The seal has been sitting over our house for a handful of days now, and with every soft dawn that slides across the shōji I feel the way my shoulders unclench a little more, because the difference between training under a sky full of eyes and training beneath a one‑way mirror is the difference between holding your breath and letting it out slowly while pretending you weren't breathless at all; before I do anything—before I so much as let my attention narrow—I run the same ritual I have carved into habit, letting the Byakugan bloom for a careful beat to sweep the rooms and the garden and the rooflines for the telltale white glare of another gaze, and when the scan returns clean, I use that very act as my first drill of the morning, dimming and brightening the sight like a lantern wick until the strain tucks itself back behind my eyes without protest.
I stay small and I stay boring, which at this age is conveniently easy, because most of my day remains a patchwork of milk, naps, and the kind of unfocused alertness that adults call calm and babies experience as the whole universe jangling in their nerves; within that patchwork I steal threads for practice, and I am ruthless about appearing unremarkable while I do it, which means that any investigation begins with camouflage—fingers curled by reflex around Hikari's offered knuckle, lips busy with the serious work of mouthing the rabbit's ear, chest rising and falling in that slow tide that makes parents soften around the eyes—and only then do I allow the smallest currents to start moving inside the architecture of me.
Imitation is the scaffold I climb first, because the adults around me obligingly demonstrate the thing I want to understand in every step they take; the Hyūga way of moving is a quiet braid of muscle and chakra, never theatrical, never showy, just the constant micro‑weave that turns balance into certainty, and so I watch how a wrist firms when a door slides open and how a calf thrums when a turn sharpens, and then I try to echo that pattern on the tiniest possible scale, knowing that my body is only two weeks past arriving and therefore requires patience that borders on reverence.
When I nudge a thread into my forearm to support a grip, I learn that there is a narrow place where strength becomes stability without tipping into twitch, and when I let a pulse gather along the back of my neck during tummy time, I learn that there is a difference between brute insistence and the kind of coaxing that lets the head float for a breath longer before gravity claims it; I keep a private ledger, not on paper but in the tidy little drawers of my mind, and in it I record thresholds, because thresholds are everything right now: this much flow to still the wobble, that much to invite the lift, anything beyond to be handled later, when the scaffolding is made of bone and not wishful thinking.
Caution does not mean timidity, and on one bright midday I get ambitious in a way that seems sensible right up until it is not; I have been listening to the house and to the signatures that move through it, and I know with certainty that both guards are stationed outside and neither has their dōjutsu engaged, that Hiashi is a cool, dense presence down the corridor with his attention folded inward, and that Hikari's warmth hovers nearby in that soft, attentive way that mothers have when they are present without hovering; I decide that this is the moment to try channeling a slightly larger portion of my available chakra into a single limb to see whether a concentrated line feels different from a gentle wash, and because my left arm is already tucked against the rabbit, I choose it for the experiment.
What I design is a simple lift, something between a flex and a press, the kind of motion a normal baby might stumble into by accident, and I am careful—so careful—about the amount I gather, because I want to observe not shock myself; the thing I forget, in the way that you only forget something once, is that newborn muscles are exquisitely obedient levers when the signal is crisp and over‑loud, and so the instant I let the line tighten and the flex fire, the rabbit does not simply rise, it departs, arcing out of the cradle with the offended elegance of a gull startled from a piling and landing with a soft and entirely audible thump nearly two meters away on the tatami.
For the length of a heartbeat there is nothing in the world but the horrible, crystalline silence that follows a mistake, and then the rehearsed survival instincts arrive like cavalry, because I do the only plausible thing a two‑week‑old can do after launching her favorite toy across the room: I crumple my face, I let my breath hitch, and I begin to wail with convincing heartbreak, which brings Hikari through the doorway with a speed that would impress me if I were not busy performing infant sorrow at professional level; she scoops me up with one arm, checks me with the efficiency that lives in her hands, and then, with her brow knitting in a small, puzzled crease, retrieves the rabbit from its new and improbable resting place.
"Now how did you get there, little wanderer," she murmurs, half to the toy and half to the air, and I press my cheek against the line of her collarbone as if the physics of stuffed animals were a problem far too large for my newly minted soul, which, in fairness, it is if you are not accounting for chakra, and she soon decides that mysteries can be set aside when babies need soothing, so the incident closes with a kiss to my hair and the rabbit restored to its post at my side, where it behaves itself admirably for the remainder of the afternoon.
The bill comes due after my next nap, when a deep, fibrous ache announces itself up and down the length of the very arm I over‑signaled, a sensation so precisely like the better class of muscle soreness that I have to remind myself that the calendar says day sixteen and not leg day; it does not feel like injury—no sharpness, no hot spark—just the protest of tissue that has been asked to recruit beyond its comfort, and I catalogue the sensation with interest rather than alarm, because it implies something useful: with chakra as tutor, muscle fibers can be persuaded to work at intensities that would normally be gated by developmental pace, which means that, in theory and with care, I can pair minuscule physical practice with precisely metered signals to accelerate adaptation without courting the kind of damage that would give away the game.
This is not a license to become stupid, and I write that sentence to myself three times in the quiet of my skull, but it is a prompt to redesign my sessions so that they resemble training rather than incidents; I begin sketching, in the language of breath counts and milk‑window minutes, what I privately name pulse ladders—ascending sequences of feather‑light signals that step up and step down through tolerable ranges while I marry them to the movements a baby can plausibly make: the palmar grasp held a heartbeat longer, the chin hovered above the blanket for two instead of one, the gluteal flick that turns a kick from wild splash into slow water; each ladder ends below the point where tremor begins, and every ladder is followed by longer quiet than effort, because recovery, at this size, is not optional, it is the point.
The rest of the house continues in its rhythms, and I continue to guard my own, never skipping the preliminary sweep for active sight, never lingering in the Byakugan longer than necessary, and always tucking the work inside ordinary moments so thoroughly that nothing pokes through; if you watch me while I am watching you, what you see is a girl barely past being new who mouths her fist with soulful conviction and sometimes stares at her rabbit as though she can coax it to explain the universe, which, under certain definitions of explanation, is not wrong.
Hiashi notices the rabbit in a different way, which is to say that he notices me noticing it, and apparently decides that the fastest route to an infant's heart runs through an expanding menagerie, because over the course of several days an entire parade of soft ambassadors begins to appear at the edge of my world: first the weasel with the expression of a conspirator, then a duck with an overconfident bill, then a dog whose ears beg to be chewed, and each time one arrives he does not present it with ceremony so much as deposit it near my reach with an air of having solved something, and then he watches, very nearly not watching, to see whether the solution takes.
I do my part by liking them all in ways that make sense for me—eyes tracking, mouth busy, fingers curling and uncurling with intent that reads as reflex—and if a small, ridiculous part of me wonders how long this will go on and whether we will, at some point, be compelled to open a plush‑zoo annex to the nursery, a larger part recognizes that this is one of the languages in which my father says what he will not otherwise say, and therefore I accept the growing flock with proper gratitude while taking private inventory of which textures light which parts of my sensory map.
The soreness fades over forty‑eight hours the way a well‑behaved ache should, and I do not repeat the rabbit incident because there is nothing to learn from launching the same object twice except that adults become correspondingly more suspicious, which is not a research outcome I am courting; instead I return to the program: lighter ladders, smoother lines, a preference for inviting over pushing, and a commitment to closing every session with enough calm that even my own pulse would be bored if it were capable of boredom at this age.
Night gathers and lets go and gathers again, and within those cycles I keep making the kinds of gains that do not look like gains to anyone who is not keeping my ledger: a steadier jaw during a yawn, a quieter rebound after the Moro reflex startles me, a more consistent ability to hold Hikari's gaze for the length of an entire lullaby, and, underneath all of that, a Byakugan that answers more readily when called and retires more gracefully when dismissed, which was the whole point of beginning small in the first place.
The seal hums on its lines like wire in a friendly wind, the guards maintain their habits of presence and absence with the reliability of tides, and I mirror them by maintaining my own habits with the same quiet discipline; I am not chasing miracles here, only building a vocabulary—one pulse, one breath, one carefully measured second at a time—so that when the world asks the harder questions it always asks, I will have more than tears and reflex to answer with, and I will still, somehow, look exactly like what they need to believe I am.
In the meantime I reside among the citizens of my small zoo, which now includes, depending on the day, the rabbit, the weasel, the duck, and the dog, all of whom are excellent listeners and terrible conversationalists, and I practice the ancient Hyūga art of pretending to be asleep when adults are thinking too loudly, and I promise myself that the next experiment will be as boring to watch as it is satisfying to perform, because that is the definition of success in a house full of careful people who love me without quite realizing what, exactly, they are loving into being.