Chapter 1: The Most Youthful Genin in All of Konoha!
The graveyards in the Land of Fire were always full.
It had been three years since the First Shinobi World War ended. Long enough that the scaffolding was finally down on the western residential district. Long enough that the mission boards were starting to fill again with something other than emergency postings.
The orphanage near the Academy still ran three children to a room where it used to run two, and probably would for years yet, because the war had been generous with its orphans and the village hadn't found a way to be generous back at the same scale.
Might Duy had lived at the Konoha Children's Home since before he could properly remember anything else.
He didn't mind it, particularly. The bed was his own even if the room wasn't, and Matron Fusae always made sure he had his green jumpsuit washed by the morning because she'd learned quickly that if she didn't, he would put it on dirty and go about his business without a word of complaint, which somehow annoyed her more than if he threw a tantrum.
He was, by most measures, an extremely easy child to manage. Cheerful, agreeable, completely unbothered by the ordinary things that made other children cry.
He was four years old. He had a bowl cut, thick eyebrows, and the normal fat chubby cheeks that the older children sometimes teased him about because they made him look, they said, like still a baby. He wore his green jumpsuit over orange-striped leg warmers and a yellow scarf that Matron Fusae had tried to confiscate twice on the grounds that it was too long for a child his size and a danger besides. He had retrieved it from the lost-items box both times without comment. She had not tried a third.
The headband was new. It sat around his waist, angled and shiny. He had stood at the bathroom mirror for a long time that morning getting it exactly right, stepping back to check, stepping forward again. Then he had looked at himself in the glass for a moment, at the green and the orange and the yellow and the headband, and he had nodded once, to himself, and left.
He had not waited for the breakfast call.
Duy always thought the village at this time was nice. The shuttered stalls and empty streets and the smoke from the early cook fires rising straight up in the still air. He walked with his hands clasped behind his back and his scarf trailing in the cold. His breath fogged. His sandals were quiet on the stone road.
He was going to the Hokage Tower.
He arrived at the tower as the guards were changing shifts. One of them, a jonin, looked down at the small person standing at the base of the steps with a headband and no adult in sight, and asked, "Can I help you?"
"I would like to speak to the Hokage, please." Duy said.
A pause. "Do you have an appointment?"
"No," Duy smiled.
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Sarutobi Hiruzen was twenty-five years old and three years into the hardest job in the Land of Fire, which meant he was managing no fewer than eleven things before breakfast on any given morning. He was also, by now, reasonably difficult to surprise. Three years of governance had included two clan disputes, one border skirmish that had almost become something worse, a permanent budget shortfall that the daimyo's office kept promising to address, and the slow, grinding work of rebuilding a village that had come out of the First War technically intact but not also on top.
He had not expected one of his eleven things today to be a four-year-old with a forehead protector.
He looked at the child standing in the doorway of his office. The child looked back at him with dark eyes that were burning ablaze with some kind of energy, which was more than could be said for the guard hovering just outside the door.
"Dismissed," Hiruzen said. The guard left with visible relief.
The child stepped forward without being invited and stopped at a respectful distance from the desk and bowed.
"Hokage-sama," the child said, straightening. "My name is Might Duy. I graduated from the Academy six days ago and I've come to receive my first mission!"
Hiruzen regarded him. He set his pen down.
"Genin typically receive their assignments from the mission office," he said.
"Yes." A pause. "I will go there after. I wanted to come here first." A shorter pause. "To thank you."
Hiruzen looked at this child for a moment. He took in the headband, the green jumpsuit, the yellow scarf. Then he reached for the D-rank request list his aide had forwarded up from the mission office that morning, because Might Duy had indeed been correct that there was no rule against the Hokage handling this personally.
"Tell me about your graduation," he said as if he didn't know already.
Duy considered the question with what appeared to be genuine thought. "I was tested on my taijutsu," he said, "My teacher let me pass after I hurt him in a spar."
"You can't use ninjutsu or genjutsu, right?" Hiruzen recognized him now.
"Right!"
"What work did you want?" he asked.
Duy's posture improved slightly. "Whatever is needed!"
Hiruzen found a request on the list. Inaba farm, eastern buffer, filed the previous week. Spring weeding unfinished. Harvest work still pending. He wrote the assignment number on a slip and slid it across the desk.
"Inaba farm. Eastern buffer, twenty minutes' walk. The farmer's name is Katsuro."
Duy received it with the excitement normal of a child his age.
"I'll complete this mission no matter what! If I can't complete this mission, I'll do 500 push-ups!" he said.
He took the slip and made his way toward the door when Hiruzen spoke.
"Duy."
The child stopped. Looked back over his shoulder.
"Do your best. I believe you can become an amazing shinobi." he smiled.
Tears flowed from Duy's eyes. The hokage actually believed in him… The Hokage believed that even he, a ninja that couldn't do ninjutsu or genjutsu could become a great shinobi!
"I won't let you down, Hokage-sama! I'll definitely become an admirable shinobi!" He vanished from the hokage's office.
Much to the surprise of Hiruzen who briefly had a hard time tracking the boy on his way out.
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Quick Style was not something he had discovered or earned or developed toward. It had simply been there from the beginning. The first time he had really run across a room, he had been two years old, and afterward the room had seemed to have rearranged itself, and Matron Fusae had been standing frozen in the doorway with an expression he hadn't understood at the time but understood clearly now. She had asked him to do it again, slowly. He had tried his best. It had been slow, for him. She had gone quiet for a long time and then said that dinner was ready.
…
The Inaba farm sat at the end of a dirt track lined by the season's dead grass, a rice and vegetable operation that had the look of land that had gone too long without enough hands. The main building was old stone and newer timber. The fields behind it still had the brown tangle of uncleared growth between the rows. The daikon plot on the eastern side showed green tops still in the ground well past when they should have come up.
Duy stopped at the gate.
The man who came out from around the side of the house was in his sixties. He had a weathered face and careful eyes. He was carrying a hoe he had just picked up, and when he saw what was standing at his gate, he stopped walking.
He looked at Duy. He looked behind Duy at the empty track. He looked at Duy again.
"I'm Might Duy," Duy said, "Genin of Konoha!" He held up the mission slip. "I've been assigned to help with your farm work today!"
Katsuro stared at the slip. Then at the child holding it. He had the expression of a man doing math that wasn't adding up.
"You're," he started. Stopped. "How old are you?"
"Four!" Duy proudly shared.
A long pause. He looked at the fields behind him. At the daikon that should have come up three weeks ago and hadn't because his back had stopped cooperating before he'd gotten to them. At the weeds still standing in the near plot. He looked at his hands, which were no longer the hands he'd had at forty, and then at the four-year-old at his gate, who was looking back at him with eyes that were ready to get at it.
He opened the gate.
"I guess I could use another set of hands," he said.
Duy stepped through and stood in the middle of the yard and looked at the farm. "The near field with its tangled growth. The daikon plot. The irrigation channel is running sluggish along the north side, the water is dark because of whatever is blocking it upstream. The split-wood stack that hasn't been touched since before the cold set in." He explained what he needed help with. "The near field first," Katsuro said. "Then the daikon. Then the irrigation channel." He glanced at the wood stack. "And the kindling after."
"Is there anything else you need help with after that?" Duy smiled at him.
Katsuro opened his mouth, then closed it. "No, that… That would cover most of it."
"Awesome! Now watch a spirited genin of Konoha at work!" Duy gave him a thumbs up with a bright smile.
He turned to face the near field.
And then something happened that Katsuro spent a long time afterward trying to comprehend.
What he saw, or rather what he failed to see, was this: the child was there, standing at the edge of the yard, and then the child was simply not there anymore. There was no in-between. No step, no surge, no blur that the eye could track. One moment the yard contained a four-year-old child. The next moment the yard contained no one, and the field was moving.
Not the child. The field itself moved. The weeds came up from the dark earth in succession, root and all, the soil giving them up as fast as Katsuro's eye could register the gap where they'd been. He tracked the disturbance from one end of the plot to the other and never once caught what was causing it. His gaze kept arriving half a second late, finding the still-trembling stems, the overturned earth, the clean row already cleared and moving on. He was watching it happen and he could not see it happening.
He became aware that he had stopped breathing.
The daikon plot. He forced himself to look at it. The long white roots were pulling free of the dark soil and being laid in lines along the border of the plot, each one set down with care, and he could see the lines forming and he still could not see the hands forming them. His eyes caught a shape, once, at the very edge of his vision, a green blur in his peripheral sight, and when he turned his head toward it there was nothing there and the plot was half done.
He sat down on his front step. He had not decided to. His legs gave out from under him.
A sound from the north side of the farm, from the irrigation channel. A short rush of displaced water, a deep clay-wet thud of something being broken free, and then the sound of the flow finding itself again, the quiet rush of water moving as it was supposed to move.
Then the wood stack. The cracking came fast and even, one after another after another without a breath between them, the sound of a hatchet finding the grain perfectly each time, and he turned his head toward it and watched the stack change, the split lengths falling into new arrangement, and could not see what was splitting them.
He pressed both hands flat against his knees.
He had farmed this land for forty years. He had worked beside his father, who had worked beside his, and through that inheritance he understood, exactly what the tasks he had described cost. His body knew the hours of them. He had filed the mission request grateful for the thought of a whole day's help.
The sun had barely moved.
Footsteps. Small ones. Steady.
Duy walked back across the yard and stopped in front of the step where Katsuro was sitting. His jumpsuit had a little mud at the knees. There was a streak of dark earth along one forearm. He was not sweating or breathing hard.
He looked at Katsuro with those fiery, bright eyes.
"The field weeding is done!" he said. "The daikon are up! The irrigation channel has been cleared! The wood is split and stacked." A small pause. "Is there anything else I can help you with?" He asked happily.
Katsuro looked past him at the field. At the east plot, the white tops of neatly laid daikon catching the winter light. At the wood stack, correct and clean. At the channel, running clear and bright along the north edge.
He thought about his son, who had died three weeks before the armistice. He thought about his wife, three winters gone. He thought about the letter he'd gotten from his younger son last month from his posting forty kilometers north, which said he was well and not to worry, which was a fine thing to say but not the same as being here.
He thought about Duy's age, which was four, and about the headband on his forehead, and about what both of those things together said about the village and the war and the world they had all agreed to live in.
He looked up at the child.
"Did I make a mistake somewhere? I can fix it!" Duy asked with concern.
Something moved in Katsuro's chest.
"Yes," he said. His voice came out rough. "Yes, it was. More than enough, young man."
And then the child, this four-year-old who had just hollowed out a week of backlogged farm work while Katsuro sat on his own step and couldn't breathe properly, pulled himself up to his full height. He stood straight with his shoulders back and his chin level, and he looked at Katsuro with the innocent pride of a ninja who has done his job successfully. He grinned, wide and bright, showing the gap where a front tooth had recently been and not replaced yet.
"Then please remember this!" he shouted. "If you ever need help again, you can call upon the most spirited, quickest, youthful genin in all of Konoha, Might Duy!" Both thumbs pointed at himself, elbows out, the full and complete commitment of a person who had thought this pose through and decided it was correct. "And if you are ever unsatisfied with my work, I will personally run five hundred laps around the village to make up for it!"
Katsuro stared at him.
The pose. The gap in the teeth. The absolute sincerity of a four-year-old dressed like a vegetable who had just done the impossible and was now formally introducing himself as if they hadn't met yet. The laugh came out of him without his consent. He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth. He breathed. He steadied.
"Five hundred laps," he said.
"If it's too easy, it wouldn't be a self-rule!" Duy said.
"I see." Katsuro looked at him for a long moment. The fields. The channel. Back at him. "There's tea," he said. "If you haven't somewhere else to be."
Duy checked the sun.
"I would love something to drink!" he said. "Thank you!"