Naruto: Dreaming of Sunshine

The future depends on what we do in the present ~ Mahatma Gandhi

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It was only barely past lunch time when Kakashi-sensei dismissed us for the day. Since he'd been hours late in showing up, and I didn't think that would change, I foresaw being on this team as having a lot of self directed training time. Which wasn't so bad for me, because I had plenty of different projects already going, but might not have been the best method for Sasuke and Naruto.

Then again, it might have been sensei's way of saying 'welcome to the real world. No one is going to push you anymore'.

That had been the really big step about going to University in my old life. It was kinda different here, and the Academy had been much less teacher driven than any primary school I'd been to back in that other life, but there was still a relevant point about taking charge of your own life. I don't know if twelve was really old enough to see that, but since they were expecting us to be child soldiers and make life or death decisions, it was probably necessary.

I remember being twelve, that first time. Twelve year olds think they can do anything. The twelve year olds around me think that they'll be fine. It's only me that has doubts.

Now that's irony.

I went to look for Ino first. Shikamaru had mumbled something about morning training last night, so they were probably finished before we were. Team Ten hadn't been given a Jounin test so there was no reason for Ino to expect that the rest of us would have, unless her father had said anything.

When I found her, she was in the Yamanaka flower shop. The Yamanaka flower shop is pretty well known in Konoha. Not only do they sell flowers, they have a sideline in distilling poisons and have a specialised greenhouse for growing medicinal plants that they sell to us, the Akimichi and the hospital. A lot of the medicinal herbs they grow don't do so well in the temperate climate of Konoha, and need a lot of looking after. It seems kind of an odd career set for a clan of mind jutsu specialists, but there are rumours that the Yamanaka have a truth serum so powerful that three drops can have you spilling all your innermost secrets.

I'm not sure that's the truth, but the body and mind are not separate things. What affects one affects the other. I'm sure that there are chemical stimulants that can make people more susceptible to mind jutsu.

Ino wasn't working, or I'd have been more hesitant to disturb her, she was just puttering around watering pots and arranging bouquets. The three of us had spent a fair amount of time in this shop over the years, and her father had never seemed to mind. He was a very calm man. I hesitate to call him laidback, since that means something extreme coming from a Nara, but he was very centred, like he had long ago decided what was important to him and wasn't going to get worked up about anything less.

"Good afternoon, Yamanaka-san," I said politely as I entered the shop. He barely had time to acknowledge me before Ino pounced.

"Shikako! Is it true? Shikamaru said that your sensei was testing you. Asuma-sensei didn't do that to us, but then again, we are the Ino-Shika-Cho. So, tell me! What was it like? Did you pass?"

Ino was smarter than people gave her credit for. A large part of that was her unfortunate fan girl tendencies but she came from a ninja clan. More than that, she came from a ninja clan that specialised in reading people. You don't put together a team like Team Ten to fail them. Of all the teams this year, theirs is probably the most stable. Individually they're stable with no major quirks, their techniques work together well, and all three of them are born and bred for teamwork.

"Ah," I said, bobbing a nod. "We passed."

She squealed, clapping her hands together. "I'm so glad. What was it like? What did you do?"

I gave a quick run down of the test and how we had acted. Predictably, Ino was far more interested in what Sasuke had done than in how Naruto had acted, though I swear I saw Inoichi raise a brow in surprise.

"Sasuke-kun helped you? That's so romantic." She practically had stars in her eyes. "You're so lucky to be on a team with him. All I have are Shikamaru and Chouji. One's lazy and the other eats all the time."

I rolled my eyes. "They'll watch your back," I said instead of protesting. I knew she wasn't that annoyed at their personal habits. It was all surface. Beneath that, they were close friends. Of course, it wasn't like I could protest those surface habits anyway. Shikamaru was lazy and he was smart enough to get away with being lazy. No matter how much I made him train with me, it would take something serious to shake him out of that. I just hoped it wasn't too serious.

"I know, I know," Ino said, shaking the platitude off. "It's just… Shikamaru and Chouji, you know? Even our sensei is…" she flopped her hand backwards and forwards, not verbalising just what exactly their sensei was. I still got the picture. Team Ten was hardly exciting. Ino had graduated the academy, ready and eager for the new, bright and shinning ninja world, only to be grouped with her childhood friends and a soft spoken chain smoking sensei. Comparatively Team Seven was positively exotic.

It might not have been a good thing, but I doubted it was going to be boring. Well, besides having to wait for sensei to show up in the morning.

"So, tell me. What's your sensei like? We didn't see him before we left with Asuma-sensei."

"He was late," I said dryly. Across the shop, Inoichi's shoulders twitched with a stifled laugh. It looks like he knew exactly who my sensei was too. I wondered if Genin assignments were juicy gossip, or if he'd only paid attention because Ino was graduating this year.

"Shikaaako," Ino whined. "Stop ogling my dad and talk to me."

I blinked. Opened my mouth. No words came out. I worked my jaw. "Ino!" There it was. A little squeaky but my voice was working again. Inoichi was definitely laughing now. At least someone was having fun. "You… I…" I spluttered, words having deserted me. The familiar burn of social embarrassment was starting in my chest.

Her face was so innocent it should have belonged to a kitten. "Joking, joking, I'm only joking," she giggled out after a moment. "But your face…"

I scowled at her, not very amused by the teasing. Embarrassing me in front of her dad wasn't funny.

"You just had that look on your face. You know, 'some one has done something interesting and I must find out why'!"

"That's a look?" I asked, bemused. I wasn't aware I had been so obvious, or that it happened often enough that she had categorised it.

"Right up there with 'this book is interesting' and 'I just had an idea about how to make things explode'," Ino confirmed.

"I don't explode things!" I protested. "Often." Somehow the clarification took most of the force out of the argument.

"Exploding tags. That's all I'm going to say," Ino said. And okay, it had taken me a little while to work out how to make my own exploding tags. And yes, there had been a few times when it had not quite worked properly. And yes, I had made a few… adjustments afterwards. But hey, I had tags with a variety of strengths, timers and radius as well as fire based explosions, concussive blasts, light and sound tags and shock tags. Making tags was easy, once you knew how. The real trick of combat seal masters was applying seals without the fuss of paper and ink. They said that the Fourth could lay a seal any place he touched. Meaning, if he got his hands on you, even the barest of touches, you were dead.

I had no idea how to do it. None of the books and scrolls I had even mentioned it.

I coughed. "Anyway. Have you heard from Sakura?"

"No, not yet. Do you think she'll be done by now?" Ino frowned, a hint of worry on her face. I think she also knew that Sakura was the least likely of all of us to pass.

"Probably." I shrugged. "Do you want to go find her?"

The Haruno's didn't live far from the Yamanaka's, which was part of the reason that Ino and Sakura had always raced each other to school in the morning. Sakura's parents were both civilians and she had always been really proud of the fact that she was the first kunoichi of her family. She wore the empty circle on her clothes in the place we wore our clan symbols because of it. It was a statement of intent; she was going to have a clan, all she needed was the skill to fill in the mon.

Ino knocked on the door. Mrs Haruno answered it with a wan smile. "Hello, girls. Sakura… isn't really in the mood for visitors right now."

The horrid guilt settled in my gut. "She didn't pass." It was the most logical assumption, and to a degree, I had been expecting it. That didn't make it any better.

Ino snapped around to look at me, then at Mrs Haruno for confirmation. She nodded tiredly.

"We have to see her!" Ino blurted out. "Please, Haruno-san!"

She let us in with a sigh and we scuttled upstairs to Sakura's room. Her room was nearly as familiar to me as my own, or as Ino's, we had spent so much time at each other's houses.

"Sakura?" Ino called, knocking gently on the door before opening it.

"Go away," Sakura muttered, turning her face away from us. She had blotchy tear marks all down her face. We exchanged looks. How did you comfort someone like this?

I climbed on the bed beside her and wrapped her in a hug. Ino mirrored me on her other side. "What happened, Sakura?"

She sniffed. "Takahiro-sensei failed us. He said… he said none of us were mature or prepared enough to be a ninja… and that we didn't have any special skills to make up for the lack."

I shared a glance with Ino. It was harsh, but true. Ino was equally a fan girl, but she had her clan jutsu. Naruto was equally juvenile at times, but he had his insane stamina and healing (not to mention Kyuubi) to make up for it.

"He was right, wasn't he?" she said, voice broken like the little girl I'd met picking flowers years ago. "He called me a silly little girl playing kunoichi."

"Don't say that," Ino cut in, voice firm. "You're not… You're one of the best kunoichi in our year. You always scored better than me, remember?"

"Book smarts," Sakura sniffed. "The one time it really mattered…" she trailed off.

"It's not over yet," I said quietly. "You can try again, you know." It was poor consolation but it was the truth. Very few students opted too, but it was an option.

"I guess," Sakura said. Even if she did pass next year, she would still be a year behind us. When you were twelve, a year was a long time.

"You know," I offered gently, "you've got good chakra control. You could make a good medic nin."

"…Really?" Sakura sniffled.

I nodded. "The program at the hospital does take academy graduates. It's a lot of training, and you'll probably have to do hospital work before you're qualified for field work, but medic nins are in high demand."

"How do you know that?" Ino asked in surprise.

I shrugged. "I kinda thought about being a medic nin for a while. Since we do a lot of medicine, quite a few Nara work at the hospital. My aunt offered to sponsor me through the program. I think, if we can show her that you'll be a good medic she'll sponsor you too. If you want that is."

"I don't know," Sakura said, twisting her fingers in the hem of her dress.

"You don't have to decide now. I mean, you've got other options, like trying again next year, or the Genin Corps. You should think about it. Talk to Iruka-sensei or something." Most of the years failures ended up in the Genin Corps. I mean, our class didn't have a single repeating student.

Sakura nodded. "Yeah," she wavered. "I'll think about it."

That was all she said, but that was all there really was to say. Her parents had never really wanted her to be a ninja, but that was more because they just didn't understand than anything else. They'd never really wanted her to fail. I was pretty sure they'd support her if she wanted to become a med-nin, a doctor, much more than if she wanted to go back to the Academy.

That depended on Sakura wanting to be a medic though. She would be good at it, but that didn't necessary she wanted to.

We changed the topic and hung around for a few hours. Sakura was in an undeniably better mood when we left but Ino was frowning slightly. The group dynamic had just changed on her, and she hadn't seen it coming. No matter what Sakura chose, the three of us were no longer the same.

"I'd better go," I said awkwardly as we paused at the crossroads that would take me back to the clan farm. "Family tradition." I self consciously touched my ears which were currently bare. Ino, I had noticed, was already wearing a pair of studs. Earrings and jewellery weren't common on ninja - too easy to grab and pull - but we wore them for symbolism rather than vanity.

She smirked and nodded. "We went this morning," she confided. "Have fun."

It was much closer to twilight by the time dad came home and we were all ready to go, but the fading light suited us as Nara more than the bright afternoon sunlight would have. You needed light to have shadows but there was a legend that the founder of the clan, many hundreds of years ago, could control the very night itself.

"Congratulations on becoming Genin, kids," Shikaku said, slouching out of the front door. "Lets go to the memorial stone."

He didn't mean the village memorial stone, but the Akimichi-Nara-Yamanaka one. It was located to the far back of the Nara grounds and I don't know if anyone besides our three clans knew it existed. It was a private monument, one where we swore oaths.

It didn't take us long to get there.

"Ready?" Dad asked, voice unusually soft and quiet. Neither he nor Shikamaru were slouching.

Shikamaru nodded and stepped forward so he was standing in front of the monument. The three clan symbols were directly at eye height for an average Genin.

"I hereby swear that," he began, voice carrying around the small clearing, "as the sixteenth head of the Nara, I will entrust the oath entrusted to me by the fifteenth to the child that will become the seventeenth! In order to protect both the Yamanaka and the Akimichi clans and to protect Konoha, I, Shikamaru Nara, will become one with the shadows."

I knew that the Akimichi version of the oath referenced becoming a butterfly and the Yamanaka swore to open their minds. These all alluded to what we considered our supreme techniques - and the most dangerous.

Shikamaru stepped back and I walked into place. Shikamaru had sworn the oath of the clan heir, but mine was the modified version that the rest of the clan used.

"I, Shikako Nara, do hereby swear, that to protect my team mates, the clan, those allied with us and Konoha itself, I will become one with the shadows."

The order of priorities was only subtly important. We had worked with the Akimichi, Yamanaka and Sarutobi clans long before Konoha was founded. The fact that the clan head at the time had modified the oath to include it actually showed just how much the clan believed in the ideals of a peaceful Konoha. After all, we certainly don't go to anymore effort than we absolutely have to.

Dads face was pensive when I turned around. He nodded. "Your oaths are heard." He reached into the pockets of his jounin vest and withdrew a small container. "These are the earrings that my younger brother and I wore. They will whisper your oaths into your ears so that you never forget them. When you become Chunin, you will gain your own earrings and become an adult in the eyes of the clan." He hesitated, then continued, voice serious. "And remember, the clan will always stand with you."