—————
Two days.
Kim sat on the low wall outside the Academy and stared at his hands. He turned them over, palms up, palms down, flexing the fingers like a man inspecting a tool he'd owned for years and suddenly found sharper.
Two days of holding the synchronization jutsu through six class periods, two sparring sessions, and one profoundly awkward group exercise where Iruka had made them practice three-man formations and Kim had been sandwiched between Sasuke and Shino for forty minutes.
The results were—
Absurd. The results are absurd.
His chakra reserves had increased by roughly half. Not a subtle shift, not the kind of incremental gain you got from months of diligent training. Half. He'd tested it last night in his room, cycling through every exercise he knew until his coils ached, and he'd lasted nearly twice as long as he had three days ago. His transformation jutsu was clean enough to fool a mirror. His body replacement was sharp — no lurch, no lag, just here and then there. His body flicker covered eight meters in a burst that felt almost elegant.
He'd sparred with Sasuke yesterday.
Not by choice — Iruka had paired them, and Kim had considered feigning a stomach illness before deciding that avoidance was its own kind of weakness. So he'd stepped into the ring and fought the number one student in the class.
It had been close.
Close. Against Sasuke Uchiha, who trained like breathing was optional and had a responsibility on his shoulder the size of the Hokage Monument. Kim had matched him in speed, nearly matched him in technique, and only lost because Sasuke had a viciousness in close combat that couldn't be learned from resonance — it had to be grown, in dark soil, watered with something Kim didn't want to think about too carefully.
But close. Two days ago he'd have been knocked flat in thirty seconds.
Kim pressed his thumb into the center of his palm. Hard.
It's plateauing.
He'd felt it this morning. The synchronization was still working — still humming along beneath his awareness, his chakra still adjusting to the ambient field — but the rate of improvement had dropped. Yesterday's gains were half of the first day's. This morning's session felt like diminishing returns graphed in real time.
The math was straightforward, once he stopped being drunk on his own progress long enough to think about it. His chakra was approaching equilibrium with his classmates. The synchronization worked by resonating with the people around him — matching frequencies, absorbing efficiency. But if he was already at their level, there was nothing left to absorb. You couldn't tune a fork higher than the note it was matching.
He needed stronger sources.
Chunin. Jonin. People whose chakra burned brighter and deeper than a room full of students.
Or one very specific loud boy with a fox in his basement. But I need to be careful with that one.
Kim hopped off the wall and started walking toward the classroom. The morning was cool, the streets quiet — most students were already inside. He was early again. Not because he was eager, but because the extra minutes of synchronization before class filled mattered even on the school walls.
"Kim."
He stopped. Iruka-sensei was standing at the intersection of the main hallway and the corridor that led to the administrative wing. He was wearing his mission kit — the flak jacket cinched tighter than usual, weapons pouch re-positioned for quick access rather than classroom comfort. His hitai-ate was tied with that particular firmness that said I'm going somewhere I might need to move fast.
"Iruka-sensei."
"Good timing." Iruka shifted the strap of his pack. There was a tension around his eyes — not anxiety, exactly, but the focused calm of a professional switching modes. "I've been called out. Mission came in this morning. I need you to let the class know — self-study for the rest of the day. You're usually one of the first in, so…"
"I'll tell them," Kim said. "Anything specific you want them to work on?"
"Chapter fourteen review. Tactical formations." Iruka was already half-turning toward the exit. "And make sure Naruto doesn't set anything on fire."
"No promises."
That earned a brief smile — the reflexive kind, already fading as Iruka's mind shifted to wherever he was going and what he'd have to do when he got there. He nodded once and was gone, moving down the corridor with the ground-eating stride of someone who'd been a field ninja before he'd been a teacher.
Kim watched him go.
Then he turned toward the classroom.
His hand was on the door. The hallway was empty. Through the wood, he could hear the muffled sounds of early arrivals — chairs scraping, Kiba's voice rising above the murmur, Ino saying something pointed in Sakura's direction.
The idea arrived fully formed, like a kunai embedding itself in a target.
Kim's hand stopped on the door.
Self-study. Whole day. No teacher.
He considered it.
An entire day where I could be within five meters of every student in this class, actively engaged with their chakra, pushing them to use techniques, watching their output at close range—
He considered it more.
As myself? No. A student telling other students what to do. That's a fight waiting to happen. Sasuke wouldn't listen. Sakura would question. Shikamaru would see through it in minutes.
But a teacher…
The grin crept across his face slowly. He could feel it happening and didn't try to stop it.
You're going to regret this.
Probably.
It's going to be fun, though.
He stepped back from the door. Found the blind spot in the hallway — the corner near the supply closet where the angle blocked the line of sight from both directions. Took a breath. Formed the signs.
The transformation settled over him like a coat. Iruka's body — taller, broader, the weight distributed differently. The scar across the nose. The ponytail. The particular way Iruka held his shoulders: straight but not rigid, the posture of a man who wanted to be approachable but could crack down if he had to.
Kim had spent two days synchronized with Iruka. He knew the man's chakra signature like he knew the smell of his mother's kitchen. The transformation wasn't just visual — it was informed. The way Iruka shifted his weight to the left when standing, the micro-expressions, the cadence of his breathing.
He checked himself. Ran his hands down the flak jacket, adjusted the hitai-ate. Felt the transformation holding — solid, crisp, none of the telltale shimmer at the edges.
Ten percent improvement on day one. Now this would've been impossible.
He opened the door.
—————
"Morning," he said, and his voice was Iruka's voice — the warm baritone that could shift from encouragement to authority in half a syllable. "Settle in. We've got a full day."
The classroom noise dampened. Students found their seats with the Pavlovian response of children trained by two years of routine. Kim — Iruka — walked to the front desk, set down the papers he didn't have (he'd grabbed a stack of blank sheets from the supp closet; it was all about the prop), and surveyed the room.
Twenty-three faces. He knew elyvery one of them.
Not just their names — he'd known those before. Now he knew their frequencies. Two days of synchronization had mapped the chakra landscape of this classroom onto his awareness with a clarity that surprised even him. He knew who was efficient and who was wasteful. Who had power but no control. Who had control but no power. Who was coasting. Who was struggling. Who was hiding.
No teacher could know that. Not even Iruka, who was good — genuinely good, the kind of teacher who noticed when a student was off and cared enough to ask. But Iruka observed from the outside. Kim had been inside. Resonating. Feeling the shape of every student's chakra from within his own coils.
Let's see what I can do with that.
"Chapter fourteen," he announced, picking up the chalk. "Tactical formations. But we're not just reading today. We're applying."
A collective groan. Kim suppressed a smile. Exactly the reaction Iruka would get.
"Pair up. Taijutsu fundamentals, then we're taking it outside for formation drills. I want to see what you've actually retained versus what you've been pretending to understand."
He moved through the room as they paired off, and this was where the synchronization paid dividends in ways he hadn't fully anticipated.
He stopped beside Shikamaru, who was already sliding into his napping position. "Nara."
"Mm."
"Your chakra efficiency is the best in this class." Kim said it quietly, leaning down, Iruka's voice pitched for a private conversation. "But you compensate for your low reserves by minimizing output. That works until it doesn't. What happens when you need sustained jutsu in the field?"
Shikamaru's eyes opened. Not all the way — that would've been an admission of interest — but enough. "…Troublesome."
"Work on your shadow technique's duration today. Not range. Duration. You can stretch it far enough. You can't hold it long enough." Kim moved on before Shikamaru could formulate a response, but he caught the Nara boy sitting up slightly straighter behind him.
Hinata was paired with Kiba, which was a mismatch that Iruka usually avoided. Kim made a point of not changing it.
"Hyuga," he said, and Hinata flinched — she always flinched, a full-body startle that was painful to watch. "Your form is technically perfect. Better than anyone else here, and that includes Sasuke." He said the last part at normal volume, and felt the room's attention shift. Sasuke didn't react visibly, which was itself a reaction. "But you hesitate on every third strike. You pull your palm back. Why?"
Hinata's face went through three shades of red. "I… I don't want to…"
"Hurt someone." Kim nodded. Iruka's face. Iruka's understanding expression. Kim's diagnosis. "That's a problem you need to solve before it gets you killed. Kiba can take it. Hit him for real today."
Kiba grinned, showing canines. "Yeah, bring it, Hinata!"
Akamaru barked.
Kim moved through the class methodically. Each student got something specific — not generic advice, not textbook corrections, but precise, targeted observations that came from feeling their chakra signatures from the inside.
Choji: "You anchor too hard. Your stance is a fortress, but a fortress doesn't chase. Work on transitioning from defense to pursuit."
Ino: "Your chakra control is fine for your family techniques, but you're neglecting your physical base. Jutsu won't save you if someone closes distance before you can form signs."
Sakura: "Your control is the best in this class. Period." He watched her eyes widen, the flush of pride. "Your reserves are the worst. I want you running laps between drills. Not to punish you. To build capacity."
Sasuke looked up when Kim stopped beside his desk. Those dark eyes — flat, assessing, giving nothing. Kim met them with Iruka's face and his own knowledge.
"Your fire jutsu is advanced for your age. Your taijutsu is excellent. You already know that." Kim paused. "Your teamwork is non-existent, and in the field, that will get your squad killed before your skills can save them. Pair with Naruto today."
The silence that followed was the kind that had texture.
"…With the dead last?" Sasuke's voice could have frosted glass.
"With the student who has the most to learn from you, and who you have the most to learn from. Whether you see it that way is your problem."
Kim walked away and absolutely did not look at Naruto's face, because if he saw the expression there — the mix of outrage and hope and confusion — he would break character and laugh and blow the entire thing.
—————
He ran three full class sessions. Three hours of drills, formations, sparring, and targeted instruction that left twenty-three Academy students more exhausted and more improved than any single day of Iruka's regular curriculum had managed.
Kim didn't delude himself about why. It wasn't because he was a better teacher than Iruka — he wasn't. Iruka had years of experience, genuine pedagogical skill, and a patience that Kim could only approximate. What Kim had was information. Two days of synchronization had given him a map of every student's strengths and weaknesses drawn in chakra rather than observation, and he'd spent that map like currency.
Also — and this was the part he hadn't planned but probably should have predicted — three hours of actively engaging with twenty-three chakra signatures at close range, pushing each one to its limits, had been the most intense synchronization session he'd ever experienced. His coils were singing. His reserves felt deeper than they had this morning, and more importantly, the quality of his chakra felt different. Refined. Like metal that had been through one more fold.
Plateau's still there. But I just pushed it back by a few days
He dismissed the class at the end of third period. "Self-study for the rest of the day. I have other duties." He held the transformation until he'd cleared the corridor, ducked into the supply closet, and released it in the dark among stacked training mats and dusty anatomical charts.
His own face stared back at him from the reflection in a glass cabinet door. Eleven years old. Thin scar on the cheek. Hair that needed cutting. Eyes that looked, if he was being honest, more tired than an eleven-year-old's had any right to be.
Three hours as someone else. That takes more out of you than you'd think.
He stretched his neck, cracked his knuckles, and walked outside into the afternoon sun like a boy who'd spent the day napping.
—————
Naruto was sitting on the river wall, feet dangling, kicking his heels against the stone with a rhythm that was probably meant to be music but sounded more like a woodpecker having a seizure.
"KIM! Over here! I caught— well, I didn't catch anything yet, but I SAW one, and it was—"
"Huge. Yes. They always are." Kim dropped down beside him and took the spare rod that Naruto had, for once, remembered to bring. "How was the rest of class?"
"Iruka-sensei was weird today." Naruto squinted at the water. "Like, good weird. He actually made sense for once. And he made me spar with Sasuke!"
"How'd that go?"
"I almost hit him twice."
"Almost."
"That's two more almosts than last week!" Naruto's grin was blinding. Then it dimmed slightly, shifting into something more uncertain. "He, uh. Iruka-sensei said something. About me and Sasuke learning from each other." A pause. "You think that's real? Like, you think Sasuke could learn something from me?"
Kim cast his line. Watched the float settle on the water's surface, concentric rings spreading outward and dissolving. He thought about how to answer honestly without saying too much.
"Yeah," he said. "I think he could."
Naruto didn't respond immediately. When Kim glanced sideways, the boy was staring at the water with an expression that was, for once, completely still.
Then it broke, because Naruto's face wasn't built for stillness. "Hey, so, about the Sakura thing—"
"The manliness campaign."
"Yeah! So yesterday I did the thing you said, where I carried all the training equipment back to the shed by myself without complaining—"
"Revolutionary."
"—and she looked at me. Like, actually looked. Not the angry look. A different look."
Kim reeled in slightly, adjusting the tension. "What kind of look?"
"Like…" Naruto screwed up his face in concentration. "Like she was confused? But not mad-confused. More like… 'huh'-confused."
"That's progress." Kim meant it, actually. "Listen. The flashy stuff — the challenges, the showing off — that gets attention. But attention isn't the same as respect. You want Sakura to respect you."
"How?"
"Be reliable." Kim watched the float bob. "Show up when you say you will. Follow through on things. If you tell someone you'll do something, do it. Every time. No excuses."
"That's… boring."
"It's the most attractive thing in the world. Trust me."
"You read that in your weird books?"
"I read that in life." Kim paused. Tugged the line experimentally. "My dad was a chunin. Average guy. Nothing flashy. But when he said he'd be somewhere, he was there. When he said he'd do something, it got done. My mom married him because she knew — every single day — that he meant what he said."
The words came out before he'd decided to say them. He felt the scar on his cheek tighten — not physically, but in the way it sometimes did when he mentioned his father, like the skin remembered something the mind had filed away.
Naruto was quiet for a moment. Then: "Your dad sounds cool."
"He was alright."
They fished in silence for a while. The river moved at the pace rivers always moved — indifferent to ninja villages and dead fathers and boys who were trying to find loopholes in the architecture of their own limitations.
Naruto's float dipped.
"FISH! FISH FISH FISH—"
"Don't yank— Naruto, don't—"
He yanked. The rod bent. The water erupted. And somehow, against every principle of technique and patience and basic physics, Naruto hauled a river bass out of the water that was, genuinely, impressively large. It thrashed in the air, catching the light, scales flashing silver and green.
"I GOT IT! I GOT IT! DID YOU SEE—"
"I saw." Kim was laughing. He couldn't help it. "I saw, you maniac."
They built a fire on the bank. Kim cleaned the fish — he'd learned from his mother, who'd learned from his father, who'd apparently learned from a mission in the Land of Rivers where they'd had nothing to eat for three days and a jonin-sensei who believed hunger was the best cooking instructor. The knife work was precise. He separated the fillets, salted them from the small pouch he kept in his hip bag (because cold food was a sin and unprepared food was a tragedy), and laid them on the flat stones ringing the fire.
The smell hit the air and both of them went quiet with anticipation.
They ate with their fingers, burning their tongues, making sounds that were probably inappropriate for a public riverbank. The fish was good. Not restaurant good — better. The kind of good that only happened when you were eleven and tired and sitting by a river with someone who was, against all probability, becoming a genuine friend.
"Kim."
"Mm."
"Thanks for, like." Naruto wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Teaching me stuff. The manliness stuff. The being-reliable stuff. Nobody really… I mean, Iruka-sensei tries, but he's a teacher, you know? It's different."
Kim looked at the fire. A piece of wood cracked and sent sparks spiraling upward.
"Don't mention it," he said.
Literally. Don't mention it. I have a reputation to maintain.
—————
Home was a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a building that the Hokage's housing authority described as "modest" and Kim described as "small." It smelled like antiseptic and lavender — his mother's two primary scents, in order of professional and personal application.
Karen was in the living room.
She was nine, small for her age, with the particular intensity of a child who had been adopted into a family of ninja and decided early that she would keep up or die trying. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail that was already coming loose, and she was running through the basic kata with the kind of grim focus that Kim recognized because he saw it in his own mirror.
"Your back foot," he said from the doorway.
Karen didn't startle. She'd heard him come in — good ears, always had them. "What about it?"
"You're turning it out. Ten degrees, maybe fifteen." He walked over, knelt, and tapped the outside of her ankle. "Here. Feel that? When you pivot, you're losing power because the rotation starts from a compromised base. Keep the foot straight. Let the turn come from the hip."
She adjusted. Tried the kata again. The difference was subtle but real — the strike at the end had a crispness it had lacked before.
"Better."
"I know." She said it without smugness — just acknowledgment. She was like that. Kim liked that about her.
He stood, stretched, and considered the evening. Mom was on shift. That meant dinner was his responsibility, which meant rice, grilled vegetables, and whatever protein he could assemble from the refrigerator's increasingly creative interpretation of "stocked."
"Where's Mina?"
"Room. Drawing."
"After dinner, I want you to teach her the first three kata."
Karen turned to look at him. Her expression was pure skepticism distilled into a nine-year-old's face. "She's six."
"And you're nine, and I'm teaching you. The best way to understand a technique is to teach it to someone else. You'll find your own gaps when you try to explain them." He headed toward the kitchen, then paused. "Also, she looks up to you. Let her."
He didn't wait for the response. He could feel Karen processing it behind him — the slight shift in her breathing, the way she went still when she was thinking. She'd do it. She was stubborn, but she was smart enough to recognize good advice even when it came from her eleven-year-old brother who she privately suspected was weirder than he let on.
She's not wrong.
—————
Dinner was rice with soy-glazed vegetables and egg. Not inspired, but hot, and in Kim's household, hot food was a moral imperative. He'd tried to explain this to Naruto once — the fundamental wrongness of cold food, the way it represented a failure of planning and self-respect — and Naruto had looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language, which, coming from a boy who ate room-temperature cup ramen for breakfast, tracked.
Mina appeared for dinner with marker stains on her fingers and a drawing of what she claimed was a cat but what Kim privately assessed as either a very abstract horse or a theological statement about the nature of chaos.
"It's beautiful," he told her.
"It's a cat."
"A beautiful cat."
She beamed. Six years old, and every compliment landed like sunlight. Kim sometimes worried about that — about how open she was, how soft in a world that didn't reward softness. Then he reminded himself that she was six, and softness at six was appropriate, and it was his job to make sure she could afford to stay that way for as long as possible.
Karen taught Mina the first kata after dinner. Kim washed the dishes and listened. Karen was, predictably, a terrible teacher — too impatient, too precise, correcting errors before Mina had finished making them. But Mina was laughing, and Karen was trying, and somewhere in the gap between those two things, learning was happening.
Not bad, Karen. Not bad at all.
—————
The apartment had a narrow balcony that overlooked the village. It wasn't much — barely wide enough for one person to stand without pressing against the railing — but it faced east, and on clear nights, you could see the stars above the treeline.
Kim stood there after the girls were in bed. The dishes were done. The apartment was quiet. His mother wouldn't be home until after midnight — double shift at the hospital, the kind that left her moving through the apartment like a ghost the next morning, smelling of antiseptic and exhaustion and the particular sadness of someone who'd lost patients and couldn't talk about it.
He looked up.
The stars were out. Dense, bright, scattered across the sky like — like something. He wasn't good at poetry. His father had been better at that. His father had stood on this same balcony, probably, and looked at these same stars, and thought thoughts that were more graceful than the ones Kim was thinking now.
Chakra reserves up fifty percent. Techniques at the top of the class. Plateau approaching. Need stronger sources. Need to graduate. Need to get assigned to a team with a jonin-sensei who'll be in range for hours every day—
He stopped.
Closed his eyes.
Stop calculating. Just for a minute. Stop.
The night air was cool. Not cold — Kim hated cold — but cool in the way that meant summer was still holding on by its fingernails. Somewhere below, a dog barked. Somewhere further, a light was on in the Hokage's tower, because the old man never seemed to sleep.
Kim thought about his mother, alone in the hospital, hands glowing green over someone's open wound. He thought about Karen, fierce and sharp and trying so hard to belong. He thought about Mina, who drew cats that looked like horses and laughed when the wind blew her hair.
He thought about his father, who had been average, and reliable, and dead.
His fist tightened on the railing.
I'm going to protect this. All of it. Every piece.
I'm going to get strong enough that nobody in this family has to be afraid.
And—
He opened his eyes. Looked at the stars again.
—I'm going to find a good girl to marry.
The thought arrived with such earnest sincerity that he almost laughed at himself. Almost. But it settled into his chest with a weight that felt important — not urgent, not desperate, but true. The kind of promise that had nothing to do with ninja ranks or chakra reserves or survival mathematics.
The kind of promise his father would have made.
Kim stood on the balcony for a while longer. The stars didn't move. The village breathed around him — quiet, alive, fragile in ways that most of its inhabitants didn't know and wouldn't believe if told.
He went inside, checked on the girls — Karen sprawled diagonal across her futon, Mina curled tight with her marker-stained fingers tucked under her chin — and lay down on his own bed in the dark.
Tomorrow. Synchronize through all six periods. Push the plateau. Figure out how to get near a chunin.
And maybe read one chapter of Icha Icha before sleeping.
Just one.
He reached under his mattress, found the book by touch, and cracked it open to where he'd dog-eared the page.
Just one chapter.
It was three chapters later when he finally fell asleep, the book open on his chest, the scar on his cheek pale in the moonlight, a faint smile still on his face.