—————
A week could change a lot.
Kim had learned this when he was seven — the week his father left for a mission and didn't come back. Seven days. Monday you have a father who chews grass on the porch and tells you the world is simple. Sunday you have a folded flag and a name on a stone and a mother who smiles with everything except her eyes.
A week could change a lot.
This week, Kim had beaten Sasuke Uchiha in a three-round taijutsu match, and the world — the small, insular, profoundly dramatic world of the Academy's graduating class — had rearranged itself around that fact like iron filings snapping to a new magnet.
He felt it the moment he walked through the classroom door.
The conversations didn't stop — that would have been too obvious, and Academy students were ninja-in-training, which meant they had just enough social awareness to be subtle about their staring. But the rhythm changed. Voices dipped. Heads turned fifteen degrees instead of ninety. Eyes tracked him from desk to door to seat with the particular quality of attention that said: that one. Watch that one.
This is uncomfortable.
Kim walked to his seat with the same unhurried pace he always used. Same posture. Same face. He did not acknowledge the attention because acknowledging it would mean engaging with it, and engaging with it would mean accepting a role he hadn't auditioned for.
King. They're looking at me like I'm the new king.
I'm eleven. I don't want to be king. I want to go fishing and read my book and figure out how to not die in a world war.
He sat down. Dropped his bag. Started to settle into his usual position — elbows on desk, head on forearms, the synchronization sign forming beneath the table where nobody could—
"Rematch."
Kim closed his eyes. Not in meditation. In patience.
Sasuke was standing at the end of his row. Arms crossed. Jaw set. The Uchiha had positioned himself so that Kim would have to either look up at him or deliberately refuse to — and either way, the power dynamic of the interaction was on display for the entire room.
Clever. He's learning. Just not the right lessons.
Kim opened one eye. "Good morning to you too, Sasuke."
"Today. After second period. Three rounds."
"No."
The word landed in the classroom like a stone in a pond. Ripples of silence spread outward. Someone — Kiba, probably — made a sound that might have been a suppressed bark of surprise.
Sasuke's eyes narrowed. Not quite the Sharingan-activation level of intensity, but somewhere in the neighborhood. "Why."
It wasn't a question. It was a demand shaped like a question, stripped of the inflection that would have made it polite. Kim recognized the tone — he'd heard it in the dreams, in fragments. The voice of a boy who had lost everything and decided that strength was the only currency worth holding.
Kim sat up. Slowly. He met Sasuke's gaze with the particular calm of someone who had spent the last week feeling this boy's chakra signature from the inside and understood, on a level that Sasuke himself probably didn't, exactly where the cracks were.
"Your taijutsu is still lacking," Kim said. "Specifically your footwork."
The silence changed texture. It went from surprised to fascinated. Twenty-two students leaned forward by imperceptible degrees.
"My footwork," Sasuke repeated. Flat.
"You lead with the right. Every combination. You disguise it well — the feints are good, the upper body sells it — but the pivot comes from the same foot every time. I caught it in round two. Exploited it in round three." Kim tilted his head slightly. "Fix that. Then ask me again."
For three seconds, nobody breathed.
Sasuke's jaw worked. Something moved behind his eyes — not anger, or not only anger. Processing. The particular torment of a prodigy being told, in front of witnesses, that he had a flaw. And worse: that the flaw was specific enough to be real.
"…Fine."
He turned and walked back to his seat. His stride was controlled, measured, and — Kim noticed with a small, private satisfaction — his right foot landed first.
He's already thinking about it. Good.
Kim lowered his head back onto his arms. Beneath the table, his fingers completed the sign.
Now leave me alone. I have resonating to do.
—————
"Psst. Kim. Kim."
A whisper from the left. Hot breath and the unmistakable scent of— Kim sniffed. Miso broth and pork fat. Breakfast ramen. Of course.
"Naruto."
"What did you eat?"
Kim turned his head just enough to see Naruto's face, which was approximately four inches away and wearing an expression of profound conspiracy. The boy had his hand cupped around his mouth as if the physical gesture of secrecy could compensate for the fact that he was constitutionally incapable of whispering below forty decibels.
"What?"
"To get this good. You went from, like, normal to—" Naruto made an upward gesture with both hands that apparently represented exponential improvement. "— whoosh. In a week. You beat Sasuke. That doesn't just happen. So what'd you eat? Is it a special food? Is it a pill? My neighbor has these pills but they make you—"
"Naruto."
"—smell weird and I don't think they're actually medicine, I think he just—"
"Naruto."
"What?"
Kim held a straight face for precisely two seconds. Then he raised one hand and pointed, with the solemnity of a sage dispensing ancient wisdom, in the general direction of downtown Konoha.
Toward Ichiraku Ramen.
Naruto's eyes went wide.
"I knew it."
"The miso pork. Triple portion. Every morning." Kim's voice was grave. "The secret ingredient is… believe it or not… the broth."
"THE BROTH." Naruto slammed his palm on the desk. Several heads turned. "I've been saying this for years! Ramen is a power food! Nobody listens! They're all like, 'eat your vegetables, Naruto,' and 'that's too much sodium, Naruto,' and—"
"Keep your voice down."
"—I'm going to eat four bowls tonight—"
"That seems medically inadvisable."
"FIVE BOWLS."
Neither of them believed it. Kim knew Naruto knew it was a joke — the boy was oblivious about many things, but he had an instinct for when people were laughing with him versus at him, and Kim was careful to always land on the right side of that line. Naruto grinned — the real one, the one that crinkled his eyes and made him look, for half a second, like a normal kid having a normal morning.
You deserve more of those moments than you get.
Kim looked away before the thought could settle too deep.
—————
Iruka arrived with his papers and his chalk and his particular brand of earnest authority, and the class shifted into its routine. Kim's fingers held the sign. The synchronization hummed.
But today, before the lesson started, Iruka paused at the front of the room. He set his materials down. Placed both hands flat on the desk. And he looked at them — all of them, the full sweep, the way a man looks at something he's built when he realizes it's actually standing.
"I want to say something before we begin."
The class went quiet. Not the quiet of boredom. The quiet of attention.
"This past week," Iruka said, "I've seen more improvement in this class than in the entire previous semester. Every single one of you." His eyes moved across the rows. They paused — briefly, almost imperceptibly — on Naruto. On Hinata. On Shikamaru. On the students who had always been afterthoughts in the ranking and who had, over the past seven days, started closing gaps they'd been told were permanent. "Your taijutsu is sharper. Your technique execution is cleaner. Your focus is better."
He straightened. A small smile — not the teaching smile, the one he performed for encouragement. A real one.
"I don't know what changed. Maybe it's the graduation deadline getting closer. Maybe it's competition." His gaze flicked to Kim and Sasuke, and the smile tugged wider. "Whatever it is, I'm proud of you. All of you. It feels like…" He searched for the words. "It feels like my effort is finally paying off."
Kim kept his head down.
Your effort. Right.
He didn't feel guilty, exactly. Iruka was a good teacher. The man's chakra was steady and warm and had been one of the most reliable sources in Kim's synchronization field for over a week. His contributions were real, even if he didn't know the mechanism.
But the improvements Iruka was taking credit for — the ones he attributed to his curriculum and his dedication and the approaching graduation — those were Kim's. The targeted advice he'd given as "Iruka" during the substitute day. The synchronization pulling every student's efficiency upward through proximity to Kim's rapidly improving baseline. The specific corrections that came from knowing each student's chakra signature like a doctor knows a patient's chart.
He thinks he did this. He's happy because he thinks he's a good teacher.
He IS a good teacher.
He's just not the reason.
Kim let it go. Filed it under "things that don't need correcting" and moved on.
—————
Time passed the way it always did during synchronization sessions — simultaneously too fast and too slow. His body sat in the classroom, half-lidded eyes pointed at the blackboard, the picture of a student who was paying just enough attention to avoid being called on. His chakra worked beneath the surface, humming, resonating, pulling.
He'd reached genin level.
He was almost certain of it. The math was rough — he had no way to formally test against the standard without taking the graduation exam or picking a fight with an actual genin — but the internal metrics were clear. His reserves had nearly doubled from his starting point. His chakra control had refined to the point where his basic techniques were virtually waste-free. His body flicker was fast enough to create genuine afterimages if he pushed it. His transformation could hold under physical contact.
Genin. Solid genin. Maybe low-to-mid, but genin.
Two weeks ago I was an above-average student hoping to survive.
The problem — because there was always a problem, because the universe was fundamentally allergic to letting Kim feel good about anything for more than thirty consecutive seconds — was the plateau.
It was back. And this time, it was real.
He'd outgrown the classroom. The aggregate chakra field of twenty-three students and one chunin instructor had lifted him to this level, but it couldn't take him further as he expected. He was the strongest signal in the room now — except for Naruto's deep, unsettling reservoir, which was less a signal and more a geological feature — and the synchronization had diminishing returns when you were already above the mean.
I need jonin-level sources. I need to be in a room with people who make me look small.
Graduation. Team assignment. Jonin-sensei.
Soon. Not soon enough.
His mind, having exhausted the productive avenues of strategic planning, did what it always did when left unattended.
It wandered.
—————
Tenten.
She was a year ahead. Graduated last cycle. Placed on a team with — if his information was correct — Hyuga Neji and Rock Lee, under Might Guy. Kim had seen her exactly six times since her graduation: twice at the weapons shop on the main road, once at the library, once at the training grounds when he'd been taking a shortcut to the river, and twice in passing on streets that he had not, technically, chosen to walk down for any particular reason.
Six times. In a village of this size, that's statistically normal.
The fact that I counted is not.
He was aware — clinically, precisely, the way he was aware of most things about himself — of why she registered. It wasn't her appearance, though there was nothing wrong with it. Brown hair, brown eyes, practical build. She dressed for function. She moved like someone who had opinions about blade geometry and would share them whether you asked or not. She was, by most metrics, a perfectly ordinary kunoichi-in-training.
But her chakra.
Kim had first caught it at the weapons shop, six months before his synchronization jutsu was anything more than a theory. He'd been browsing — procrastinating, really, avoiding a history assignment — and she'd walked in and the air had shifted. Not dramatically. Not the way it shifted around Naruto, or the dense compression of Sasuke's signature. More like—
Like walking into the kitchen and smelling Mom's cooking before you see the stove.
That was the thing. That was the embarrassing, analytically indefensible, stubbornly persistent thing.
Tenten's chakra felt like his mother's.
Not identical — his mother's signature was medical, precise, the particular warmth of a woman who spent her days putting broken things back together. Tenten's was sharper, edged with metal and intent, shaped by a different discipline. But the texture. The underlying , the way she carried herself. There was a resonance between them that Kim's synchronization sense had identified months before his conscious mind caught up.
Familiarity bias. Imprinting. The body seeking what it knows because known things are safe.
He understood the psychology. He'd read about it — not in the Icha Icha books, in the actual psychology texts he'd pulled from the library's dusty behavioral science section. Humans were drawn to the familiar. Partners who resembled parents. Environments that echoed childhood. The comfort of recognition masquerading as attraction.
It's a trick of the mind. A cognitive shortcut. The limbic system pattern-matching against stored data and producing a signal that the conscious brain interprets as—
An image surfaced: Tenten at the training grounds, pulling kunai from a target post, counting them with her lips moving silently, the afternoon light catching the edge of her jaw.
Kim's analytical framework collapsed like a house of cards in a windstorm.
—as her being really, really pretty.
He pressed his forehead against his desk.
You are a ninja. A strategically-minded, scientifically-oriented ninja with a synchronization jutsu and a plan to survive a world war. You do not have the operational bandwidth for a crush.
He thought about the way she'd tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear at the weapons shop.
You absolutely have a crush.
Wonderful.
The worst part — the truly, cosmically unfair part — was that he couldn't even justify pursuing it strategically. Tenten was a genin on an active team. She was a year older. She trained with a Hyuga and a taijutsu specialist under a jonin who wore spandex and shouted about youth. Her daily life and Kim's daily life had approximately zero points of intersection.
Also, he was eleven. And she was twelve. And the gap between eleven and twelve was, in the social physics of the Academy, roughly equivalent to the gap between the Land of Fire and the moon.
File it. Put it in the "when I'm not trying to survive" folder. Move on.
He moved on.
For about forty seconds.
Then his traitorous brain produced the image of her laughing — he'd heard her laugh once, at the training ground, at something Lee had said — and his chakra coils actually flickered, the synchronization wavering for a half-second before he clamped down on it with the focus of a man defusing an explosive tag.
This is a security vulnerability and I refuse to acknowledge it further.
He acknowledged it for the rest of the period.
—————
By the time the final class ended, Kim had spent six hours in continuous synchronization and his coils felt like wrung-out cloth. The gains were real but marginal — incremental refinements rather than the dramatic leaps of the first days. He could feel the ceiling pressing down. Genin-level. Solid. Respectable. And utterly insufficient for what the dreams told him was coming.
He walked home through streets painted gold by the late afternoon sun. The village was quiet in the way it always was at this hour — the shift change between daytime commerce and evening domesticity, when the shops were closing and the restaurants were opening and the ninja on the rooftops were switching rotations with the silent efficiency of a machine that only worked because nobody looked at it too closely.
I need access. Jonin-level chakra sources. Extended exposure.
Options.
He ran through them.
Graduate early? Possible, but it would draw attention. The dreams were vague on timelines, but he knew the graduation exam was coming — the real one, the one with Naruto and the scroll and the thing with Mizuki that he couldn't remember clearly. Disrupting that sequence felt dangerous in ways he couldn't quantify.
Find a jonin training ground and loiter? Suspicious. An Academy student hanging around jonin was the kind of thing that attracted ANBU attention, and ANBU attention was the kind of thing that attracted questions he couldn't answer.
His mother? She was chunin-level, and he'd been synchronizing with her passively for months. But she was one person, and she was home less and less as the hospital shifts got longer.
Graduation. Team assignment. That's the path. Get assigned, get a jonin-sensei, and suddenly I'm spending eight hours a day within five meters of someone three times my level.
Just need to survive until then.
He turned the corner onto his street and saw the apartment building — three stories of modest architecture and laundry lines and the kind of structural integrity that said "built quickly after the Nine-Tails attack and never quite updated." Third floor, second window from the left. Home.
Almost doubled chakra reserves. Techniques superior to every student in the class. Genin-level combat capability. Progress that would take most students a year, achieved in nine days.
He climbed the stairs.
And none of it — not a single improvement, not a single percentage point — means anything if I can't protect the people on the other side of this door.
He unlocked the apartment. The smell hit him first: lavender and soy sauce and the particular staleness of a space that had been closed all day.
Mom's shift. Right.
"Karen? Mina? I'm home."
"Kitchen!" Karen's voice. Followed by a crash. Followed by silence. Followed by: "…Everything's fine."
Kim closed his eyes. Opened them. Walked to the kitchen.
Karen was standing on a chair, reaching for the high shelf where the rice was stored. She had knocked over the oil bottle, which was now spreading across the counter in a slow, inevitable tide. Mina was sitting on the floor with her legs crossed, drawing on a piece of paper with the calm disregard of a child who had correctly assessed that the crisis was someone else's problem.
"I was making dinner," Karen said, with the dignity of a general whose battle plan had encountered unexpected terrain.
"I see that." Kim crossed to the counter, righted the oil bottle, tore a cloth from the rack, and started mopping. "New rule. If the ingredient is above your head, you wait for me."
"I could have reached it."
"You could have also cracked your skull on the counter edge, and then I'd have to explain to Mom why her daughter is in her own hospital."
Karen scowled. It was an excellent scowl — she'd been practicing. "I'm not helpless."
"No. You're short. There's a difference." He reached up, grabbed the rice, and set it on the counter. "Come on. I'll teach you the seasoning for the vegetables while I cook. And—" He glanced at Mina. "What are you drawing?"
"A fish."
He looked at the paper. It was either a fish or an abstract representation of existential dread.
"Beautiful."
"I know."
—————
Dinner was rice, grilled vegetables with the soy-ginger glaze his mother used, and leftover fish from a neighbor who had brought it that morning as thanks for Lin healing her son's broken wrist. Kim heated the fish until it steamed. Cold fish was not food. Cold fish was a failure state.
Karen sat across from him, eating with the precise, small bites of someone who was watching what he did and filing it for future replication. Mina ate with her fingers until Kim gave her a look, then switched to chopsticks with the exaggerated care of a child performing competence.
"How's the kata?" Kim asked Karen.
"Fine."
"Mina?"
"She can do the first two." Karen paused. "She keeps turning the wrong way on the third."
"Mirror it for her. Stand facing her and do it reversed. She'll match your movement."
Karen chewed. Thought. Swallowed. "That would mean I'd have to learn it reversed."
"Yes."
"That's harder."
"Yes."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, and went back to her rice.
She's going to be good. Better than me, maybe. She just needs someone to keep pushing.
After dinner, Mina went to bed early — she'd started yawning halfway through the meal, the drawing-intensity catching up with her. Kim carried her because she asked, and because she was six, and because the weight of her — light, warm, trusting — was a thing he held onto the way other people held onto jutsu.
He tucked her in. She was asleep before he finished pulling the blanket up.
Karen was in the living room, reversed-mirroring the third kata. Getting it wrong. Correcting. Getting it wrong differently. Correcting again. She didn't look up when he passed, and he didn't interrupt. Some lessons only worked if you fought through them alone.
—————
The balcony again. The stars again. The cool air that wasn't cold, because cold was wrong and Kim would not engage with it voluntarily.
He leaned on the railing and stared at nothing.
Not tonight.
Tonight, he just stood. Breathed. Felt the village settle around him like a blanket, imperfect and thin in places but there. The distant sounds of laughter from a restaurant. A cat yowling in an alley. The low, constant hum of chakra that he could feel now — always feel, since the synchronization had opened something in his awareness that he couldn't close. The village breathed chakra the way it breathed air, and Kim stood in the middle of it and let it wash over him without trying to use it.
Mom will be home in three hours. She'll check on the girls. She'll find the leftover dinner I plated for her — hot, because I'll reheat it when I hear the door. She'll eat standing up because she's too tired to sit. She'll go to bed smelling like antiseptic and lavender.
He went inside. Checked on Mina — still sleeping, still curled tight, marker stains fading on her fingers. Checked on Karen — asleep on the living room floor, mid-kata, which was so perfectly Karen that he almost took a picture before remembering that cameras were expensive and his family's budget was the opposite of that. He picked her up — heavier than Mina, but still light, still small — and carried her to her futon.
She stirred. "…Did I get it right?"
"Almost. Tomorrow."
"Mm."
She was asleep again before he set her down.
Kim went to his room. Lay on his bed. Stared at the ceiling.
His hand found the book under the mattress. He pulled it out. Opened it. Read three pages.
Then he closed it, put it back, and stared at the ceiling some more.
He rolled over. Pressed his face into the pillow. Willed sleep to come with the same intensity he applied to chakra manipulation.
Sleep, like most things in his life, took its time.
But it came.