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Muichiro forgot his sandals again.
He was halfway across the garden when the realization stalled him, the damp grass cool against his bare feet. Morning light slanted through the maple leaves, sifting down in broken bands that painted his arms and face. He stood in it, content to let the warmth soak into his skin while his mind drifted where the sky drifted - somewhere higher, wider, softer than the ground could hold.
“Muichiro,” Sakura called from the engawa, “feet.”
He looked down, blinked once at his toes as if they were an unexpected gift, then padded back. Sakura knelt with the sandals in her hands, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth despite the crease between her brows.
“You tied your sash without me,” she said. “Progress.”
“I forgot to forget,” he said, and meant it.
She slid the sandals on and checked the knot at his waist anyway. Her fingers lingered a beat too long on his wrist, feeling for pulse, for temperature, for anything she could quantify and therefore control. When she lifted her gaze, the worry had not fully left it. Green eyes, bright and exacting, met Muichiro’s. The dazed eyes that looked back were neither green nor black but the pale teal of a hazy sky.
“Don’t skip breakfast,” she said.
He nodded. By the time he reached the kitchen he had forgotten the rice entirely and drank half a glass of water while watching the dust float in the sunbeam. On the engawa, his father waited.
Sasuke sat with one knee raised, the other leg extended. He held a stillness that did not belong to quiet but to control. On the tatami beside him lay a worn bokken. Muichiro barely saw it. He was watching the way the maple leaves above framed a pocket of sky.
“Forms,” Sasuke said.
“Mm.” Muichiro went to the yard.
He forgot the first instruction, misheard the second, stood a heartbeat too long staring at a drifting feather caught in a web. Then the blade rose and the world clicked. His wrists rotated smoothly and the cut fell clean. The next motion assembled itself inside him faster than thought could follow. Feet, hips, shoulders, breath - each fell in place like stones across a river he was meant to cross.
“Again,” Sasuke called.
He did it again. And again. And in the repetition, a rhythm borne not out of effort but inevitability drummed on. He stepped where the form required, but he did not feel bound by it. He felt and he paused, shifting in the morning fog.
When the lesson ended, his damp shirt clung to his back and Sakura was waiting with a towel and a bowl of rice he didn’t remember seeing her prepare. She watched him eat three mouthfuls before she spoke.
“You lose track of time when you train,” she said softly.
“I don’t,” he answered truthfully. “Time loses track of me.”
Sakura’s smile wavered. Over her shoulder, Sasuke’s gaze held steady. He had said almost nothing through the lesson; now he said less. But when Muichiro looked toward him, he found the smallest nod of approval, invisible to anyone who hadn’t spent a life learning how to see them.
They called his disorientation a quirk in the Academy until it stopped being funny. He carried a sword when most genin still clung to kunai and wire. He drifted when others drilled. He forgot to answer when sensei quizzed them on textbook tactics. He forgot to raise his hand when volunteers were called for. He forgot, once, to come inside when it rained and stood in the courtyard drenched and blinking, trying to recall why water made the world smell new.
But he did not forget how to move.
On the day teams were assigned, Muichiro was late and arrived with a leaf stuck in his hair. His sensei - a red haired woman with an oddly rough voice who introduced herself as Kozuki, looked him over as if counting what was there and what was missing.
“Team Three,” she said. “Aya, Ren, Muichiro. We’ll start with patrols.”
Aya was quick with her hands and quicker with her temper, a storm compacted into a person. Ren was careful and funny, the kind of teammate who made dull work gentler with commentary that never quite got them in trouble. Muichiro was not sure what he was. He liked the way the three of their shadows braided together on the road in the late afternoon.
On their first patrol they were assigned the south wood. Aya complained about the humidity, Ren whistled at a thrush, Muichiro counted the invisible things-the eddies of air curling around bark, the way light slid off one leaf and took a different angle into another, the subtle change in the smell of moss a few paces off the path.
“Stay in line,” Kozuki called, and Muichiro exhaled. The hum in his chest that was always there when a blade hung at his side tuned itself to the forest’s song.
They found stray snares, a crude campfire, tracks that did not belong to deer. Kozuki’s hand lifted once. The team stilled. A rustle in the understory paused, then shifted farther away.
“Bandits or worse?” Ren whispered.
“Worse,” Kozuki murmured back. “Eyes up.”
Muichiro’s eyes were always up and elsewhere. He registered the warning without thinking. When danger came, it did not shout before it struck.
It came three days later, on a mission so dull they had argued about whose turn it was to carry the extra canteen. They were escorting a messenger. He was a twitchy sort of civilian who flinched at his own shadow and the road looked like every other road until it wasn’t. Shadows thickened wrong. A single flutter of a white ribbon on a branch that hadn’t been there the day before. Kozuki’s fingers twitched, and they scattered into the brush.
Three shapes dropped from the trees. Not bandits. Not Academy drills. Ren cursed. Aya lunged.
Muichiro drew.
His blade liked this clarity. The hum inside him sharpened until the world was down to lines and lines only: the arc of a kunai, the slope of a shoulder, the angle a wrist would take in the next half-beat. He stepped where those lines told him to step.
It almost worked.
Aya’s opponent was larger, older and had experience carved into the lines slashed over his body. She held well for three exchanges, then slipped on a patch of damp leaves. The man’s knife flashed. Kozuki was across the path, tangled with the second attacker. Ren had the scroll-runner half-dragged into the ditch and a blade in his off hand.
Muichiro’s body flew before thought formed a word like go.
He cut in low, blade sliding against blade, redirecting the knife enough that it kissed Aya’s sleeve instead of her throat. The man pivoted to adjust and Muichiro’s sword was already where it needed to be, not because he’d decided but because the body understood the geometry of survival.
He had learned from Sasuke to keep distance that others could not close, to invite a strike that you were never there to meet. He pushed the man backward three steps, felt Aya scramble up behind him. Good. Safe. He could keep pushing. He could-
The third attacker came from the blind side. Ren yelled something that didn’t sound like a word. Kozuki went still for the span of a heartbeat and in that stillness Muichiro saw it - the knife he had not accounted for, the hand he had not tracked, the line he had failed to see.
The knife was going to take Aya anyway.
In the space where fear should have been, something else kindled. It was not rage. Rage burned outward. This burned inward and flared so bright the rest of the world dropped off its edges.
Not her, he thought-or maybe he didn’t think it at all. Maybe the feeling itself was the thought.
His vision tightened to a point. Not smaller - truer. The incoming knife was no longer a smear of speed but a rule with marks he could measure. The third attacker’s shoulder telegraphed a breath before the blade moved. The first man’s weight shifted to his back foot. Aya’s center of gravity tipped left. The leaf above them fell as though dragged by a string someone had mistaken for gravity.
The teal in the world receded. Red poured into it.
Something inside his pupils spun and locked. A new awareness of the world settled into him as though he had walked through a door. One tomoe bloomed in each of his blood red eyes.
He stepped.
His blade found the knife’s path not where it was but where it would be. Steel met steel and the shock bit his wrist. His other foot pivoted; the first attacker’s correction became a mistake. Muichiro moved into the space as narrow as a breath without fear.
He moved like mist learns to be wind.
The knife fell. Aya did not. Kozuki finished her fight with the efficiency of a woman who had decided long ago she preferred her students alive. Ren lowered his arm slowly, a grin breaking through the bruised fear wrapping his face.
Minutes later, or was it hours? Muichiro found it hard to tell. He found himself kneeling in the dirt, hand still clenched tight around his katana. The world had returned to colors he recognized. The red was gone from his sight, but not from memory. He looked at his hands and then at Aya’s, which shook only after the danger lifted.
“You-” Aya started, then stopped and tried again. “Show-off.”
It should have been a joke. It was a joke. He laughed, late to the understanding of it, and only when he laughed did he realize he was crying. He wiped his face with the back of his wrist and left a dark streak there and didn’t care.
Kozuki crouched in front of him and looked straight into his eyes. She didn’t flinch.
“Well,” she said. “There it is.”
He blinked. “What?”
“The part of you you hadn’t met yet.”
Sakura knew before anyone told her. She saw him cross the threshold that evening and her breath knotted. Not from the dirt, the scuffed knees, the faint tear at his sleeve. From the way he moved as if the house were both familiar and newly precise.
“Come here,” she said, voice even. He did and let her tilt his chin toward the light. Her hands smelled faintly of antiseptic and dried herbs; they steadied him more than he expected. “Look at me.”
He did. For a heartbeat, the world slipped into that other clarity again: red wheel, black tomoe, circles within circles falling into place. He saw the way her pupils shrank. He saw the muscles in her jaw tighten and release. He saw, more than anything, the relief arrive before the fear that threatened to devour it.
She kissed his forehead, a single precise touch, then pressed her brow to his for the span of a breath. “Of course you would,” she whispered. “Of course.”
Sasuke was waiting in the engawa again, and Muichiro went to him because he could not not go. The night smelled pregnant with rain. Fireflies bided their time in the hedge.
“Sensei said I should show you,” Muichiro said, as if it were an errand he’d remembered halfway to doing.
Sasuke said nothing. Muichiro let the clarity rise. The red came. The world simplified down to lines he could name. Sasuke’s face did not change. What changed was the distance between them, which he had always believed was fixed and now learned could collapse without a step.
Sasuke stood, drew his own blade from where it waited by his hip, and moved.
Muichiro was ready in a way he had never been ready, and still he wasn’t enough to catch everything his father was. Sasuke did not overwhelm him, he did not humiliate him, he did not press advantage for the pleasure of advantage. He simply filled the space with a precision that reminded Muichiro there were rooms beyond the one he’d just found.
They moved until sweat stung his eyes and his arms trembled and his breath came fast enough to taste iron. Twice, no, three times, Muichiro saw openings he would not have seen that morning. Twice, no, three times, Sasuke closed them before they fully formed.
At the end, Muichiro’s sword tipped and Sasuke’s hilt was at his shoulder. They stopped in the same breath.
“You’re not better than me,” Sasuke said, and there was no triumph in it, only a flat statement of the world as it was.
“I know,” Muichiro said. He did not feel small. He felt oriented.
Sasuke lowered his blade and sheath slid against steel with a sound that felt like a door shutting gently on wind. “You protected your teammate.”
Muichiro swallowed. The clarity had burned through something in him that felt alarmingly like an answer to the question he hadn’t known to ask. Aya alive and laughing badly through her fear. Ren’s grin cracked sideways. Kozuki’s calm. The messenger clutching his parcel like a lifeline. The hummingbird that had stopped in the air beside them at the exact moment everything had stopped inside him.
“I wanted to,” he said. “More than I wanted anything else.”
Sasuke’s mouth tilted, not a smile, but something rarer. “That,” he said, “is the part you can trust.”
From inside, Sakura’s voice, level and deliberate, cut across the night. “Both of you, water. Then food.”
Muichiro turned at the same time as his father. For a second, small as a blink, large as a horizon - he saw what others called clan as something more intimate: not people with names carved the same way, but a line made of choices, rising and falling, never neat, always stubborn.
Sakura saw two young boys, one with a father and one without, eyes red with the blood filled with the desperation to protect those they loved.
Muichiro and Sasuke went inside.
Sasuke saw pride.
Muichiro on another mission the next week. C-ranked again, though this time everything proceeded smoothly. Kouzuki had them practice moulding chakra for suiton jutsu. Aya’s water canteen emptied immediately. Ren kept blasting tiny water guns from his hands. Muichiro forgot to bring a bento and Aya split hers with him and called him an idiot for half the meal.
At home, Sakura checked his eyes too often and then stopped herself with a huff of discipline. She made him tea with something bitter in it and watched to be sure he finished. At night, she watched him breathe for two beats longer than she had when he was a child and then went to sleep, because mothers who are also medics cannot afford rituals that do not make sense.
Sasuke stood half a step behind her, watching them both. He will be fine.
Sasuke sparred him twice each week and once, in the middle of a cut, Sasuke shifted, weight sliding to his back foot a fraction early. The opening appeared. Muichiro entered it and - he did not strike. Only placed the possibility of a strike where it belonged.
Sasuke’s eyes met his. The glance was neither approval nor surprise. It was something steadier that Muichiro learned later to recognize as respect.
After, Muichiro sat on the engawa with his sword across his knees and watched the leaves.
Sakura stepped out with bowls and set one beside him. “You look like your father when you stare into nothing,” she said, then added, gentler, “and like me when you see it’s something.”
He ate because she would watch to be sure he did. When he finished, he said, “I was standing with Aya, and I felt a thing like.. like the world was telling me what to do and my body believed it.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“Is there another way?”
“You wanted her alive,” Sakura said simply. “Strongly enough that your body rearranged itself to accommodate the desire.”
He sat with that. The words clicked into him with the same rightness as a well-placed foot on a stepping stone.
“I do,” he said.
Sakura pressed her palm to the back of his head, a touch as brief and absolute as prayer. “Good.”
He did not stop forgetting sandals. He remembered the names of his teammates even when the names of festival food stalls left his tongue. He remembered the exact feel of Aya’s sleeve under his hand when he pulled her out of a strike’s path. He remembered Ren’s laugh everywhere he heard it.
He remembered, with a fidelity that felt less like memory and more like lived experience, the feeling of the world tilting toward him when red entered his vision. He learned to call it gently, without panic. He learned to set it down. He learned to trust that wanting something good could be a kind of skill when joined to the discipline of a blade.
When he trained with Sasuke, he lost. When he trained with Sasuke, he lost differently each time. Losing became a map rather than a wound.
Sometimes, at dusk, the three of them sat in the garden, and the maple filtered the light into coins on the grass. Sakura read a page three times because she kept watching her son. Sasuke said nothing and said it with a calm that no longer hid anything. Muichiro lay on his back, sword within reach, and counted the leaves he couldn’t see.
“Otosan?” he said once, voice drifting into the twilight.
“Hm.”
“Do you think the sky is stronger than the ground?”
“The ground holds,” Sasuke said. “The sky frees. Strength depends on what you mean.”
Muichiro smiled into the leaves. “Then I’ll be both.”
“Eat your rice before you turn into philosophy,” Sakura said, and he sat up and did as he was told because some things, small things, ordinary things, were how you held what mattered.
He was thirteen and not yet better than his father. He was thirteen and already himself. When he stood and the sword touched his palm, the air along its edge folded politely out of his way. He moved, and the world made space. Not because it feared him. Because he had chosen what he would be to it: a boy who forgot the sandals and remembered, with a clarity that reached to the bone, to keep the people he loved standing in the light.