Chapter Text
His name is Ryuhiko Shimura. It takes him a while to understand that it’s his name; it takes him longer to understand why the name feels itchy and wrong. His mother is Aoi Shimura, one of the last of the Shimura clan, which has long since scattered. She is gentle and kind, a widow who tends a small garden near one of the rare springs left in Fire country. The spring serves more than them, of course, there’s an entire (if tiny) dusty village that it supports.
Once upon a time, his name was Shikaku Nara and the name ‘Shimura’ meant betrayal to him as he died.
Aoi’s husband was a distant cousin, another Shimura, and it’s a tossup as to whether the villagers are using her maiden or married name when speaking to her, since they’re identical. Ryu is around five when he realizes that the distinction is only vague when it comes to his mother. When they’re addressing him, they’re using her maiden name. He should possibly be grateful that they don’t do it with malice in mind, since his father…well, let’s just say it wasn’t Aoi’s then-recently deceased husband and he’d broken the rules of hospitality to spawn Ryu on her.
Once he’d been a Clan head, with a beautiful wife and a brilliant son, not the bastard of a rapist who forced himself on the remnant of a clan once headed by a traitor.
Well, not that Ryu really cares, to be quite honest. Ninjas might not be a ‘thing’ any more, however many centuries later this is, but he’s not fool enough to let his former skills stay as vague memory, because he knows full well how useful those skills are. What bothers him a great deal more is how much more difficult it is this time around to manipulate shadows. There’s obviously not a drop of Nara blood in his veins, given how much trouble he has with it. Now, mind you, he’s five, but he has an envious amount of chakra for his age, so he shouldn’t be having any issues with it beyond the normal. Yet… Well, if he were any less stubborn, he’d have given it up as a lost cause by now. It’s hard! The effort involved almost entirely defeats the purpose of being an (ex-)Nara!
Huffily, he leans against the scrawny, droopy apple tree his mother tends carefully. It does produce a few, very tasty apples every year, but the poor thing is just…unhealthy. Climate change is a bitch. Most plants aren’t very happy despite tender care. The poor, poor things. The tree gives an ominous creak, but Ryu stubbornly doesn’t move, well aware that the tree isn’t so badly off that his slight weight is going to break it. More creaking occurs, and a surprising amount of rustling of leaves, enough that he finally looks up in curiosity and his eyes go wide in disbelief.
No. It can’t be.
But it is. The tree is now several feet taller, its trunk thicker, and its branches are fuller, not to mention covered in healthy foliage and emerging fruit.
Huh. Troublesome.
~
Sadly, he’s not so lazy as to entirely avoid using Mokuton simply because doing so might prove a hassle to him. So he sneaks around in the late evenings and encourages the trees in the village one at a time. Honestly, it’s no harder than feeding the deer treats used to be. The trees respond to emotions, or more likely the Mokuton responds to emotions and reaches out in response. Whatever. He still misses the deer.
When the trees are all thriving, much to the villagers’ wonder and delight, he moves on to doing the same for bushes, again, one at a time. As a plus, there’s some hilarious theories going around and no one has any clue that it’s his doing; he plans to keep it that way. Doing the bushes takes longer. Not just because there’s more of them, but because the villagers are curious now and it’s hard to dodge their attention long enough to do the work. Mokuton itself is fairly easy and quick, so he mostly focuses on subtlety with it so he’s not noticed. When he uses it. Mostly, he works on regaining the basics of shadow manipulation. He almost has it when he has a growth spurt, his chakra pool grows in response, and he loses most of his progress almost overnight.
Oh.
His mother is more than a little puzzled when he spends the next two weeks moping for no apparent reason.
Because he should have known. His problem is chakra control, and has been all along. He has memories of having good control with this much chakra, so it never occurred to him that he had been an adult at the time, and for a child his chakra pool is not merely enviable but nearly insane in size for someone who is not a jinchuuriki. After double checking to assure himself that he is not somehow secretly a jinchuuriki, he concludes that it must be a part of having the Mokuton.
This, of course, doesn’t change his determination to relearn his shadow jutsus, but it does alter how he goes about doing the basic training for it. Instead of doing the simplest, least chakra intensive exercises meant for young children, he starts training (out of sight of the village, because he’s not stupid even if he’s no longer a Nara) in full sun where there’s no shadow to start with and using the chakra intense techniques of creating shadow and then manipulating it. This tactic is met with overwhelming success, and after playing with it for an hour or two, he collapses into relieved laughter for a few minutes.
He may have to wait until his chakra coils aren’t growing so quickly, until he’s into his late twenties even, to regain control over the most delicate techniques, but he’ll have no problem at all with the brute techniques or defending himself. Which had been a real worry, given that this tiny village is civilian and the world at large doesn’t really have ninjas any more. He’s done the training he could of course, but it’s limited by lack of tools and a need to not convince the villagers that he’s insane or bloodthirsty. Chakra use is still around, mostly water jutsus. Using them is certainly not looked down upon, is even encouraged, so he’s been able to practice around his mother and simply get an amused, doting look. She’s promised to teach him a few Nature Transformation jutsus like the one she uses to water her garden when he’s older. And she’s definitely not the only adult in the village who knows several low level jutsus that are amazingly useful to daily survival.
Ryu rolls over, enjoying the texture of soft grass, then blinks. Grass? He’d picked the most barren area possible that is close enough to the village that his mom won’t freak over finding him in if she comes looking. There definitely had not been grass here.
Looking around, his eyes widen in shock. The grass right around him is thick and luxurious, but everywhere his shadows had touched as he practiced there is the beginnings of plant life determinedly poking through the fine dust and cracked soil.
Oops.
He suddenly gets, viscerally, why people had once coveted this power to the point of madness and many lives pointlessly lost. This...really isn’t a power a human should have. It’s something more suited to a kami. And a kami, he definitely is not. Ryu has hidden his Mokuton because it’s troublesome and he definitely does not want to be the center of attention, but this… He looks beyond the rough circle of green the size of a meadow and bites his lip. This could endanger his mother and the villagers. Even if he were his former self, full grown and fully trained, he could not protect all of them and… Right now, he is just a child, his discipline and abilities abysmal in comparison to the man he once was. His mouth twists in self-derision.
He needs a plan.
~
It turns out that he doesn’t need a plan.
Yoshi ojiisan (unrelated, Ryu is happy to say), who makes liquor out of things he really shouldn’t, starts telling anyone who will listen about mysterious lights and a woman with ‘hair like fire, down to her toes, wearing a green dress of leaves and vines, and with golden eyes and golden antlers that drip silver fire, and sandals made of purple feathers’. Apparently the mysterious lights indicate her presence, and she restores the land where she walks or does rituals.
None of the locals believe him, of course, but there’s no readily available better theory and it makes for a good story. So they play along when travelers come through and ask about the unexpected greenery, assuring them that the tale is true without outright saying it’s true.
The tiny village gains the name of Green Kami as those travelers gradually spread the tale, embroidering it as they go.
Ryu adds henge and kage bunshin to his regular practice and finds that if he has several clones in existence, he has a few hours of improved chakra control until his body restores the lost chakra in full. He learns how to use bits of shadow jutsu as something of a delay timer for his Mokuton. The shadow clones are also good for feeding the tales Yoshi ojiisan started up, letting him green up spots while he’s conspicuously nowhere near those spots. It’s always good to have an alibi, after all.
Sometimes seeds planted from fruit bought in Green Kami mysteriously grow several seasons worth of growth overnight before slowing to normal if particularly sturdy growth. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it, other than it only happens with honest merchants, which furthers tales of the green kami. Tales that both excite greed and ward off the greedy for the most part. Kami have mostly forsaken the world, after all, so no one wants to scare this one off. Or worse, tangle with her temper should they overstep too badly.
~
Ryuhiko is nine when Aoi remarries, to Taki ojisan (not related), a nice enough villager who wants children of his own. This is fine, but he takes to spending nights outdoors because he does not want to listen to his mother having sex. Taki sells his place to a young couple wanting a place of their own and moves in with Aoi and Ryu. Understandably, since Aoi’s property is far more productive, having been Ryu’s home his entire life, but more notably since he’s awakened the Mokuton. They use the extra money to build onto the tiny house, adding a room for him and a room for the baby they plan to have. He still spends most of his nights outdoors, but he is grateful for the thought they put into it, at least.
He spends all his free time collecting seeds and spreading more growth around the village. Now it stretches for several miles in all directions and remnants of wildlife have started to move in to seek shelter. The more common and useful seeds he takes to swapping with traders for seeds or cuttings of plants from other areas. The most immediately useful of these is a cutting of bamboo, and he establishes a small grove of it in an out of the way area and uses it to make containers for his seeds. In addition, he manages to get his hands on a nice set of travel packs and several precious storage scrolls. Some experimentation proves that while scrolls aren’t good at keeping things alive, his mokuton shadow timer jutsu wrapped around ordinary seeds and cuttings preserves them neatly within the scrolls, and seeds from plants grown by mokuton don’t even need that bit of extra protection. Because he is a cautious soul, Ryu uses both methods on all his stored seeds and cuttings.
During winter, he uses the cover of snow to sneak some plantings of the most valuable plants into individual gardens or edges of properties claimed by various villagers. They’ll need the extra prosperity to stay on even ground with the new people, who are tentatively immigrating to Green Kami and moving into the reclaimed lands.
Spring brings with it bandits, and it’s just their misfortune that Ryuhiko happens to be nearby when they attempt to attack. There is now a new and ominously healthy patch of extremely thorny salmonberries that greets newcomers and travelers where the highway and the village meet. The bandits die via being speared by aggressive vines and then are dragged below the soil as fertilizer under the shocked gazes of the villagers. At that point, Ryu utilizes a henged clone to have the ‘kami’ visibly pat the vines and give them an extra boost of mokuton as a reward as ‘she’ disappears under their awed stares.
Ryu is satisfied with his work, because word travels even faster than the traders that attacking Green Kami is a sure way to arouse the wrath of the kami who lives there. He has done what he can to ensure the village’s safety.
He starts talking to his mother and Taki about apprenticing to a merchant, or traveling with one to a larger village to seek another sort of apprenticeship. Aoi thinks being a trader is a good idea, while Taki thinks seeking a different sort of apprenticeship may benefit him more. He shows his parents (he can accept Taki as a stepfather because the man obviously doesn’t resent him) the travel packs, the seeds in sections of bamboo (apples, beets, red rice, sour plum and a couple others that are no drain on the village for him to take) and the storage scroll for his clothes.
Although he most certainly does not show them the storage scrolls full of seeds in little bamboo containers, because they’re much safer not knowing about his Mokuton. Those…well he’ll need a better way to carry them, because the seeds in his pack are decoys as much as anything. He definitely doesn’t want a thief getting their hands on a seed scroll.
They agree that it’s a smart idea and help him fill his pack with other tradeable items. It’s useful. Gives him more camouflage for his real intentions. Taki helps him arrange a short term apprenticeship with one of the better merchants that frequents their village, and in mid-summer, he leaves Green Kami behind.