Author's Note:Hey! Today I had some extra time after finishing Chapter 12, so I decided to dedicate it to writing Chapter 13.I think it turned out really well — what do you think?
Acting like a baby demands far more stamina than I expected, because while it is simple enough to gurgle and wave my plush rabbit whenever it wanders into my field of view, the true difficulty lies in sustaining the performance convincingly from moment to moment without allowing the mask to slip even a fraction.
My instincts keep urging me to look more closely, to analyze, to act, yet whenever Hiashi's gaze flickers toward me I deliberately let a bead of drool gather on my lip and blink up at him with the practiced docility of a sleepy kitten, which makes my dignity yelp but still seems preferable to trying to explain to the head of the Hyūga why his two‑week‑old daughter watches him as though she were tallying ledgers behind her eyes.
Caution settles into a rhythm I can live with: a sleeve swishes somewhere beyond a paper wall and my vision tries to snap into Byakugan like a reflex—an itch in my tenketsu begging for relief—so I convert that impulse into measured drills, cycling through activation, holding, deactivation, rest, and then beginning the sequence once more, until the habit itself becomes a kind of lullaby for my nervous system.
Ten seconds remains comfortably clean at first, whereas thirty still feels like someone is driving a corkscrew behind my eyes, but with repetition the ache softens, shrinking from the hour‑long pounding that once followed into a tolerable afterglow of twenty minutes, and even that begins to recede; meanwhile the range nudges outward by cautious increments—the corridor's edge resolves first, then the garden stones, later the far fence, and eventually a shimmer at the lane beyond—so that the world widens by half‑meters rather than by dramatic leaps, which suits my purposes perfectly.
While chakra hums like a quiet machine in the background, I keep the baby routine as if it were a second occupation: my limbs flail in uncoordinated arcs that look appropriately random; sometimes my fist bumps cloth and the palmar reflex snaps shut around it with gratifying reliability; if Hikari rests the rabbit near my cheek I mouth the ear and smack my lips with noisy satisfaction that reads as normal; on my back I pedal the air with my legs as though bicycling the ceiling; and during short, supervised moments of tummy time I lift my head for a heartbeat before gravity wins and my nose collapses gently into the blanket.
Outwardly this all appears harmless, cute, and forgettable, yet inside I am quietly calibrating—testing balance in micro‑bursts, holding tiny isometrics, and feeling the early stir of muscle tone waking—because a newborn body learns in jittery sparks, and I intend to guide that current without advertising that I am guiding anything at all.
As dusk pools in the house, voices sift through the paper walls with the soft intimacy of steam rising from a teacup; Hikari speaks to Hiashi in her gentle, steady way, worrying about my sleep, my latch, and the oddly focused quality of my gaze, while he answers in measured lines where even the silences seem deliberate, and when he finally says that I must be a natural talent with the Byakugan, I press my knuckles to my mouth to smother a smug little sound and let relief radiate through me, because the drills are not triggering suspicion and the fiction of a gifted infant protects the truth I am building behind it.
The days blur into a warm continuity of sun through shōji screens, soft tabi whispering over wood, and birds arguing somewhere beyond the bamboo; with the Byakugan held on a short leash I allow myself quick looks—never prolonged, always restrained—just enough to let the compound draw itself in delicate filaments around me: servants ferrying laundry that swings like small gray moons, a branch boy running messages with more enthusiasm than oxygen, and Hiashi moving from room to room with the inevitability of a quiet weather front.
Watching inevitably becomes study when three clan members pass along the path—two men and one woman—and something inside me clicks into place as I notice that their chakra flows are not at all the same: one stream runs smooth and steady, another ripples faintly like light on shallow water, and the last packs tightly along the limb channels as though braced for effort.
Chakra signatures, so obvious in theory, take on a different weight in practice, because once I see them I cannot unsee them; it becomes immediately apparent that everyone carries a flavor, a distinct note in the same scale played by a different finger, and so I begin to catalog what I observe with the same care I would devote to names.
Hikari's chakra glows like a lantern veiled under silk, while Hiashi feels like a gated river—dense, contained, and accustomed to opening and closing streams by habit; one of the guards carries a coiled, springy presence that makes my own tenketsu itch in sympathetic readiness, whereas the other keeps a broad, heavy calm, the reliable weight of a shield raised without fuss.
There are guards—plural—and I chart them carefully: always two and never both gone, trading their absences in even blocks of six hours, sometimes eight; the spring‑coiled sentry tends to return a little ahead of schedule while the shield‑steady counterpart lingers a little longer, yet neither leaves me without eyes on me, which they surely believe are their eyes alone, though the polite truth is that I am watching them as surely as they watch me.
In time I learn their preferred routes and the rhythm of their steps; I recognize how their attention spikes whenever Hiashi shifts in his office or when Hikari's laugh rings out over the garden; I notice they favor the same two rooflines for overwatch; the spring‑bright guard lands on the balls of his feet, while the heavy calm of the other lets his heel kiss down first like punctuation; their scanning patterns reveal short, sharp pauses followed by long, looser sweeps, small tells that remind me that professional vigilance, while admirable, is not synonymous with perfection.
Threaded through all of this is another pattern that fascinates me even more: movement in this place is almost never purely muscular, because the Hyūga bleed a trickle of chakra into their arms and legs as naturally as breath, not with theatrical flares or visible auras but with constant micro‑adjustments that stabilize, prime, and quietly enhance each motion; Hiashi and the guards wear this augmentation like a second skin, while many passersby carry it like a borrowed coat that sits a little stiff in the shoulders.
Memory contributes a pointed reminder in the form of Tsunade reshaping a building with a punch, the narrative insistence that chakra‑enhanced strength belongs uniquely to her and to the Senju, yet the grammar of that same technique appears to live here in the clan's daily gait, not as raw power but as a syntax of control, timing, and intent, which suggests that the method is less a bloodline miracle than a cultivated habit that, with sufficient practice, can masquerade as nature.
Accepting that premise, I cultivate what I can, bound by the strict and obvious limits of a newborn frame; I undertake tiny experiments disguised as cuteness so that, when Hikari slips a finger into my palm, I add the smallest whisper of chakra to my forearm and discover the grip holds for a heartbeat longer before the reflex lets go, and when tummy time threatens to pitch my face into the blanket, a feather‑light pulse along the back of my shoulders keeps my head aloft for an additional second that feels like triumph.
If a random swat happens to land on the rabbit's ear, I take the opportunity to nudge sensation along my fingertips and map how touch lights the network in my hand, and though none of this rises to the level of visible weirdness, a mental ledger grows steadily more detailed with notes like "pulse here yields steadier chin," "too much at the wrist produces a twitch in the fingers," and "left heel kicks with more vigor than the right," so that I become, in essence, a scientist wrapped in a swaddle blanket.
If anyone notices the pattern, they choose not to remark on it; Hikari simply coos over how focused I seem, while I drool decorously on my sleeve and try not to preen, content to let her interpretation stand.
The Byakugan's tantrums settle into a wary truce as headaches dim and afterimages fade faster, and the edges of my perception creep outward another modest meter until the carp pond in the garden ceases to be a pale blur and resolves into fish that swirl like commas in an unwritten sentence; veins etch leaves with a clarity like carved glass, and a spider's anchor point shivers with a presence that my sight interprets as chakra, though I remind myself that too much detail is still too much, so I blink the intensity away, breathe evenly, and return to contemplating the rabbit with a pose of infant seriousness.
Between feedings and long, heavy naps that carve the day into irregular slices, I babble and mouth my fist and invent a nonsense syllable for the rabbit that I repeat until it takes on the shape of language; although my body schedules everything for me, I lean into the wakeful moments that overlap with useful eavesdropping, and when Hikari's fingers brush the hair from my forehead, the warm certainty of the gesture complicates my plans even as it steadies them, because love has a way of doing both at once.
During one such wakeful morning, thin lines begin to bloom along the walls—frost traced by a mathematician's hand—and when I blink, the lines remain; intrigue races through me and I roll my head to one side, mouthing the rabbit's ear to disguise the spike of joy while I let the Byakugan hum low and study the geometry of what I am seeing: segments bound to posts, intersections anchored on ridgepoles, a filigreed lace that behaves more like a lens than a net.
Evening conversation soon confirms the deduction as Hiashi's measured tone carries a faint thread of satisfaction through the wall while he explains that the seal will prevent outsiders from peering in with dōjutsu—a necessity, he says, because there has been interest—and the word "interest" lands with the familiar discomfort of a pebble lodged in a shoe, warning in its smallness that pressure exists from beyond the pleasant boundaries of our home.
Hikari's pause is soft but sharp as she asks whether the array will interfere with those inside, and Hiashi, almost pleased, assures her that internal sight remains unobstructed, which turns our house into a one‑way mirror and grants me the sanctuary I have needed from prying eyes; I answer with a contented burble that, in the private language of me, translates neatly into the word finally.
Muscles unclench that I had not realized were braced, and I allow my testing to expand by the slightest of fractions, though I keep my ritual intact: I check first—always first—for active Byakugan from either guard or either parent, and only when my scan returns blank do I let circuits run longer, press pulses a little firmer, and sharpen my observations, because prudence is not optional when one's camouflage is measured in ounces and inches.
What I am doing is not a leap so much as the easing of a brake I have kept engaged with both feet; I map interior pathways with steadier light, watching the flows pool behind my knees and the network in my hands braid and unbraid as my fingers open and close, and I count tenketsu by sight as well as by feel, learning that forcing chakra through a point and inviting it are not the same act any more than shoving a door and turning its handle are the same kind of entry.
The world obliges my curiosity by continuing to teach: a branch family woman passes by with a basket of daikon and I can see the way her chakra steadies her forearms to bear the load, while two boys race one another and one over‑channels into his calves until his toes curl and he trips, yelps, laughs, and then repeats the mistake, because ten‑year‑olds hold a perfect record against learning from immediate experience; later, the guards run a brief, restrained spar in the yard where hands blur and feet whisper, and I watch spring‑bright hum fast pulses into his wrists while shield‑steady lays broad, stable bands through his core.
People thus become entries in that quiet index I keep: Hikari's lantern glow, Hiashi's gated river, the spring and the shield, the messenger boy's impatient fizz, the gardener's mulch‑warm calm, and as signatures approach I find I can match them to names without turning my head, which feels at once like a party trick and a safety net, and I cherish it as both.
Tsunade's legend, once a distant spectacle, resolves into a syllabus I can follow at a scale appropriate to my state; if the Hyūga lace chakra into motion as habit, then I lace it too, not to strike—my fiercest opponent at present is a rebellious blanket crease—but to refine grammar: a whisper to my shoulder when I swat, a nudge at my hips when I attempt a roll and only make it halfway before the floor rescues me, a gentle press to my soles during the supported stepping reflex when Hikari stands me up for a second and laughs at the absurdly prancing feet.
Greed remains a risk I refuse to indulge; my channels are fine capillaries rather than braided rope, and if I push too hard I become lightheaded or my fingers tremble—both poor optics for a baby who is emphatically not possessed—so I etch a simple rule that I recite to myself whenever temptation whispers: do less, do it cleaner, and then do it less again; control first and never, under any circumstance, chase flash.
As the days pass, the seal becomes a quiet companion that allows me, if I time things carefully, to press my sight through the garden and across the lane where I can catch a sliver of the street beyond while remaining invisible to anyone not standing inside our room; the array does not prevent the world from shining, it simply prevents the world from shining back, and I take full advantage within the boundaries of my checks—scan for active sight, find none, breathe, test, record, deactivate, smile, drool, and then sleep.
Discipline does not exclude softness, and there are moments when Hikari hums an old melody while folding laundry and the sound lands in my chest like a warm stone, or when Hiashi pauses at my threshold for no reason except to look at me breathing before he leaves again with a tilt of his head that contains a word he will not say; at dusk the guards' shadows stretch long across the stone like paired parentheses, and I discover that hiding who I am becomes easier when I also allow myself to become who I am for them: a daughter, a new presence in a house that had previously felt too quiet.
Day fourteen arrives without fanfare as cool air promises rain, and my internal index lists both guards on station with neither sight engaged, which is precisely the alignment I prefer; once my checks are complete I brace the rabbit against my forearm like a small witness and trace the cleanest chakra circuit I have managed yet, sending the current up the forearm and into the fingertips, out along the palm and back again, lingering long enough to map the texture of the flow as it moves.
This time there is no tremor and no ache, only a warm cursive line that unfurls with obedient grace, and the pleased little sound that escapes me earns an approving stoicism from the rabbit, who endures my triumph as if it has seen many such victories before.
Later, while rain gathers its arguments overhead, voices drift beyond the garden where two cousins gossip about the new seal as though it were a fashionable sash—one calls it overdue because there have been too many eyes, while the other wonders aloud whether anyone would dare transgress, only to receive the succinct reply that people always dare, which is precisely why the seal exists—and although my smile thins at the repetition of that pebble‑word "interest," I put it away with the rest of the small stones I am collecting.
I am physically small, my world a tapestry of nap schedules and milk and tatami lengths, yet I am not naïve; the clan is a web warmed by tea and cut by knives, and seals are declarations even when they wear the polite face of protection, which changes nothing about my plan except to make it safer, a modification I will never refuse.
I keep my performance tidy because it is a tool I depend upon: when Hikari lifts me I melt against her shoulder, my head lolling heavily until she cups the base of my skull, and when Hiashi offers me a finger the reflex clamps down and, with the lightest whisper of chakra, holds for one heartbeat longer before letting go; when a guard passes close on some errand I find the tatami pattern suddenly fascinating, even as delicate threads of perception hum politely down to his soles, because self‑control tastes like paper and green tea and unchewed pride, and I have learned to savor it.
By afternoon the promised rain arrives, rattling the bamboo like a drummer testing a snare, and in my sight the seal writes the water's song along its lines until the whole array gleams with a delicate assurance; while the guards' attention leans toward the lane I open my view a little longer, charting the street's curve and the puddles forming in the depressions, watching a vendor's chakra pool along his shoulders beneath the weight of the yoke, and after I file him as unknown, transitory, and harmless, I reel my sight back in before an eyelid flutter can lengthen into something anyone might question.
Evening brings tea and rain‑soft talk about clan business and a cousin's promotion and a training match gone sideways and, more quietly, about the seal performing exactly as intended, and I file each detail where it belongs—under context and house temperature and how many moves until the next move—because listening is an art that grows sharper when people forget there is an audience, and people often forget when the audience is small and swaddled.
Night arrives like a well‑poured blanket, and the sleep that follows feels banal in its simplicity and strategic in its necessity, because rest lays the ground for control; morning always brings the itch to do more, and each time I hush it with patient promises, reminding myself that there will be time enough for threads and scalpels and the clean, frightening things chakra can be made to do, whereas now my task is only to build the hand that will one day hold the tool.
Before sleep on the following night, I allow myself one last indulgence because I have earned it: the scan for active sight comes back clear, so I send a feather‑fine trickle into shoulders and neck and accept Hikari's invitation to another round of tummy time, where I lift my head for two counts, then three, and brush the rabbit's nose with my cheek as though affixing a ceremonial stamp; progress is a ceremony, and if you do not mark it, it slips past pretending to be nothing at all.
The sound of happiness I make afterward is not a calculated giggle but the honest thing itself, which I quietly pocket like a coin, because I am still playing the part and people are still watching and a seal, for all its usefulness, is a door rather than a lock on the truth; therefore I keep checking for active Byakugan before I test, I keep moving like a child learning her body rather than a stranger mastering a weapon, and I keep the ledger while I grow the hand and nudge the range outward by inches until, one distant day, the inches will consent to becoming miles.
They will continue to believe that I am a precocious baby girl, and they will not be wrong, although it will also be true that I am a precocious baby girl who counts tenketsu for entertainment and can tell which guard occupies which roofline by the way the floorboards forget to creak when he passes below; these truths are not contradictory so much as complementary, and they fit together like two palms pressed briefly in greeting.
Between those paired truths, here in the quiet rooms of this house with all of its eyes, I am becoming something it cannot yet see, and I am content to let that fact remain our smallest and safest secret for a while longer.