beboots

The waste of fine tea through incompetent manipulation was considered one of the three most deplorable acts in the world (the other two being false education of youth and uninformed admiration of fine paintings.)
~ Modern introduction to Lu Yu's The Classic of Tea.

W00t; I've finished my book review (handed it in on Tuesday) and my research essay for the History of China and the West (handed it in on Thursday). I ended up writing on how a foreign drink (tea) became the epitome of British culture.
And now... it's the weekend! :D All I have to really do is continue to assemble my application to go to France this summer, edit my English research essay, compose a fifteen-minute presentation for History 290 and write a skit in Japanese! (Um, that sounds like a lot, but it really isn't.)
Aaand since I finished writing my essay, I had time to finish writing the next chapter of "Rise of the Jinchuuriki"! :D Ahead of schedule!

Author’s note: As I’m sure many of you who reviewed my last few chapters have noticed, I enjoy replying to reviews. :) I enjoy thanking people for giving me what most authors beg for.

That being said, I’m afraid that I can’t answer your reviews if you’re posting them anonymously. ;_; If you did so, please contact me, and I’d love to talk with you about this fic! :D (I’m also willing to drop plot-worthy hints or thoughts on what’s to come, if that’s to your liking.) I’m looking at you, webweaver and Nemesis Jedi!

Oh, and I encourage everyone to vote in the reader’s opinion poll I have in my profile (http://www.fanfiction.net/u/331848/ ). :) Your votes won’t affect what’s actually going to happen in this fic (kind of like Canadian elections, that way), but I’d like to know what people think is going to happen. :)

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Chapter Five: Meeting the Pawns

With movements careful to conserve water, which was precious in the desert, as one can imagine, Gaara rinsed what Naruto would eloquently call the “yuck” off of his face.

He hadn’t thought that Yashamaru would try something like this so soon. He knew that the man had volunteered to take on a mission to assassinate him around this time; Yashamaru had admitted as such the last time around. That mission had lead to the... encounter on the roof that had resulted in his uncle’s death.

The poison hidden in his portion of fried rice had been particularly potent. If he hadn’t had the healing ability bestowed upon him by demonic chakra, he probably wouldn’t have made it to the bathroom to throw it back up before it caused massive organ failure.

At least he had managed to hold onto his composure. Gaara wasn’t sure that he wanted his siblings knowing that the only family member of theirs who was actually “nice” to them was actually trying to kill him.

However... Poisons were one of the few ways to get past his sand defense. Either the man had merely stumbled across this weakness of his by chance, thinking that it would be the simplest and safest way for him to do his nephew in, or Yashamaru had analyzed his weaknesses enough to know the perfect way to kill him. If it was the former, Gaara hoped that the man’s luck wouldn’t hold and that he still had a chance to win him over. If it was the latter, well... he wasn’t looking forward to killing his uncle. Again.

Gaara ran a handful of water through his red hair to cool himself down. Some wet, gritty and ever-present sand dripped from the locks of hair hanging across his forehead. Gaara examined his image in the mirror. His forehead was smooth and devoid of any self-depreciating symbolic tattoos. He only looked… tired, but that wasn’t unusual. He had survived too many attempts on his life before to really appear affected anymore. He didn’t appear too haggard, or on the verge of collapse, so he had been worse. He looked so incredibly young though: not a wrinkle anywhere. His hair was still violently red, without a gray hair in sight, which was a nice change, he supposed. Naruto would say so. His eyes, though, weren’t those of a child. He could tell that much. He had seen far too much to disguise his inner sense of experience.

Luckily, most people made a habit of avoiding his gaze.

Gaara didn’t have any excuses for any sudden bursts of knowledge that he might display. However, he likely wouldn’t be letting as many things slip, or at least not as much as Naruto undoubtedly would be. He had very good self control – he had to. And anyway, no-one really paid much attention to him in the first place. For all they knew, he really could have known jounin-level techniques at the age of six.

In any case, everyone was probably still too afraid of him to actually question him about, well, anything. Short of building a pedestal in the middle of the city and showcasing advanced jutsu to all and sundry for during the busiest hours of the weekly market, no one would have any idea of what he was capable of. Being considered a monster did come with the advantage of automatic privacy and grudging respect.

“Oi! Get out of here!” The shopkeeper’s words were punctuated by a thrown cabbage, which Naruto summarily caught as he fled. Its leaves were browning; the storekeeper wouldn’t waste perfectly good produce on a demon-brat like him.

He had really taken having his own chef for granted, Naruto mused to himself as he was chased out of the fifth grocery store this morning. He hadn’t had to actually do something so menial as to go shopping in decades.

After the first time he had been thrown bodily from a store, Naruto decided that, if nothing else, this enterprise would be a perfect test of his youthful body’s skills. He would see if he would be spotted as he tried to stealthily sneak into grocery stores to buy necessities of life. Many civilians who lived in Konoha had once been ninja hopefuls who had failed the academy graduation exam one too many times, so more civilians than you would expect had basic knowledge of ninja arts.

As it was, he wasn’t doing too badly. He had almost made it to the cash register with a loaf of bread and some instant ramen this last time. But then, as luck would have it, the manager, a chuunin who’d lost a leg during the Kyuubi attack, had managed to spot his stealthy movement towards the front of the store, and had forcibly kicked him out.

Well, there was one shopkeeper whom he was pretty sure didn’t have any ninja training. More importantly, Naruto was fairly certain that he actually let him into his establishment.

There was nothing for it: Ichiraku for breakfast it was.

Content with this thought, Naruto began walking towards where he still remembered the store being. It should come as no surprise that he would remember where the ramen stand was, but not the apartment of his youth. He’d spent much more time eating ramen than sleeping, after all.

Hands behind his head, humming, and almost skipping along, Naruto had a smile for anyone who even deigned to look in his direction with a less-than-usual amount of hate in their eyes. He liked to think that someday, they would smile back.

Still humming a jaunty tune, he was just about to turn the corner onto the street when someone in the middle of a shunshin no jutsu barreled right into him, sending them both to the ground. ‘Chuunin,’ Naruto thought automatically as he was thrown to the pavement. ‘Genin don’t have enough control to blur that fast, but a Chuunin would be cocky enough about mastering the technique not to notice they were about to run into someone. A Jounin would be too paranoid to use it in a crowded city, for fear of attracting enemy attention. Plus, they have more practical ways of getting around than flashy body blurring.’ And sure enough, when Naruto blinked and opened his eyes at the person who had knocked him down, who was also just getting back onto his feet... it was indeed a chuunin: one Umino Iruka.

Forgetting himself, Naruto gave his best gleeful smile and said in a louder than normal tone of voice: “Good morning Iruka-sensei!” And he meant it.

The chuunin froze, clearly staring at the person... no, thing that he had knocked down. Naruto realized his mistake immediately. He was too young to have met Iruka-sensei... whose parents had been killed by the Kyuubi. Therefore, the hate in the young man’s eyes was probably pretty justified. But nothing really prepared Naruto for the swift kick in the side he received from his former mentor. “Watch where you’re going, brat!” Iruka spat – he actually spat! – on the ground, just narrowly missing the blond’s small, sandaled feet.

Naruto couldn’t help it. Later on, he would blame it on the young age of his new body, but he knew that there was a deeper, more psychological reason than that.

In any case, he began to cry.

Iruka couldn’t help but feel vaguely guilty. He tried to tell himself that it was just the Kyuubi brat – the thing that had killed his parents – and that it was just using crocodile tears to get his sympathy... It wasn’t even human.

They were awfully realistic tears, though.

His feeling of guilt wasn’t assuaged until he had blurred out of sight again in another shunshin no jutsu. ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ as they said. He didn’t have time to be thinking about this demon, anyway; he had been summoned to see the Hokage. This was an unusual enough event that it warranted a speedy answer. Certainly, he worked for the man, both in his capacity as an academy teacher and as someone to man the mission desk, but it wasn’t often that he was summoned to see the leader of the village personally.

Something was “up”. And he would soon find out what it was.

Just because Gaara didn’t sleep didn’t mean he didn’t get tired. He was often outright exhausted. But as most insomniacs learn, there is a point in which exhaustion is turned to almost painful awareness of the world. Sounds become magnified, everything seems sharp to the eye, and even the softest of clothes become unbearably wrinkly, itchy and uncomfortable. All of these things stop the insomniac from getting the well-deserved rest that they crave.

Gaara was in this state at all times.

He settled himself into a comfortable-looking chair in the corner of the living room with the intention to meditate, or maybe just to read, depending on whether or not he could clear his mind. It wasn’t healthy, even for someone with demonic chakra to keep them going, to have to stay awake all of the time. Besides, meditation put him in a relaxed state of mind, which was as close to real sleep as he could safely get most of the time. Reading was merely a distraction, not a form of true rest.

It should also come as no surprise that Gaara was very well-read – he had twice as many hours in the day as anyone else did, after all. He couldn’t spend them all training or meditating, although many of his advisors seemed to think that he should spend most of them doing paperwork.

“He Who Never Sleeps” had been one of his epithets while in office, along with “Godaime Kazekage”, “Vessel Of Shukaku”, and so forth. In practice, that had meant that his ninjas could meet with him at any hour of the night and he wouldn’t have any excuse not to see them. It also meant that he couldn’t beg off doing paperwork because he had to sleep, unlike one blond ninja he could name. He had had to do week-long stints of paperwork-signing before, when some big project had had to be approved. Those were some of his worst memories of being in office, right up there with that time someone almost succeeded in assassinating Kankurou and meeting with civilian city leaders.

He did enjoy being so much more productive than his Leaf counterpart, though. It gave him something he could brag about. Not that he was prone to bragging.

Gaara released a breath that he had been holding and tried to relax in his sitting position on the chair. He closed his eyes and breathed in slowly, then out again. In, then out.

Of course, as soon as he began to relax, Shukaku rose to the challenge in the back of his mind. Gaara firmly shoved the angry consciousness back down. It took hardly any effort, especially after he had gone through so much trouble to erect mental blocks the day before. He reinforced them, though, just to be sure. He kept his breathing steady, face completely impassive and inscrutable.

Just because he appeared calm didn’t mean that he was untroubled. Far from it. Few but Naruto knew that the blanker Gaara looked, the more extreme the emotion he was blocking.

His face could mask the rage of Shukaku, after all. The Ichibi was said to be the most wrathful of the tailed beasts. Gaara had actually developed the ability to show emotions, such as amusement or happiness, on his face in his autumn years. Of course, they were never as evident as the expressions on Naruto’s face, after all, but it has gotten to the point where the crinkle in his eyes was so obvious that even a genin could tell that Gaara was pleased. Now, divining the cause of this amusement was a completely different matter altogether. Due to political necessity, Gaara had never grown out of hiding his inner plans and opinions.

He turned his mind to a more useful train of thoughts.

Yashamaru was definitely going to be a problem that he would have to address, and soon; this, he knew with certitude. Shukaku grumbled something about simply killing the man, and being done with it. There were more references to blood and gore than that, of course, but one had to edit such things out of polite thoughts.

Gaara gave no indication that he even heard the beast. It was the only way to keep sane. Once again, he shoved Shukaku to the back of his mind, where it belonged. Inwardly, he wished that Chiyo-obaa-sama had sprung for a more comprehensive seal, something like Naruto’s… one that would have allowed him to get some peace and quiet in his head.

Sometimes, no matter how strong a person one is, one just needs a good, long cry. They shouldn’t come often, but it’s unhealthy not to have them at all, especially if one’s in a stressful situation.

However, Naruto didn’t cry for long. One didn’t become Hokage if one was prone to crying over every little thing.

...Even if this “little thing” felt far from inconsequential to him.

Naruto wasn’t sure that he still felt like eating anything at the moment, but then again, if there was one thing he had learned in all of his years as a ninja, you couldn’t really do anything on an empty stomach. Sometimes when things popped up unexpectedly (“things” like, well, enemy ninja, invasions, unexpected assassination missions for him to assign, unexpected assassination attempts assigned to kill him , or a combination of all the above) he didn’t always get a chance to eat something, and he had always regretted it later.

And so, quickly swiping a hand across his face to dispel the remnants of dampness before anyone else would see – it wouldn’t do for him to show any weakness – he made his way towards his beloved Ichiraku.

“Ah, come in Iruka-kun. I’ll be with you in a moment.” The Hokage called at the chuunin’s gentle knock on his office door. The voice of the Sandaime always put Iruka at ease. He found his worry regarding this meeting melting away almost instantly after that brief greeting. Entering the room and taking an “at ease” stance in front of the man’s desk, Iruka waited to be addressed.

The old man finished scrutinizing the papers before him and placed them aside, turning his eyes to meet Iruka’s.

“I am worried about Naruto’s education.” Sarutobi got straight to the point.

Iruka felt thrown. “I – sir?” He wasn’t even the brat’s professor! He really hoped that this wasn’t leading to where he thought it was going to lead...

“Yes.” The Sandaime took a long draw from his pipe, sending a small cloud of smoke into the air above his head. “He has been transferred six different times in his first four months of the academy. And with the... debacle this last week, he has missed yet another few weeks of schooling. I believe that he’s an intelligent child, who just needs the proper teacher.” The man’s mouth said ‘teacher’ but his eyes said ‘Iruka.’

The chuunin knew that perhaps the reason that blond brat only appeared so smart because he was actually a thousand-year-old demon, but he didn’t voice that thought. Not to the Hokage, who seemed to have grown... attached to the thing.

Iruka supposed that the kid did look human enough. He suppressed a disgusted shudder, focusing hard on paying attention to what the Hokage was saying.

“That’s why I’ve decided to suspend a teacher’s ability to transfer Naruto. He needs a steady education.” The man’s eyes crinkled in amusement. “He wants to be Hokage, after all.”

Iruka didn’t know what to say. He knew that if he opened his mouth, something bit like profanity and more like horrified but wordless screaming would immerge. The chuunin kept his mouth – and thoughts – firmly to himself. It was safer that way.

He didn’t want to teach his parent’s murderer. But neither could he disappoint the Hokage. I’m sorry, Mother, Father, he thought, glancing upwards.

All he saw was a smoke-stained ceiling.

“Welcome!” Teuchi, of Ichiraku Ramen fame, called out with a smile as his first customer of the day sat down at the counter. “What can I get you?” He asked of the blond boy perched on a stool that barely raised him high enough to see over the countertop.

“Um, I’ll have a large miso ramen to start with.” The boy said in a subdued tone.

“All right.” Teuchi tossed some miso broth mix into the water simmering in one of the pots on the stovetop. “Can I get you anything to drink while you wait?”
“Just water, thanks.” His customer said with a smile. Teuchi noticed it didn’t meet his eyes.

The boy looked upset. He was trying to hide it behind a painful-looking grin, but the chef could tell that the boy had recently been crying.

Teuchi tossed a plateful of noodles into the pot, sending a burst of miso flavoured steam into the air. The kid was also very young to be out on his own, without any parents. He had a daughter just a few years older than this kid… He hoped soon to have his young daughter working alongside him. At the moment, she was too young, but she had the makings of a great ramen chef like him.

The chef watched his customer out of the corner of his eye as he prepared the order. The boy was staring moodily into his glass of water, which irrationally reminded Teuchi of an old man brooding with a mug of beer. He dismissed the thought as soon as it crossed his mind. The kid was probably sulking over something his parents had refused him.

Teuchi added the final sprinkling of tempura pieces and one solitary, swirly naruto. There. It was perfect. With the steaming bowl in his hands, the chef turned around to face the customer. The boy was still staring down into his glass with a noticeable aura of depression about him. The older man paused for a moment, thinking.

What was the harm?

After half a second’s contemplation, he decidedly set the bowl of steaming miso ramen in front of the boy. “Here: free of charge.” The boy’s head shot up and Teuchi was treated to the most elated, watery-eyed expression of gratitude that he had ever seen.
The ramen chef knew, immediately, that he had done the right thing. He turned back to the stove, trying to hide his smile.

Unbeknownst to him, he had just won the eternal loyalty of one of the strongest ninja in the whole of Fire country... for a second time.

Iruka was being guilt-tripped. He knew this, intellectually. He should have been able to resist. All those of chuunin-rank and above had to go through the same torture resistance training courses, but after five minutes of Sarutobi just... looking at him like that convulsively made him want just apologize, cave in and do what the man wanted him to do and more.

Despite the fact that Sarutobi was easily the oldest of all active ninja in the village, he was still, undisputedly, the strongest as well. For all that, though, he didn’t often use corporal punishment against those who displeased him. Instead, he was one of those men that people instinctively felt close to. Then, if the Sandaime was unhappy with one of them, in many cases all it took to rectify the problem was a single, long, disappointed look from the man that almost all Konoha shinobi viewed as some sort of grandfather figure. The fear was not of pain, but in making him disappointed in them.

“All right, fine! I’ll teach him!” Iruka snapped in exasperation just to get the Hokage to stop looking at him like that, quickly slapping a hand over his mouth when he realized what he had just said to the leader of his village. He began to stammer out an apology, only to have it waved off by Sarutobi.

“I am glad that you agree.” The old man smiled amicably around his pipe, somehow managing to look both benevolent and devious at the same time. Iruka had no doubt that if he had refused just now (if he could have somehow worked up the courage to refuse the Hokage), the Sandaime would have found some other way of convincing him. It was the way that the man worked.

Iruka sighed. “When do I start?”

Sarutobi just smiled once more in response, and slid a packet of paperwork across the desk for him to sign. From the title, Iruka gathered that it was the finalization of a student transfer form. The Hokage had been filling it out before he had even arrived.

Apparently the Hokage had already known that he would agree to his “request.”

Damn it.

Iruka left the office an hour later, feeling vaguely uneasy about the whole thing.

Gaara was broken from his meditative trance by the sound of footsteps in the hallway. Automatically, he identified them: not light enough to be Yashamaru’s ninja-trained pace, too fast to be Kankuro’s slow amble... which left Temari. He was proven right only moments later, when his blonde sister appeared in the open doorway, apparently on her way to the kitchen for a quick snack in the middle of the night. The girl paused as she spotted something curious in the living room. “Gaara, what are you doing up?” Eight-year-old Temari asked with childish curiosity.

Gaara opened his eyes and shifted his gaze to his sister’s face. His eyes glinted in the darkness like those of a cat. “Thinking.”

“Oh.” There was a brief pause. “Why aren’t you in bed?”

“I don’t sleep.”

“…Um – why?”

Gaara stared. She didn’t know? Well, he supposed that made sense, considering he’d never really talked to his siblings until they were put on a genin team together, but by that time, Kankuro and Temari were terrified of him and he hadn’t cared. They had probably been told about his inner resident when they made genin and had been put on the same team as him. They had a right to know of the dangers that they faced. Or, rather, they had to know, to help boost their chance of survival.

For a moment, he wondered what Yashamaru had told them about him. He was pretty certain that they knew he was their brother; there was a certain resemblance, but what had been the explanation given for why he was suddenly living with them?

The redhead pondered how to answer her question, finally settling on: “Because if I fall asleep, a monster will eat me.” This was actually a surprisingly good answer to give to a child. That, Gaara knew from experience. Even though he generally avoided the younger generations of villagers, he obviously couldn’t seclude himself completely from the people he ruled over. He had had to explain to children about his “condition” before.

“So… Do you eat?” Back in the day, Gaara reflected, he would have tried to kill her by now for questioning him in such an annoying fashion. This thought did not show up on his face.

“Yes.” He replied, simply.

“All right, do you want to share some sandwiches?”

Gaara considered this offer for a moment. Why not? “Yes.”

“Come on, then!” The girl coaxed him out of the room and into the brightly-lit kitchen. Gaara took a seat at the table, and watched her making sandwiches at the counter, perched on a chair so that she could reach it. It was strange seeing Temari looking so… domestic. She normally brow-beat other people – men, such as her brothers – to do the cooking and cleaning. She had always seemed to rather resent the assumption that kunoichi were automatically responsible for the cooking and cleaning just because they possessed a uterus.

Well, that wasn’t strictly true; he knew that his sister wasn’t above using her feminine whiles to her advantage.

Gaara wasn’t sure he liked the change. His Temari - the one that no longer existed, he thought with a pang of hurt somewhere deep in his chest - would never put up with this sort of thing. She would have made him do the dishes, at least, even if he was Kazekage.

Perhaps he would, anyway, without being asked.

Gaara moved differently than most people, Temari noted, watching him out of the corner of her eye as she made the sandwiches. She hadn’t seen enough of her little brother before to notice. He kind of moved like those elite ANBU. That was the closest comparison she could think of. But that wasn’t quite right: there was something more… animal-like, in his walk, in his look… But he wasn’t an animal. Just by looking into his eyes you could see that he was smart. So he couldn’t really be described as an animal, either.

He almost reminded her of the desert, for some reason, but that was silly, because the desert wasn’t alive...

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