if he wants it to be a surprise, she’ll humor him.
Though she did stumble upon a scene where Lee was on one knee in front of Sakura, while Naruto prepared to hit him with a bag of mulch from behind.
All three froze when they realized she was there, stammered out something incomprehensible, and fled like startled mice.
She has no idea what was going on there, but she’d pay good money to find out.
Or at least cook a good meal, because all her ingredient purchases leave her perpetually broke.
Naruto isn’t in his apartment the morning of her birthday.
She gets past all of his traps only to knock on the door and hear no answer. The neighbors yell at her when her repeated hammering on the entrance gets too loud.
Lee isn’t with Gai-sensei when she finally arrives to training. He pointedly ignores all her questions about where the other two are, but teaches her the kata for a dropkick in exchange.
It’s difficult, but the grin she gets when her heel hits the ground and leaves a dent is blinding.
He walks her home too.
That’s when she realizes this was planned.
Sure enough, the curtains on the windows are drawn, and Gai-sensei is a little eager to go ahead of her into the house.
The lights coming on are blinding, and the yell of “HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAYU!!” should not be as loud as it is considering there are only five people in the room.
She’s sweaty and worn out and for some reason she can’t stop smiling so hard her cheeks hurt.
Lee and Gai-sensei present her with a set of weights and a few pairs of orange leg warmers to cover them, like the ones they wear on a daily basis. She grins and thinks it might be nice to wear something that reminds her of the two of them and Naruto, who has insisted on getting mainly orange clothing since Okaa-sama once told him he had the coloring for it.
Okaa-sama and Otou-sama give her a book on baking bread that’s about as heavy as the weights and several bags of different types of flour. She hugs them as tightly as she can. There’s wheat and rye and multigrain and gluten-free and she can’t wait to see what she can create with all of this.
Naruto fidgets and shoves a small pot with a rosemary plant in it into her arms. “Ino let me have it if I helped out at the Yamanaka flower shop with her and Sakura-chan, believe it, and she said it tastes really good in food and its name is Habu-san because plants are living things, so they should have names like people and animals do, right?”
She inhales the slightly salty scent.
Later, after she’s finally had a shower and gotten dressed with the addition of the leg warmers, Sakura and Ino will drop by with a set of sparkly silver hair clips and a chef’s hat keychain.
They’ll all go to a restaurant owned by Chouji’s family to eat, and she’ll devour one of the best plates of chicken katsu, intent on figuring out the recipe through taste alone. She’ll share a chocolate cake with Chouji and Naruto, laughing as the latter pouts when describing Lee’s declaration to woo Sakura when he becomes a worthy ninja.
But for now, she just beams at her best friend and tells him, “I really love Habu-san. Thank you so much for giving this to me, Naruto.”
They return to the Academy.
Lee walks with them there, and they wave to each other as they go to their respective classrooms.
Kiba runs up to them within seconds of arriving in their new classroom, a beam on his face so bright it could outshine the sun itself.
“Igotmyninkenpartner!!!” He bursts out, practically vibrating with happiness.
She blinks. Looks at Naruto, who shrugs. Looks back at Kiba. “Beg your pardon?”
He groans, cuddling a bundle close to his chest. As she’s looking down at it, it squirms.
“I. Got. My. Ninken. Partner.” He repeats, with exaggerated slowness. “It’s a huge thing for the Inuzuka! We get chosen by a ninken, and they can understand human speech and learn cool ninja moves with us, so when we grow up we’ll be twice as awesome as any other ninja!!”
“What’s a ninken?” Naruto asks as the bundle squirms again—
And a puppy pops out.
“Meet Akamaru!” Kiba says proudly. Akamaru is white with floppy brown ears and big dark eyes and—
“Akamaru.” She says seriously. “You are a very good boy.”
The puppy yips in response and she could die right then and there from happiness.
This year they’re actually moving into the ninja portion of Academy learning.
The new teacher is a white haired man and he has them sit criss-crossed on the floor.
“Chakra is a force found in all living beings, a combination of their spiritual and physical energy, or yin and yang. It is a ninja’s greatest tool, the source of genjutsu and ninjutsu.” He drones on.
Does it run on midochlorians too? A voice in her head that sounds like her past brother’s mocks. It just all sounds so inaccurate, like a bunch of different ideas mashed together to seem cool.
At least Devil Fruits were somewhat understandable in how they worked. Eat a weird fruit, it messes with your genetics, you get powers. Much more plausible.
She pokes Naruto awake again and the teacher glares at them. “Today we’ll focus on basic chakra awareness. I want you to meditate and locate your chakra center.”
The classmates around her close their eyes. After an especially sharp glare, she does so too.
It’s warm in the classroom.
It’s noisy outside, and she can feel Naruto’s knee press into her leg.
She focuses on her breathing. It’s almost peaceful, retreating inside herself like this—
There’s something inside her.
It wasn’t there before.
It doesn’t belong in her.
She thinks it doesn’t like that she’s found it.
It’s like forcibly being made aware of blood circulating through your body. Not simply your heart beating, but the friction as the liquid scrapes through your veins, the pain as the breakneck current is divided and divided again, until dead ends send the liquid flying back to where it came from at the same terrifying speed.
“What the shit?!” She gasps out, eyes flying open.
Then she hears what she just said and claps her hands over her mouth as the children around her break into surprised titters.
The teacher glowers. “Ketsugi, go stand in the hall.”