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Aiko didn't like to think about those early days of blearily drifting in and out of consciousness, realizing that the world was a blur of strange colors and smells and feelings that she couldn't properly interpret.
First of all, it was strange and frightening that she could remember it at all. She certainly shouldn't. At three years old, she was discerning enough to know that she was a complete freak and just savvy enough to keep her lips sealed shut instead of babbling even though some part of her realllly wanted to impress the grownups she knew. It would be satisfying to impress her caretakers and the other adults she saw, and maybe get special treatment. But in the long run? It felt like a terrible idea.
'For me and for Naruto. What would happen if I got taken away? No one cares about him.'
"Hey! Heyyyyyy," Naruto whined, tugging on her foot. He was sitting with his legs spread wide on the floor and staring beseechingly up at where she was perched on the bed. "What doing?"
She did her best not to grimace, both at the grammar and at the way that the toddler guilelessly rubbed his fist against his runny nose and then onto his shirt.
It wasn't his fault, really, that he was a comparatively normal child. When the fact that he was a jinchuuriki was taken into question, that fact took on an alarming pallor.
'I don't even like kids,' she thought resentfully, for the nth time. 'It's not fair.'
"I'm looking at pic-tures," Aiko said carefully to minimize the way her clumsy tongue stumbled over harder syllables. She turned the glossy children's book –an encyclopedia of sea creatures thinly guised as a story—in her hands to show her otouto. "Would you like to see?" She clumsily patted the cushion next to her, carefully avoiding looking at her stubby fingers. She already knew they looked like fat sausages without watching. Naruto made a face, but climbed up beside her, using another pillow as a step-stool and nearly slipping.
'I hate this pathetic body,' Aiko thought dully, turning the book back to the first page. 'It can't do anything right.'
Granted, she suspected that the flesh bag she was currently interred in was of vastly superior quality to her old one. The comparison was probably like a new Camaro and a fifteen year old Grand Am. They were both technically cars, and they looked fine at first scrutiny. But no matter how great her three-year-old flesh bag was for such a small sack of meat, it was still the body of a young child. It tired easily and needed rest often. Her fingers were fat and clumsy, and she had a hard time utilizing fine motor skills for things like coloring.
Her otouto wiggled beside her, making a strange high-pitched 'eeeeee' sound for no apparent reason. When that garnered no reaction but a tilted head, he huffed loudly and bounced, shaking the bed. "What's the story?" Naruto demanded bossily, prodding the book with an outstretched finger. When he grabbed for the pages, she pulled it away.
"There's not really a story," Aiko demurred, trying to keep the sigh out of her voice. There were picture books with words she could guess at, yes, but she wasn't going to touch those until it was well and age-appropriate for her to do so. She was bored out of her gourd, but it wasn't worth the risk.
At least not until she knew what was going on well enough to gauge the risks of gaining adult attention, anyway. She didn't know much about how ninjas trained or dealt with prodigy children, but she didn't think it was anything she would like to experience.
For the first few weeks or months, she'd thought that she was completely insane. To be fair, an infant had a horrendously poor grip on reality. She hadn't been able to see well, struggled to stay awake for very long, and she certainly hadn't understood anything that was being said. It had seemed like a waking dream when she had first made the connection between her current existence and a half-remembered television show that she had apparently never finished watching. Pity. She really couldn't have predicted that would become relevant to her survival and lifestyle.
Naruto was simultaneously the reason she questioned her sanity and the one consistent source of human interaction that was keeping her from going absolutely insane. She needed him.
Naruto made a rude sound that implied he wasn't going to accept the answer that there was no story. Fair enough.
She glanced around futilely, as if to be sure she was alone. The beautiful dark-eyed lady who volunteered at the orphanage and had them call her 'aunt' was nowhere to be seen. She had probably left for the day—Aiko was relatively sure that the woman had children of her own to tend to.
That didn't mean the twins were alone. She didn't see one often, but there was at least one ANBU who followed them around.
Well. She'd just have to speak slowly and try to keep her diction to something believable.
"This fish is named Marlin," Aiko said quietly, pointing out an illustrated koi. That wasn't the right type of fish at all, but it wasn't as if Naruto would know the difference. "He's scared of everything. Like this shark," Aiko pointed as she turned the next page. The blue-green color of the water in the books was like her eyes. The sky was like Naruto's. They looked nice together. "And he's scared of this walrus, too," she improvised. That wasn't in the right story, but there weren't any sea turtles in this book. She'd have to make do. There was in fact a barracuda, but she wasn't going to tell her little brother a grim story about a mother being murdered.
"Why?" Naruto breathed, staring, transfixed at the glossy images.
"Well, bigger fish are dangerous," she said practically. "And sharks eat fish." She couldn't hold back the grin at the disgusted face Naruto made and the way he buried his face in his hands and shook his head.
"Nuh-uh," he rejected. The words were a direct contrast to the fascinated glee on his face. His big blue eyes practically glittered.
She knew what was coming, but Aiko still waited to hear it with amused fondness.
"Tell me more."
~~~
"Our great village was founded…"
Her civilian teacher's voice was a comforting drone seeping in one ear and out the other. Aiko wasn't paying the slightest bit of attention to a thing that the man said.
There was no need to, really. History wasn't going to help her much. Besides, the propaganda lightly dashed with facts that he was sharing would be repeated in other classes, she was sure. As they grew older they would probably get the party line reinforced, peppered with darker inclusions as they became age appropriate.
Or what counted for age appropriate in a shinobi village, in any case. Half of the picture books back at the orphanage included references to violence, indexes and identification games of weapons, and casual mention of death that was doubtless meant to serve as a reference for appropriate grieving behaviors. The other half were perfectly standard, trite works with cute animals and pretty children with two loving parents and an extended family who taught them various lessons.
(Aiko had no idea which sort was more harmful to Naruto. The sweet banal picture books of happy families filled him with a wistfulness that was painful to see, but watching as the darker texts normalized the shinobi lifestyle made her want to tear them all up).
"In the fiftieth year of the ninja, the great clans…"
Dull as dirt. No wonder that Naruto was nearly nodding off on his desk. That was probably a better use of time than listening, Aiko thought. It wasn't her plan for the day, however.
She was instead preoccupied with practicing her hiragana. Painstakingly, Aiko bit the tip of her tongue in concentration and tried not to let her hand wobble as she copied stilted and blotchy figures next to the perfect printed versions.
"Pay attention, class," came the light scolding from the head of the classroom. The boy beside Aiko jerked guiltily, but she didn't react.
The teacher didn't frighten her. What was he going to do? Really, the power that he used to maintain classroom control was all dependent on the fact that children hadn't yet realized just how little he could do to keep them in line. The psychological intimidation wasn't going to work on a girl who was 21-going-on-4, and the elderly civilian man who taught her homeroom class at school wasn't about to resort to physical intimidation.
The twins had only been attending civilian school for a few short months, but the routine was solid enough that Aiko was taken aback when a pretty Chuunin with a wide smile and a red bow in her hair came to pick them up and took them to Hokage tower.
Aiko pressed her lips together in a stern expression that she knew was uselessly cute on her pudgy, pink-cheeked face and strained her toes toward the floor. Her feet were dangling over the edge of the plastic waiting room chair that she was seated quietly on. By contrast, Naruto had climbed up on top of his and was talking at a mile a minute to an obviously disinterested secretary and a now overwhelmed Chuunin.
' I know that Naruto is supposed to be close to the Sandaime. I should have suspected that they would meet soon.'
She watched silently, remaining aloof from the conversation that followed when they were escorted into the Hokage's office. Naruto was outright thrilled, bouncing around with all the energy that a four-year old jinchuuriki could muster (and that was an impressive amount of energy, to be frank).
"And what do you think, Aiko-chan?" the old man attempted to bring her into the conversation.
Aiko blinked, taking a moment to steady herself. What did she think?
' I think that you're pathetic for taking advantage of a little boy's loneliness and culturally homogenous hero worship of you in order to coerce him into agreeing to a military career years before he's mentally and emotionally capable of making that decision.'
Nope, that probably wasn't the best idea.
' No, don't sign me up for shinobi training. I don't want to be a ninja. It seems scary. I'm not scared of dying at all because everyone does, but I don't see any reason to get involved in a violent caste system and kill people for a living.'
She was going to be a ninja whether she wanted to be or not. She was four years old; no one was going to let her make her own decisions, and it would be a waste not to at least attempt to put the fourth Hokage's kids through the shinobi Academy.
In the end, she just shrugged and regarded the old man with cool turquoise eyes.
He seemed fairly off-put by her lackluster reaction, but gracefully enough turned back to Naruto. The blonde was an eager conversationalist, if not a particularly creative or clever one.
Aiko wasn't surprised to find herself bundled off to the shinobi academy when a new term started a month later. She was a bit surprised to find out that the other first year students were six years old, but a moment's thought wrapped up that mystery. The term lengths meant that their classmates would graduate at the age of twelve, which fit with what she remembered. Theoretically she and Naruto should probably graduate at ten, then, except that it seemed likely that the Academy was actually being used as a babysitter in their case and not a device to crank out soldiers even earlier than usual.
Putting the twins in the Academy meant that she and Naruto were under a trained and trusted shinobi's attention for the bulk of the day. It probably freed up their ANBU stalker for more important work. Like shaving cats, or going home and licking their mirrors. Whatever. The point was that it had to be mind-numbingly dull to stare at toddlers all day.
Accordingly, Aiko didn't trust the kind-faced woman who was their first teacher at the Academy. She didn't understand the type of person who would agree to spend so much time around so many children that weren't hers: or at least, do so in order to teach them to kill. It was hard for Aiko to dismiss that as a strongly developed maternal instinct, assuming as she did that it would be damn hard to teach class after class of cannon fodder when the majority of them died a year after graduation. But Katade-sensei didn't seem to be the ice-old that Aiko thought was necessary to survive that type of heartbreak.
'There's something wrong with her. She would be doing field work if there wasn't.'
Even if Katade-sensei hadn't kept a wide berth from the twins, Aikowouldn't have had a thing to do with her.
At least Naruto was easy to figure out, although she admittedly had an advantage. He had simple desires, as did the other carpet sharks in the Academy class. He wanted to play (and couldn't understand why no one played with him after they had talked with their parents) and he wanted to eat too much sugar (until he threw up, at which point he would try again) and he most certainly did not want to do his homework because it was legitimately too hard for him and he cried when he failed all his assignments.
Aiko spent two years with the smiling woman who taught very small children, and didn't understand her any more at the end than she had when she was four. Katade-sensei was a blank wall, even if her voice was kind.
Maybe it was a shinobi thing? Or maybe… Aiko frowned, rubbing her fingers against her copper-toned hair, ignoring the fact that it was slightly grubby from the outdoor part of class where they had practiced falls and done agility work. Maybe it was just something that some people could turn on and off. A figurative mask that kept the outside world from peeking underneath to what really mattered.
Funny that it took her so long to figure out that she had anything in common with sensei. Aiko's secrets were probably much bigger. She stuck by that opinion, even when Katade-sensei became increasingly thin, grey, and harried. One day she simply never returned to class.
She eyed the nervous young man who had replaced Katade-sensei with tired resignation.
"Ohayo, class," he forced out with a pathetic imitation of confidence. The following smile looked more than a bit queasy. "I'll be your teacher from now on. My name is Umino Iruka. Any questions?"
He fielded several queries about his hair, where sensei was, and if he had a girlfriend, before Iruka-sensei called on Aiko. His expression was guarded and a bit uncomfortable. She thought she knew why—she was sitting right next to Naruto. Iruka-sensei probably didn't know what to think.
"Is Katade-sensei dead?"
Aiko knew her blunt guess was true by the way that Iruka gaped at her. She settled back in her chair and shook her head. "Never mind," she said mildly, without care for the way that Hyuuga Neji's eyes narrowed at her or that an Akimichi girl with rosy cheeks looked about to burst into tears.
She didn't pay much attention to the rest of proceedings—roll call, syllabus, and other dull minutia. Her curiosity was satisfied.
'She's not really real anyways.'
"Hey," Naruto hissed, leaning over the space between them. The girl in front swiveled to give them both a dirty look, obviously confused by her inability to understand what the boy was saying.
Aiko gave the girl a dry, steady look until she turned around. Then she blinked at her otouto and replied likewise, in English. "What's up?"
"Why did you ask that?" Naruto's brow furrowed. "and do you think Iruka-sensei will be nicer than the last lady?"
"De- You there!" Iruka-sensei barked, sounding firm and scary for the first time. It only took him a moment to stride on long legs to the back of the classroom where the Uzumaki twins were sitting. He had eyes only for Naruto—angry brown eyes, specifically, and tense hands that clapped down on Naruto's desk as the teenager loomed. "Why would you think it was acceptable to talk in my classroom?"
Naruto's big blue eyes wavered in shock and hurt as he sank back into his chair, fighting off tears. Aiko inhaled steadily through her nose, gritted her jaw together painfully, and stared at Iruka-sensei with feelings that were less than pleasant. If he'd been asked to describe her eyes at the moment, he might have said that she looked like she thought he was trash on her shoe. It didn't matter. He wasn't looking at her.
"I would say not," Aiko said steadily into the sudden hush as Iruka glowered, waiting for an answer from a small child. She hadn't pegged him for a bully. It was a shame.
She ignored the bout of confused expressions at the use of a foreign language and carefully got out her favorite pencil, turning to the middle of her notebook and going back to practicing kanji. She didn't feel any need to clarify or explain herself. English was her first language, after all, and she had made it Naruto's as well. It wasn't as if anyone else had been lining up to teach him language skills and she had needed someone to talk to.
A strange person was vying for that, actually. When the new term had rolled around with a new class of six-year-olds, a great deal of them had been very familiar. Chibi Sasuke was the oddest of all, because he was such a friendly little thing.
If she didn't know better, she would say that he'd been pressured by his parents to befriend them. Unfortunately for the possibility of Uchiha-Uzumaki friendship, the brunet had shown Naruto up in aerial weaponry skills and classroom knowledge from the first week. Naruto was too embarrassed, jealous and resentful to accept Sasuke's clumsy overtures, and Sasuke was too guileless to understand that he would have better results if he made sure not to make Naruto feel inadequate.
It took him a while to attempt approaching her. Perhaps it was some little-boy instinct to try other boys before girls. It could just as easily have been that Aiko wasn't particularly approachable.
"Uzumaki-san?"
Itty bitty Sasuke had a bit of a lisp, she noted. That was unfairly cute.
"Would you like to share my bento?" He held the box out awkwardly, over-large baby eyes fixed studiously on the point between her eyes, as if he'd been taught to make eye contact was wasn't comfortable with it yet. "My mom makes a lot, and I just…" Sasuke trailed off, and dug at the floor with a sandal despite his attempts to look grownup.
"Thank you for the offer. I have my own lunch, though."
She left him standing there mildly flustered and pink, as if he didn't have a set response for someone being that rude. Yeah, he was an adorable kid, but he was just that: a kid. Naruto was all the kid she needed in her life, thank you very much. She wasn't a babysitter and it sounded absolutely exhausting to dumb herself down to a child's level in personal interactions as well as those she already had to perform for adults.
Despite her resolution to stay away, her eyes drifted over to Sasuke while Naruto was still scrambling to find his left shoe so they could leave for the day. The brunet all but ran to a woman in a gorgeous kimono with long dark hair whipping gently in the wind. Aiko watched for longer than was probably polite, but she never saw the woman who was probably Sasuke's mother turn around enough to get a clear look at her face.
Pity. She seemed oddly familiar. Maybe it was her hair—it was unfairly beautiful.