Chapter Text
She suddenly becomes aware, at the age of four, almost five, that this kitchen is not her kitchen.
There is no moka perpetually on one of the back burners, no radio crooning dulcet tunes. There are no espresso cups, or warm kisses, or angry yelling over pasta being overcooked, and no shrieking of hot-blooded neighbors spilling over into another wrathful quarrel.
There are no such things as backsplashes. There are no spiraling tiles that remind her of the smell of the air, of the sea, of oranges, of olives.
She looks to her mother, whose hair is too straight, whose skin is too pale. She looks to her father, and sees the same.
Hair too straight. Skin too pale. Features too delicate. Eyes too dark.
There is no wine at the dinner table. There is no antipasto, or pasta, or dulce. There is no crucifix above the doorframe. No forks, no knives.
She looks down, at the little bowl in her hand, just right for her size, but its contents are not right.
Rice.
She looks back to the slender dishes before her.
Mackerel.
It startles her that it’s not tuna.
The vegetables aren’t quite right either.
They’re common place—tomatoes, cucumber, carrots—but she wonders why she can’t smell garlic, oregano, rosemary, and then she wonders why there’s no asparagus.
It’s May.
There should be asparagus on her plate, a healthy amount, and her mother should be fussing at her to eat more, eat more, mangia, mangia, you’re too thin Concetta.
Uchiha Kiyo picks at her rice contemplatively, looks to her mother, frowns. “Mamma?”
Uchiha Akari raises an eyebrow and tuts with the snapping of her chopsticks. “You’re too old to be calling me mama, Kiyo-chan.”
Kiyo frowns deeper, the crease between her brow growing into more of a cavern, and she turns to her father. “Papà?
Uchiha Kazan, though there’s a little smile on the edges of his lips, corrals it into a straight line. “Otou-san.” He chides, with few words, like she’s forgotten her manners.
Kiyo thinks it’s them who’ve forgotten their manners.
She doesn’t like the silence at the table. She doesn’t like the coolness of the atmosphere. The distance.
She was used to none of it.
But, she was. Or she should have been.
Kiyo doesn’t remember what it was like before, before this exact moment, but she recalls a round table with chattering and laughter, with the window open and warm summer air on her skin. Of teasing and taunting, of fighting and howling. Of wild hands, close to the heart, and able to express a thousand words.
Ahj, futtitini, she thinks.
So Kiyo slams her chopsticks down, passion filling her tiny chest, and she stands on her chair.
Her mother gasps. Her father regards her with a stern eye.
“Babbi!” She shrieks, her voice filling the whole house. It doesn’t reverberate like it would on tile. The tatami just soaks up sound. “Both of ya! Babbi! Dinner is loud! Loud, loud, loud!”
“Kiyo-chan, what in Amaterasu’s—!” Her mother has been stirred, at the very least, a shadow of disappointment in her unreadable eyes, and that spurs Kiyo on further.
Kiyo has no devotion for Amaterasu. The name doesn’t incite fear in her heart, nor evokes any warmth.
Calling on Amaterasu means nothing to Uchiha Kiyo.
“At dinner, we shout!” Kiyo screams, but before, it wouldn’t be much of a scream. It would be a slightly impassioned volume, before. “And we laugh!”
She feels as though she must demonstrate, so Kiyo grabs her belly, and laughs even louder than her scream, and recalls a time when her mother before had been so angry that she had flung a whole batch of uncooked, freshly made gnocculi at her father, and how he had been so miffed by it that he picked the gnocculi out of his hair to throw right back at her. It makes Kiyo laugh harder, tears streaming down her face in a torrent of emotions, wild and untamable, hot and fast, like her laughter could transform into flailing fists at any moment.
It makes Kiyo feel so alive that she does send a fist at her father, when he tries to to wrestle her back into her seat. If she were any ruder, she’d have spit in his face and bit her thumb at him.
The fist doesn’t connect, but her father’s hand slaps against her cheek with such force that it sends her head whipping to the opposite side, blistering. Kiyo doesn’t stop laughing.
Words hurt Kiyo more than anything—her father before would slap her with the back of his hand, and tell her she was a mean bitch, and that would hurt. But that hurt because that father loved her in a way she understood.
He wasn’t always open fists and noxious fumes.
That father would kiss her cheeks and hold her tightly, and sang her her favorite songs. He told her he loved her, and he told her when she was terrible. That father was never a liar.
That father was never obscure, never unreadable. His anger was hot, but it went just as quickly as it came.
This father’s cold rage is something that is foreign to her. His closed mouth says no words. He probably thinks it needs no words.
But Kiyo needs words. Fists mean nothing to her. She doesn’t know how to live without words or touch. She’s not fond of abstracts, and craves the tangible.
So she laughs, with the ache on her cheek.
This father looks concerned, and this mother, terrified.
Kiyo would like to taunt them for it, but she pounds at her sternum instead, before imagining an accordion and a flute.
“Ehi, ehi, ah!” She vocalizes, now on the table, her feet bounce, from the ball of one foot to the other, one hand in the sky, clutching at a phantom tambourine, the other groping at her yukata, pulling it up enough to back it a skirt loose enough for dancing. “Ehi, ehi, ah!”
The tune of a tarantella ghosts in her ears, knees high, and she can almost hear the clapping of onlookers, ribbons swirling along with the dance, the scent a summer festival deep in her nose, until—
Her father removes her from the table, and bends Kiyo over right there, and delivers ten sound hits to her bottom.
Kiyo doesn’t cry.
She’s more upset that her dance had been so rudely interrupted.
That night, in her room, sleeping on a hard futon and under warm quilted blankets, she stares at the ceiling.
There’s information that Kiyo should not know supplanted in her head.
A language, a script, motions, and mannerisms that she doesn’t ever recall learning.
Though, she does remember learning.
It’s a confusing, confounding thing.
She remembers lessons with her mother, going over the winding strokes of kanji, with paper and ink and brushes.
She remembers reading poetry with another mother, from lovers to beloveds, and she remember reading the first words of La Commedia, after the War. She remembers how she wanted every child to know how to read those words.
But here, there are many words that she still doesn’t know. Many words that her parents say, and she hears babbling.
There are other memories, of her father praising her—“How smart you are, my little flame.”—and her mother going over the steps of tea ceremony over and over again until she was satisfied with the tea Kiyo had made for her.
Kiyo is young. So young.
The Kiyo in her memories is eager to please, eager to extract even the slightest word of affirmation from her parents that it makes her ache.
That Kiyo still itches in the back of her mind, a small voice, fading and mingling, but ultimately, overpowered.
This Kiyo decides, if she can do one thing, it’s reading words that are worth her time.
Which proves to be much harder than it was the first time.
“Kiyo-chan, this stroke is forth, not third.”
“The order matters?”
A sigh. “Yes.”
“Minchia.”
“Kiyo-chan, please write the radicals for electricity, separately.”
“Radicals?”
“Yes.” A sigh. “Radicals.”
“Minchia.”
“What does this character mean, Kiyo-chan?”
“…currency?”
“No.”
“Minchia.”
Kiyo forgets and she remembers.
Some days, she’s more reserved. She’s shy, and bows when she should, and addresses people formally, and knows a good little girl walks with meekness, with hands folded at her navel.
Other days, she’s raucous, chomping at the bit, and demands anchovies and artichoke with her whole heart. She walks swaying from her hips, like she’s a grown woman with hips to sway, and her default setting is yelling and wide gesticulations.
Her mother thinks something is wrong with her.
Her father realizes no amount of spankings will alter the behavior.
That, at least, is a relief—it’s a relief to the Kiyo on other days, but the Kiyo on some days wonders why her Okaa-san and her Otou-san look at her so strangely.
This is one of the other days.
She’s on an errand with her mother, delivering a newly sewn yukata to a relative (but, to Kiyo’s knowledge, everyone in this neighborhood is a relative of some sort.) The roads are packed dirt, not cobblestone, so it doesn’t make the same noise as she dances down the street.
Her mother hushes her, and dips her head in embarrassment as old women cover their mouths with fans in abject horror. Kiyo hums loudly, to the melody of a mandolin, wishes she were home so she could cook and sing, cu ti lu dissi ca t'haju a lassari, megliu la morti e no chistu duluri,, ahj ahj ahj ahj, moru moru moru moru—
“What’s this then, Akari-chan?”
“Ah, Otsune-sama.” Mamma bows. “I’m making a delivery with my daughter. To Hikari-san.”
The woman looks down her nose, at Kiyo, who dances a little more in place with a grin on her toddler cheeks. Her tranquil features morph, and the woman smiles mockingly down at her mother. It's a subtle thing, barely at the ends of her mouth, but Kiyo knew plenty of petty aunties and grannies in her day. It seemed to be a look that transcended worlds.
“You child seems very lively, Akari-chan.” The fan in her wrinkled hands opens and shuts. “But her—ah—well, it’s really such a shame. Her demeanor as well, if I’m perfectly candid. An Uchiha woman mustn’t make such…movements, in the street.”
“I apologize.” Mamma sinks her head lower.
Kiyo doesn’t approve.
“Who do you think you are, eh? Totò Termini?” Kiyo brushes the back of her fingers to her chin, and flicks her wrist at the old crone, her lips pulled back into a rather rude look for a little girl to have.
The woman’s lip pulls back further, set deeply within her wrinkled face. Then, like the crone can’t help herself, “What ugly eyes.”
She sees the way her mother’s jaw drops, sees how the rest of the business on the stress stills to a halt, and how inky black eyes float over to watch it all unfold.
Kiyo’s not wild. Not really. She’s still trying to understand the mannerisms of this world, and how to contain herself. It’s a given that an outburst or two would be acceptable, for a four year old, however mannered, to throw a tantrum or two.
She’s been through decades of hearing how her skin and eyes and hair are all low-born vestiges of a backwards and medieval society.
She won’t live through a decade more.
“What’s wrong with my eyes!” She bellows, from her diaphragm and springing past her teeth.
The old woman doesn’t so much as flinch, but surprise flickers across her face.
“Kiyo-chan.” Her mother tugs at her shoulder. “Let’s go. Excuse us—“
“No!” Kiyo’s fist ball up into white hot rocks. “No! You hate me ‘cause my eyes aren’t black! Witch! Hag!” Kiyo howls, even as her mother pulls her up to her hip, and shushes her. Kiyo flails her hands, childish emotions raging, and she feels tears prick.
Mamma bows with Kiyo’s hair falling into her eyes, and hurries off.
Not before they hear: “I’ll have your tongue for that, girl!”
Mamma blanches, walking faster, Kiyo in one arm and the box with the yukata in the other.
They have to make quick work of the delivery, and use alleys to get home, her mother still bright red with some sort of shame.
Kiyo’s bright red too, but not from shame.
Their home is quiet.
Until her mother promptly whirls around, anger clear, and her hand twitches like she’d like nothing more than to slap Kiyo across the mouth.
Kiyo turns her head, ready to accept her punishment. She knew she’d made her mother look a fool in public. It was, admittedly, not one of her wiser decisions.
Mamma seems to lose her will at this, and sinks to her knees instead.
“Kiyo-chan, why do you do things like this?” She grasps Kiyo’s shoulders and gives them a firm shake. “I know they look at you funny. I understand, I do. But can’t you just ignore it? For your Kaa-san?”
Kiyo’s face is still red. “No. No ignoring. That’s silly.”
“Yelling in the street is silly, Kiyo-chan.” The tone reeks of desperation. “Yelling in the street is not Uchiha.”
Before Kiyo can retort, there’s a knock, and then a sliding of wood.
Her arms are crossed over her chest, and her mother tries—and fails—to push her head down into a bow when Uchiha Keisuke appears.
Kiyo won’t be intimidated. She thinks she can smell blood, and she checks the collar of his yukata, to see if she’d missed any, but she hadn’t.
He looks like the unsavory sort. Proud and dignified, with his nose pointed a little too high in the air. Like he owned her mother and her, their house, and their very lives.
“Akari-san.” He says coolly, looking down at her mother’s stooped form. It looks like a taliata, and keeps Kiyo on edge. “I presume you know why I’m here.”
Her mother tries to force her head again, but the most she manages is a bend a Kiyo’s neck. She won’t look down, though. She glares up, through the pressure.
“I do, Keisuke-sama.” Her mother’s voice is small, deferent. “I apologize for my daughter’s atrocious behavior. Kazan and I are addressing it.”
“Don’t apologize for me, mamma.” Kiyo snaps, shoving her hand from her neck. There’s an injustice in all of this. Kiyo can smell it.
Who’s this man to tell her mother to bow so low? To make her incline her head and her will?
Kiyo gnashes her teeth, and tilts her chin up.
“You gonna take my tongue?” Kiyo sneers, and the man narrows his eyes.
“I didn’t think you, of all people, would raise such an insolent child, Akari.”
Her mother is still bowed.
Kiyo’s voice raises, booming as much as the voice of a four year little girl can. “You gonna take my tongue or what?! What’s it gonna take for you to leave mamma alone! Why’s she gotta bow to a man like you?! You a king?!” She stomps her foot, hate prickling at her lungs, and the man raises a hand, but Kiyo doesn’t flinch.
“Kiyo-chan, please.” Her mother isn’t much of a beggar. She’s bad at it, and she’s never convincing. Kiyo’s never been convinced at least.
The man looks down at Kiyo like she’s a little maggot crawling through meat that’s gone rancid weeks ago. Like she’s trash to be taken out.
Kiyo hates it here.
“The Uchiha reputation cannot be sullied by a half-breed, Akari.” Kiyo wants to snarl at the disrespect, but another word makes her cower in her boots, makes her dip her head, and tremble. She’s not very good at registering nuance—she was a thick-headed thing—but if she had, she would have realized that the words were soft, an echo of sentiments that weren’t Uchiha Keisuke’s.
Kiyo, finally bows her head, fists clenched at her side. “Sorry for disrespectin’ the family.”
Even if this was a family that Kiyo didn’t like, even if it was a family that was cold and lacked affection, it was still family.
It was the only thing Kiyo cared about. Before, and now. Despite her parents, despite the haughty air of the man in front of her, she knew that family was the only thing she’d even place her pride in. It was the only thing worthy of her loyalty and love.
Keisuke seems to accept this apology, gives her mother a final chide, and hurries out the door, it sliding gracefully behind him.
Akari sinks to her knees, pulling Kiyo in front of her, with a wild mixture of terror and awe in her face, and shakes her by the shoulders. “Kiyo-chan, you must stop this—whatever this this is. We can’t be getting visits from the clan head. Your father and I, we, we can’t have this kind of attention, you understand? They barely let us settle on the fringes of the District, and we can’t be causing a fuss. You can’t be causing a fuss. That’s not how Uchiha are, Kiyo-chan. You understand, don’t you?”
“No.” Kiyo snorts, the severity of the situation completely lost on her. For her, a cousin had come to scold her mother, out of place and unwelcomed. “I don’t like Uchiha.” She bares her teeth. “You don’t like them either, mamma.”
Her mother groans, and shakes her again. “That doesn’t matter, Kiyo-chan.”
“It does!” Kiyo’s fists are still clenched, because they’d fly if they weren’t. “Nobody laughs! Nobody eats! Everybody smells like smoke and grass and I don’t like it!”
They should smell like oranges and the sea.
The girl doesn’t care if her mother finds her petulant and unbecoming of an Uchiha. Kiyo has seen enough of her mother to know she’s a domesticated animal—she grips her hands with thumb over knuckle wrath, and mediates her anger with soft, polite phrases.
Kiyo has no interest in being domesticated.
“We’re at war, Kiyo.” Her mother holds her face. “People have a hard time laughing and eating during war.”
Kiyo thinks this is preposterous. She thinks of hulking, eating monsters, on the vague fringes of her memory, of nights spent without food or drink, and of the laughter her father still managed to put in her belly. She remember stretchers, and soldiers bleeding out in front of their stucco home, and the hearty laughter over fresh pasta her father had traded an entire month’s worth of sugar for. Their coffee was so bitter the rest of the month that it made her mother’s eyes water.
This mother really believes this, if her solemn eyes are any indication.
“We laugh.” Kiyo emphasizes this, letting this mother understand her seriousness. “There’s no use being sad when there’s already sad things, mamma.”
“Kiyo-chan,” her mother snorts, which is a step up in Kiyo’s mind, “you really are so strange.”
“Futtitinni, mamma.” Kiyo grins cheekily, and her mother does laugh this time, though Kiyo’s sure the meaning is lost on her.
It’s a small victory.
There’s a different kind of language here, beyond the words. It’s a kind Kiyo doesn’t quite understand.
It’s familiar though, but more subtle, less boisterous, and she has to keep her eyes open at all times, or else she’ll miss a centimeter of raised shoulder than communicated this conversation is over, and I’d like to be left in peace now.
The hands also frustrate her. She uses her hands like they’re a dialect all their own, and nobody understands the gravity of her wagging fingers.
She tries to learn this language, though she dislikes it. Though she loathes to use it.
Kiyo’s father is a soldier. A ninja. She doesn’t know anything about ninjas.
He goes off to fight in this war she knows nothing about, and comes home weary, with bandages and new wounds, and it seems like he’s more scar than flesh at this point.
But when he returns home, after a month’s absence, and Kiyo is cooking at the stove, with a little apron and a step-stool under her feet.
She turns, mackerel frying with chopped pine nuts and garlic, and other herbs that made her nostalgic, and makes a beeline for the door.
“Papà! Welcome home, welcome home!” Kiyo had been cooking all day. Her mother had said her father’s return was imminent, and there’s no point in coming home to a place that didn’t smell of food and sweets. The table is covered with cookies, a stuffed artichoke, five distinct variations of marinated vegetables, and a bottle of her father’s favorite sake, with two chokos placed delicately beside it. “Mamma! Papà’s home! Let’s eat!”
“Hn.” Her father mutters. This is another part of the strange language Kiyo has yet to decode.
She herds her father to the table, who looks properly scandalized, and her mother comes trotting from around the corner.
“Kiyo-chan, you keep making too much.” Her mother scolds, but it’s fonder than those months ago, when she thought Kiyo’s strangeness was a crutch. The fondness keeps Kiyo in check.
Kiyo can behave like an Uchiha outside as long as she doesn’t have to behave like one in her own home.
“The nanni next door don’t mind.” Kiyo says, for the hundredth time. She goes knocking on doors with cookies and leftovers, and always receives a warm welcome.
Her father sits, and Kiyo whips out a cigarette and a lighter. “Would Papà like a smoke first? Mamma and I can wait for a little longer.”
“Akari.” Her father wants to complain. Kiyo knows this. Akari waves him off with levity, and smooths over her yukata.
“Kiyo does as she pleases in this house, Kazan.” If it were any other child, it would be an indication of a foul temperament, which Kiyo has, but at least she’s helpful. “She does the cooking and cleaning now. It gives me more time to work. I don’t see the issue.”
“This is unbecoming. There’s no need for such a celebration.” Her father says, and Kiyo tuts at him, her head tilting back ever so slightly.
“Papà, anytime someone’s gone and comes back is a celebration. You’re silly.” He doesn’t understand that is disagreement is quite profound, and he hardens his face.
“You shouldn’t be wasting food like this, Kiyo-chan. We’re at war—our budget is tight.”
Kiyo squawks indignantly, and this is grounds for an argument, without question. “Sciatiri e matri! What’s money for if we can’t eat good food!? Papà, you really are pazzu!”
“Stop with the gibberish, Kiyo-chan.” Her father says, and this enrages her more.
“It’s not gibberish! You speak gibberish! What does ‘hn’ mean anyways?” Kiyo turns to her mother, who’s laughing. “Mamma, what does it mean? Every time I think I get it, it means something different! Yes, no, maybe, absolutely not, are you an idiot, get out of my face—“ She lists a few more things she had gathered from her outings in the Uchiha district, and it cracks her father’s frigid gaze.
He puffs.
Kiyo screams, clapping her hands. “I knew you could laugh, Papà! I knew it! Ha! I told you, Mamma, didn’t I?”
Her mother just about keels over.
Her father puffs again.
This is the kind of family Kiyo knows. She knows families that laugh, and yell, and double over at the dinner table. This is a family Kiyo can live in.
There’s the smell of smoke.
She pales, and her father tilts his head towards the stove.
“My fish!” Kiyo is up in arms within seconds. “Papà, you distracted me, you fiend!” She scrambles over to her step-stool, and turns the burner off with a vengeance. The fish is, indeed, very burnt.
He frowns. “Don’t blame other people for your mistakes, Kiyo-chan.”
“I’m not blaming other people, I’m blaming you.” Kiyo retorts, mourning over her fish, and cursing her father’s name.
“How about we just eat what you’ve made us, Kiyo-chan?” Akari soothes, wiping at her eyes. “We can make fertilizer for the garden with your little experiment over there.”
Kiyo’s nostrils flare. “My food better not taste like fertilizer, mamma! A woman’s greatest pride or deepest shame is her food!”
“Maa, maa, that’s not what I’m saying.” Her mother gestures for her, and Kiyo grumbles as she returns to her seat. “Let’s just enjoy our meal with your father, hm?”
They do enjoy that meal.
She teaches her father how to scrap the stuffing off the artichoke leaves with his teeth, and when they reach the center, and informs them that it was necessary to squabble over who would get the tender heart inside.
Her mother plays along, and rouses her father into it with jeering and playful teasing.
Their voices are louder, happier, and Kiyo decides, as a just arbiter would, that Papà had never had artichoke heart, and would be awarded the prize.
It makes her mother sulk and her father grin.
This, to Kiyo, is a family.
Kazan nudges her arm up two inches with a bokken, and a lazy look in his eyes.
“You’re form is sloppy.” He yawns, in the grass, tanning in the sun. Kiyo puffs a stray curl from out of her face.
“Papà, you’re not helpful.” She pouts, and her father’s eye twitches, ever so slightly, but twitch it does.
“You spend all your time dancing around the kitchen, and none of it practicing your kata. I’ve already taught you. This isn’t about me being helpful, Kiyo-chan. You’re slacking.”
“Kata are boring.” She says, bluntly, and her father winces.
“You need kata for taijutsu, Kiyo-chan.”
“Why do I need taijutsu, Papà?”
“To be a ninja, you need to know taijutsu. Even if you don’t master it, it’s a necessary art.”
“Do I need to be a ninja?”
Her father’s face does an interesting dance. He’s surprised, then angry, then soft, then angry again.
“If you want to live in this world, then yes.”
“Is Papà a ninja?”
“Hn.” This means yes, because Papa nods.
Kiyo tilts her head, trying to decipher the resentment in his voice. “Can’t I just be a seamstress like Mamma?”
“You’re mother was a kunoichi before you were born.” He picks at the grass at his side, and rubs it delicately between his fingers.
This comes to Kiyo as somewhat of a shock.
Men and women were both soldiers in this world, both sent to kill and be killed, and she’s missed something important in all of this, something the other Kiyo wasn’t taught, but understood. This Kiyo, however, does not understand.
“Papà.” She settles by him, with crossed legs, and peers down at his face. “How does this world work?”
Her father’s dark eyes blink up at her, and he really has the longest eyelashes she’s ever seen. Her father isn’t a pretty man—he’s too rough and scarred, but she knows he’s handsome in the way her husband had been handsome—in his calluses and tanned skin, his furrowed brow and faint laugh lines.
“Little flame,” he murmurs, and his palms meets her head, tousling coils and kinks, “aren’t you too young to be asking that?”
“No.” Kiyo crawls up to his chest, and he shifts on his side so she can lay her head on his shoulder.
“Ah, my smart Kiyo-chan.” He quirks his lips, not enough to be called a smile. “Well, there are shinobi—and we kill each other to protect what’s precious to us. Our village, our families.
Other villages, Kiyo thinks. Maybe there’s other places besides that too. Places with pasta and swordfish.
“And we need taijutsu for that?”
He nods. “Taijutsu, ninjutsu, and genjutsu.”
Kiyo’s heard these words, but the definitions elude her.
“What’re the other two?”
“To be brief, ninjutsu molds chakra to do various things, but chief among them are elemental ninjutsus. Genjutsu alters the perception of the intended target. Illusions, if you will.”
Kiyo nods, but—“Ciacara?”
“Chakra.” He nods, then, with the air of a magician revealing a trick, makes the blades of grass his was fiddling with stick to his downwards facing palm.
“Eh?” Kiyo stares.
Things do not simply stick to hands. She might have been a literature teacher, but she was, in fact, aware that gravity existed.
His lips twitch. “This is chakra.”
“Sorcery.” Kiyo’s head spins. “Papà’s made a pact with the Devil. Papà, you need to repent, Gesù will forgive you, so don’t sign your soul away, please.”
“It’s not sorcery, Kiyo-chan.” Her father rolls his eyes, messing her bangs away from her face. “Everything in this world has chakra. The trees, the grass, you. It’s energy.”
She sniffs with an air of suspicion. “Sounds just like what a witch would say to escape persecution, Papà.”
“Kiyo-chan.”
That tone meant her father’s humor was all worn out. Kiyo sticks out a tongue and bobs to her feet.
“How long have you been a ninja, Papà?” She widens her stance, and places her hands on her hips.
He knocks at her ankle, to widen her stance more, and at her elbows. Kiyo doesn’t move, though. Not until she has her answer.
He knocks her ankle again, a bit harder. “Fifteen years.”
Kiyo’s feet edge out, and she makes fists that rest at her navel, the first stance in her string of kata. “Papà’s twenty-five.”
"Hn."
She’s pretty good at addition, but these are numbers she does not like.
Kiyo’s kata gets better, under her father’s watchful eye.
He’s, interestingly, a decent teacher when he choses to speak instead of just correcting her with a bokken.
There’s an analogy he makes—one where kata are steps in a dance, and Kiyo just needed to find the rhythm. This is a good metaphor, but it’s not quite enough for Kiyo to perfectly master the steps in the rhythm they should be.
The style doesn’t bounce enough, for her. It’s sharp and abrasive, and requires flicking and jabbing where the beat doesn’t fall, and it makes Kiyo trip over her own feet at times.
That being said, she does get better.
The kata don’t suit the tune of a mandolin, and Kiyo believe this to be the problem.
It wouldn’t be, if Kiyo could forget what her other life had felt like, but she had been old, and stubborn. Two months in Konoha could not override ninety years of life with music that was much more cheerful than the doleful croons of the shamisen.
“You tripped, again.” Her father’s face falls into his hands.
Kiyo doesn’t need to be told this. She can taste the dirt in her mouth.
Her mother calls, her voice projecting off the open kitchen window. “Lunch is ready!”
“Don’t think we’re done.” He clips, even as he throws her into his arms. Kiyo laughs, and he deadpans as his fingers poke her in all her tickles spots.
“Papà!” She wheezes, wriggling in place, and when Mamma sees them, she stifles a laugh.
Kiyo has tears streaming down her face, and a breathless grin on her lips.
Her father strolls up to Mamma, and Akari pinches Kiyo’s cheek, and traces her fingers above the girl’s brow.
“Your eyes really are so lovely.” Her mother says, softly, with a tenderness that makes Kiyo want to kiss every inch of her face and scream with delight.
Kiyo’s glimpsed herself in the mirror, of course. She knows her eyes aren’t an inky black.
“Just like my Tou-chan. Green and brown and yellow.” Akari murmurs, pressing a kiss onto Kiyo’s forehead. “Kiyo-chan’s eyes remind me of the last day of summer. Ne, Kazan?”
“Hn.”
The soba Mamma's prepared sits just right in her stomach, cool on her tongue while the summer sun swelters.
It’s July, and in Kiyo's eyes, it's the first month that she feels a home bloom in their house.