Chapter Text
Rin, 2 years old
Magic was nice. Nice to feel again, draw in with every inhaled breath, and then let out with a short, panting sigh.
The people, though… the people here were all pretty much bugfuck nuts.
Rin—she didn’t remember what, if anything, she had used to be called, and had taken on the name her new parents called her—didn’t think that this was the way to go, when you were raising a beloved child. She had had toys, Before, but none of them had ever been blunted knives, or ropes, or pretty little circles of metal that she could see doing damage to someone if the star points that dotted their edges had been properly sharp.
As it was, it took a significant amount of concentration not to injure her stubby, too-small fingers on them.
“She likes them,” Papa cooed, his attempt at baby-talk making it even harder to understand his words. “Rin-Rin, smile, look up? Look at papa?”
They were so easily pleased. One look up, one uncertain smile, and the camera shutter’s click was lost in their delighted laughter. It made Rin smile harder.
And then, because she was just that much of a degenerate, just that desperate to keep the joy flowing, she strained, picked up the blunted knife and waved it.
Papa grinned. Mama did too, but it looked a little sad, and in a moment, she bent down to gently pick Rin up and extract the knife from her still-clumsy grip. “Time… change, hm?”
Rin nodded firmly, though there was a word or two in there she wasn’t sure about. Mama’s grin was weird up close—the marks on her cheeks made it look strange. Rin patted the smooth skin covered by the mark in a bid to distract herself from the terrifying sensation of being moved by someone much larger and stronger than herself.
She didn’t know whether it was normal to have kids this young, even in ancient times. So she patted a little harder, and let the rumble of Mama’s voice lull her into a state that was somewhere between asleep and awake.
The best thing about being here, she decided, wasn’t the magic. It was the emptiness of her head. The vague fuzziness over everything she struggled to remember. Sleeping in her parent’s arms was nothing short of bliss.
(Rin, almost 5 years old)
Bliss went away all too quickly. Days passed, and if Rin had not been charting the growth of her hands obsessively, if she hadn’t the colourfully painted, tidily dated hand-size records to prove the passage of time, she would have thought it all came about in a handful of months.
Time was difficult, as a child. Time was doubly difficult when the clocks didn’t follow you, and instead stayed stubbornly on their walls.
“Nohara Rin,” Maeda-san said, her low, tight tone brimming with disapproval. “Care to explain why you are, yet again—”
“Slept too much,” Rin said, as she toddled to the only empty desk in the room, the one in the front row that was one desk over from the window and six desks over from the door. “Sorry, Sensei.”
Maeda-san glared at her for a brief moment, then sighed. “Your assignment?”
“Um, Sensei, that…”
“You will stay to finish it at the end of the day,” Maeda-san said, hardly bothering to look away from the blackboard she was now once again writing on. “Unless you didn’t bring it?”
The dark undertone in her voice caused the whole class to hunch down, just a little, in their chairs. Well, the whole class minus Rin, who was busy getting her writing things out of her annoyingly heavy school bag. And of course there was also the silver-haired boy to her left, Hatake-kun, who always grabbed the first row desk nearest the window. He was now also glaring at her, and seemed entirely unaffected by Maeda-san’s tone. “Um… it’s here, Sensei. I have it.”
“Good,” was the cold answer. “Get up here and solve this, then, Nohara-kun.”
Rin went up, inwardly amused by the fact that it had been more than half a year of her being shunted from class to class at the Academy, and yet some teachers still thought that flustering her by putting her on the spot was something they could do if they planned well enough, tried hard enough. Rin worked through the overcomplicated equation on the board neither slowly nor quickly, and when she could no longer be sure of what she was doing, she stopped.
“Well?” Rin had to hand it to Maeda-san, the woman’s tone was perfect. Just the right amount of impatience, just the right amount of disregard, but not too much. No one that heard the woman could say she was gloating over a too-smart four-year-old child’s misfortune, or even say that she was pushing the child unduly. “Why aren’t you finished?”
“Ah, that, Sensei,” Rin said, turning around, rotating the chalk between her fingers. “Rin-Rin can’t finish it.”
Factual. Slightly apologetic, but not in the way of someone apologizing because they thought they’d done wrong. Maeda-san’s brief glance at the half-finished equation on the board only made her frown harder. “This—what do you mean, you can’t finish it? It was on last week’s test!” Left unsaid was the fact that Rin had gotten the second highest score on that test. “Don’t joke around with me, young lady. Finish it!”
“But, Sensei,” Rin said, scrunching up her face, “Rin-Rin won’t be able to reach, it’s too high.”
“Use. The stool.”
“Ah, but…”
For a brief moment, the brightly lit classroom seemed to dim, seemed to tighten around Rin’s wavering form and that of her glaring teacher. Then Maeda-san let out a short, ragged sigh, leaning her hip against the side of the sturdy wooden lectern just a few steps away from the board. “Nohara-kun,” she said, “surely you know that determination is the one thing you require as a ninja. Finish your work, or you’ll have to run laps during lunch.”
Rin looked at the board, then at Maeda-san, then at the board again. Then, shuffling her feet a little, she inched toward the lectern, the chalk in her hand held out in front of her.
“Nohara-kun—!”
“Rin-Rin already ate lunch on the way here, Sensei,” Rin said, earnestly. “Rin-Rin doesn’t mind running.”
The expectant silence that followed that almost chipper announcement was nearly immediately broken by a loud creak. Maeda-san, her expression dull with resignation, looked down at the slightly distorted top of the lectern, then let go of it, opening and closing her gloved fist. “Then,” she said, in a low, thick tone, “twenty laps.”
“Yes, Sensei.” Probably, that reluctant acquiescence meant that Rin was going to be moved up soon, but she wouldn’t bet on it until it had actually happened. “Sorry, Sensei.”
Maeda-san waved vaguely in her direction, her expression still dark. “Hatake-kun,” she said, “you come up and finish this.”
The silver-haired boy at the window desk stood up with a loud, exaggerated scrape, then stalked—or was it prowled—to the front of the class with nearly soundless steps, glaring at Rin the whole way. He was something like a quarter-head taller than Rin, and he was always willing to stretch and contort his way into reaching the distant parts of the board, or drag over the little stool in front of the blackboard and stand on it without being prompted. He finished the equation in moments, his writing neat, his numbers meticulously correct.
“Good,” Maeda-san said, again, actually sounding like she meant it this time. “Well done, Hatake-kun.”
“It was my duty, Sensei.”
Inwardly, Rin couldn’t help but roll her eyes. Outwardly, she beamed proudly at the scowling older boy as he stalked back to his seat, much the same way girls their age would beam at him back when there were any girls their age in their class. “Hata-kun is so cool,” Rin whispered, the moment he sat down. “Rin-Rin isn’t very good at these things.”
“Liar,” was the responding hiss, the moment Maeda-san’s back was turned as she rubbed out the old equation in preparation for writing out another one for someone else in the class to tackle. “You beat me the test before last.”
“Ah, about that, um,” Rin said, unable to help herself. The way the boy was glaring at her was a goad in and of itself, and the curious, scandalized looks they were getting from the older kids around them was even more of a motivation. “Can Rin-Rin tell you a secret?”
“Shut up! Sensei’s talking!”
Rin, undeterred, turned to the stiff-backed boy seated in the desk to her right. “Kondo-senpai,” she said, in an over-loud whisper, “do you want to know Rin-Rin’s secret?”
Kondo-kun, who had twitched when she said his name, didn’t deign to look at her for a few moments. But, when Maeda-san turned back to the board after calling up a slouching, bored-looking Inuzuka girl to do the honours, Kondo-kun turned his head back in Rin’s direction and eyed her up and down. “A shrimp like you can’t know anything interesting.”
In other words, he was willing to be persuaded. “I do,” Rin shot back. “Rin-Rin knows all the best secrets!”
Kondo-kun snorted. Hatake-kun gave her dagger looks. The girl in the seat behind Hatake bit her lip, looking too amused for words. The girl in the seat behind Rin frowned at her.
“Rin-Rin, um,” Rin said, squirming a little, because it would add the right touch, “on that test, Rin-Rin may have cheated.”
Silence. The room wavered around Rin, stretching strangely in her mind, as if the space between her desk and Hatake-kun’s desk was one long tunnel.
“Hata-kun,” Rin said, widening her eyes, wishing she could still cry on command, “don’t…”
“You’re lying,” Hatake said, through gritted teeth, loudly enough that everyone around them went still. “You can’t have—how would you even—?”
“Um,” Rin said, her voice a little smaller than she would like. She’d never get used to the way it felt to have the hostile attention of so many different children pinned on her. It was worse than being stared at by adults; with adults, she at least had the comfort of knowing that, if they attacked, she could justify retaliating without holding back. “It’s, um, the lounge is easy to climb into. The one where the teachers put tests and stuff.”
“Bullshit,” Kondo-kun snapped. “There’s no way you got in.”
“You stole the answers?” Hatake-kun said, his eyes so cold they felt as if they should bore holes through her. “You. You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”
“Only the maths questions,” Rin said, soothingly. “Rin-Rin doesn’t look at the others, okay? Just the ones Rin-Rin doesn’t—”
“Just what are you jabbering about back there?” Maeda-san called out, over her shoulder. “Keep quiet and pay attention to the board, or else—”
Sadly, she hadn’t even finished that warning before Hatake-kun, enraged beyond measure, darted up from his seat and cracked the lid of Rin’s desk with a clumsily chakra-enhanced kick. Then Rin was too engaged with the fight to pay much attention, trading blow for blow, cheating shamelessly.
By the time the fight came to an end, Rin’s lip had split, her hair had been yanked free from its already stubby, pitiful pigtails, her knuckles were full of scrapes and splinters, the right half of her face felt like one big bruise, and her left arm was caught in the vicelike grip of Maeda-san’s slightly shaking hand. “You, you both, you really—!”
“Sensei, Hata-kun hit me first,” Rin tried to sob, through smarting lips. But even as the words left her mouth, she knew they had failed; after all, what timid, beaten, victimized four-year-old girl would sound so gleeful even in this situation? “It’s all his fault, not mine.”
“Sensei, she confessed to cheating on the tests,” Hatake-kun said, forcefully. “Please investigate.”
“Even if it’s true, Hata-kun shouldn’t have h-h-hit me,” Rin managed to get out. Wow, the cut in her lip must be deeper than she thought, it was that hard to talk. “Everyone’s always saying we got to be re–resuf–res’sful, as ninja. So Rin-Rin did it like that.”
“Resourceful doesn’t mean cheating,” Hatake-kun spat, even though he knew just as well as most of the class that it obviously did. Rin didn’t know whether to be satisfied with how freely he still seemed to be moving even after she’d managed to give him a really good punch to the stomach, and had scratched bloody furrows into his arms and his neck. But seriously injuring him would have been bad; he was only five years old. “Sensei, it’s—isn’t there a rule against cheating during tests?”
“Even so,” Rin said, loudly, “Hata-kun shouldn’t have hit Rin-Rin. Sensei, Hata-kun’s really mean, even to his friends.”
“Who the hell is your friend?” Hatake-kun shouted, and for the rest of the day, even as she helped clean up the splinters and straighten up the classroom while dutifully listening to Maeda-san’s unending lecturing, Rin had to bite the inside of her aching lip to remind herself not to smile.
Getting Hatake-kun to curse at her and sound that shrill was always so satisfying.