Naruto awoke to the smell of fried eggs invading his nostrils. It was a good sign for the day to come, in more ways than one, and so it was with high spirits that he made his way down the stairs, easily stepping around the bits of trash that littered every square inch of their apartment. He was still in his nightwear and rubbing the sleep from his eyes when he stepped into the half-kitchen. He found his godfather standing there, cheerfully experimenting with how many times he could flip an egg around in the air before catching it with his frying pan. It would have been a surreal sight indeed, to anyone who was not intimately familiar with the many oddities of the legendary ninja.

“Mornin’ kiddo! Take a seat, breakfast is almost done. Tea’s on the table.”

As Naruto sat down, he took one look at the dining table and immediately knew something was off. The chopsticks were neatly arranged, not scattered around haphazardly as they usually were, the green tea was being kept warm with an actual tea warmer, and above all Jiraiya was making breakfast instead of sleeping in after coming home late the previous day.

“You’re leaving again,” Naruto said.

The egg made two more flips in the air before landing in the frying pan with a small spray of cooked fat. “I got a note this morning,” his godfather said without turning around. “There was a mission…”

“Nevermind,” Naruto looked away, staring into his plate. “It doesn’t matter. Whether it’s a mission or your books or whatever it is you do all night, the end result’s still the same.” The same as it’s always been, and the same it’ll ever be. The downward spiral of his thoughts was interrupted by a fried egg flying onto his plate with perfect accuracy, causing him to jump slightly in surprise.

“Now look here, kiddo,” Jiraiya said, as he tossed his own egg onto his plate and planted himself onto the seat opposite Naruto. “I made you a promise, and the Gallant Jiraiya never goes back on his word! I’ll teach you that technique, just… not right now. Gimme a few days, and I’ll sort things out with the Hokage, all right?”

“Yeah, sure…” Naruto poked around in his breakfast and took a bite, distractedly. The eggs were delicious, which was unfair, because Naruto felt sure they ought to taste like ash. “You know… you never told me who my parents were, but I get that it might be dangerous or whatever, so that’s fine. I tell everyone that I’m the cousin of the First Hokage’s wife Uzumaki Mito, twice removed, and that’s why you’re taking care of me. It’s just… whoever they were, you musta cared about them at least a little bit, to spend time on me when you’d clearly rather do something else. So you’d think that if the character from your books always keeps his promises, you’d take raising me to become a ninja more seriously as well.”

For a while only the clicker-clacker of chopsticks could be heard as the two ate their eggs in silence. Then Jiraiya stood up abruptly, the legs of his chair scraping along the wooden floor. He swept towards the hallway, his red coat and white hair trailing behind him. A second later the sound of moving furniture and items being thrown about could be heard coming from Jiraiya’s room. Naruto was still eating his eggs when Jiraiya strode back into the half-kitchen, carrying a massive one-meter long scroll under his arm. He slammed it onto the floor in front of Naruto.

“This is the scroll of seals,” he announced theatrically. “I borrowed it from the Hokage, but I figure you’ll make better use of it than me. It contains all of the Village’s jutsu, with descriptions and illustrations and everything, so it’ll probably do a better job of teaching you than I ever could. Just try not to damage it or lose it or something, or I’m gonna have to come up with a really good excuse to tell the Third.”

Naruto had to flare his chakra just to pick up the massive object, and even then he almost buckled under its weight. The parchment alone must have weighed a ton.

“It uh, says ‘forbidden’ right here on the top in giant letters,” Naruto remarked cautiously.

“Yeah, but forbidden means something more like ‘discouraged’ in the language of the Konoha Council,” Jiraiya said, making a ‘so-so’ gesture with his hands. “Thing is, that scroll is full of dangerous techniques that’ll kill ya, sure, but not knowing dangerous techniques is like to kill you much faster. The only thing that’s really forbidden is teaching those techniques to others without permission, ‘cause you never know in whose hands they might end up. Anyway, I marked the ones in the scroll that are least likely to blow up in yer face, so as long as you stick to those it’s probably perfectly fine.”

“Uh, okay,” he said. “Wow. Thanks, dad.” Naruto stared at the giant scroll in total awe. It was not what he wanted, not really, but it was something.

“No problem, kiddo. Okay, it’s getting late, I gotta go. Take care of yourself now, you hear me?” As the giant of a man hurried out the door, Naruto started to unfurl the ancient scroll onto the floor, pushing stray bits of egg out of the way as he did so. Skimming through the start, he quickly saw a technique that intrigued him, and he began forming the required hand seals experimentally.

The Reaper Death Seal, also known as the Dead Daemon seal: Created by Uzumaki Mito specifically to contain the Nine-tailed Daemon Fox, forming the following hand signs allows the user to release-

Jiraiya strode back into the room, cut out the page with a knife and stuffed it in his pocket in one swift motion. “Whoops, not that one.”

-o-

It was three weeks before the Academy Exams when Naruto finally found the time to follow up on his agreement with Sakura. Despite Naruto’s protestations, Sakura had insisted that he catch up on the exam material before attempting to make history by uncovering the fundamental workings of ninjutsu, and she had proven entirely insusceptible to his argument that becoming internationally famous for their research would probably get them a free pass. Naruto made his way to their meeting point humming as he went – excited for possibly the first time in his life at the prospect of spending the day in the library.

The Konoha public library was a massive building with white marble pillars and wide open doors. It was not entirely clear to Naruto why it was so massive however, as most ninjas avoided its dusty book-lined corridors like they avoided death by chakra exhaustion. After a brief search under the watchful eyes of the library staff, he found his partner in a quiet corner of the library, sitting cross-legged on a cushion in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a semi-circle of neatly-piled books and scrolls like a makeshift fort.

“Hey, Sakura-chan!” he called out as he approached her. She immediately motioned for him to quiet down, which Naruto thought was unfair, given that he had already lowered his volume to one-tenth his usual level. “We can figure out how the body-flicker technique really works,” he continued excitedly, as he planted the giant scroll at Sakura’s feet. “See, Jiraiya gave me this scroll that describes all the ninjutsu in the Village, so now we can research the technique and set up tests and… what?”

“There’s no point, Naruto.” She shook her head despondently. “I only realized it once the excitement wore off, but the body-flicker technique is one of the most basic academy techniques, taught to anyone who wants to become a genin. There’s no point in testing something that’s already been done a million times before, because we already know exactly how it works: The user casts the technique using hand signs and chakra, and it speeds up his movements so that he can cross a short distance in the time it takes to blink. That’s all there is to it.”

Naruto looked at her blankly. “But… that doesn’t explain anything at all! You’re just describing how it works, not why it works that way. We still don’t know if it’s a space-time technique or not.”

“There’s no difference between asking how something works and why it works,” she explained tiredly. There were bags under her eyes that she had not quite managed to cover up, the product of her researching advanced material and preparing for the exams at the same time. “If you know how every piece of a clock functions, you also know why it works, and if that doesn’t feel intuitive that’s only because we’re used to looking at things in terms of what use they have for us. You can argue all day whether the body-flicker technique should be called a space-time technique or not, but that’s just how we describe it. It doesn’t affect the way things are.”

“But, but… then what about the substitution technique?” he tried. “I mean, it lets you instantly swap places with something. That has to be teleportation, right?”

She shook her head again. “I read up on the existing research done by brilliant ninjas like Tsunade of the Sannin and the Second Hokage. One of the things they discovered was that the more elements you add to an explanation, the less likely it is to be true, because you have to multiply the chances together and they’re all less than one.” She reached into a pile besides her and extended the relevant scroll to Naruto. “When you look at it, the substitution-technique does the exact same thing as the body-flicker technique, except that it also moves a similarly-sized object to your position at the same time. So even without looking it up I can guess that the substitution technique just casts the body flicker technique twice, once for you and once for an object that you coated with your chakra. Then it leaves an afterimage of your body behind in the same way as the transformation technique. There’s no mystery to it.”

Naruto frowned as he accepted the scroll, staring at it as though it were singularly responsible for all his problems in life. Even without opening it, he somehow knew that it would confirm precisely what Sakura had just told him. “But that can’t be true for everything,” he protested. “There’s tons of ninja techniques that are really complicated, and I don’t think there’s a simple explanation for any of it. Like, the most powerful water technique looks like a Dragon made of water. Why a dragon? And why are the five basic elements things like fire, or air, or lightning? Why not iron or something? It makes no sense!”

She hesitated. “Maybe it’s because of the mental component to techniques, like how you need to imagine what you want to look like when casting the transformation technique, and we think of dragons as being really strong so the most powerful techniques end up looking like that?” She raised her hands to ward off Naruto’s objections. “I don’t know, I’m only guessing! But I do know that you don’t explain something by making it even more complicated. Like, we know vision works by light reflecting of things before reaching our eyes, so physical illusions like the transformation or clone technique must work by bending light as well. That’s what’s meant by the word ‘law’: You just describe in the shortest possible way how the universe already seems to behave. You don’t add anything on top.”

“Oh…” Naruto slowly felt himself deflating. He had woken up with such high hopes for the day: They were going to do research and discover the true nature of ninjutsu and they would become amazingly powerful and famous and everyone would respect them for it… but somehow things never seemed to work out the way they were supposed to. “Hold on,” he said. “How does chakra work, anyway? Could we do the same thing as with light, and come up with rules to describe how chakra behaves?”

“Hmm, maybe… Hold on, I’ve read about this.” She got onto her knees and started searching through her pile. Her hand drifted over a particularly mouldy series of scrolls, and then lashed out like a striking serpent. “Here we go… shortly after founding Konoha’s academy, Senju Tobirama proposed three universal laws of chakra. The first law, on the conservation of chakra, states that chakra can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed into energy of a different nature. The Second law says that chakra can only affect something if it’s in physical contact with it. The Third Law states that no Chakra of two different Natures may occupy the same location within Space and Time.” She frowned. “The rest is just basic academy material: You create chakra within your body by combining physical and mental energy, all living creatures have at least some chakra and you die if you ever run out, and so on… but it doesn’t say how they know this, or what any of it means.”

Naruto rubbed his hands, grinning widely. “Well, there’s only one thing to it! We’re just gonna have to do our own research and find out for ourselves. And it just so happens I got a scroll from Jiraiya that describes all the ninjutsu in the village, and he’s been teaching me a technique that I think could tell us a lot about chakra if we can just figure out how it works…” He made to form the seals for the technique, but stopped when Sakura grasped his arm.

“You can’t do your research in here,” she said, scandalized. “This is a library!”

-o-

“It’s time for sparring practice! Everyone, please team up and find yourself a partner.”

Only two weeks to go before the final academy exams, and it was the first time Mizuki-sensei told them to just start practising without any further specifications, though unlike Iruka-sensei he at least did not need to read from a scroll to do it. Naruto furtively looked around the training ground, fearing a repeat of the last time this happened, when Uchiha Sasuke humiliated him in front of everybody. It would be so much more efficient if he could just spend his time on researching Chakra, or practicing the Shadow Clone technique, instead of learning to punch people…

He had read through the other techniques in the scroll as well, to see if his time might be better spent learning something else, but the Shadow Clone technique was just so good. It created a perfect copy of you – not just a convincing illusion, but an actual second body that was just as bright as you – as well as copying anything you carried that was coated with your chakra. Sure, they disappeared when either they or the caster so much as scratched their noses, but when that happened all their unspent chakra was redistributed to the original and the rest along with their memories, and Naruto had enough chakra that even the steep casting cost and chakra drain presented no great problem. You could use them to scout, or to cast techniques, or create distractions or read books or cook food or clean your room or…

No, focus! I gotta find a partner: Sakura is with Sasuke, Kiba is with Shino, I can’t see Ino anywhere…

“Naruto-kun.” Naruto turned around to find Mizuki-sensei standing behind him, placing a hand on his shoulder and smiling congenially. “I believe Hinata-sama does not yet have a partner, and I think you two would be a good match. Why don’t you go and spar with her?”

Naruto almost asked who he was talking about, but then he remembered that he did in fact have a person in his class with that name, though the black-haired pale-skinned Hyūga girl had a habit of vanishing into the background. He found his designated partner at the very edge of the training ground, in front of a line of trees bearing wooden targets at the furthest possible distance from the rest of the class – as though it were her intention to be forgotten.

He could not help but stare at her. She was throwing shuriken with the most awkward form Naruto had ever seen: She would shift her feet, look at them intently as if trying to get their positions just right, carefully tilt her throwing arm back, and then finally launch the shuriken in absolutely any direction other than the intended target. Every time she missed she would bite her lip and glance around furtively, as if to check whether anyone saw her fail. Then she would try again, each time more hesitantly than the last.

Despite her constant glancing around, somehow she still managed to miss Naruto sauntering up to her, and she let out a small surprised yelp when he greeted her. “Hey, Hinata-chan. Whatcha doing?”

“N…Naruto-kun. I’m practicing my s-shurikenjutsu. I’m afraid I’m not very good at it…” She stared at her feet in a way that made Naruto feel like she was waiting for him to confirm or deny it. Naruto did not want to be mean, but at the same time he couldn’t honestly claim she was doing well.

“You, uh… you know we’re not doing shuriken practice, right?” he said instead. “Mizuki-sensei told us to spar together.”

“Oh… d-did he really? I p-prefer throwing shuriken, though… I think maybe, maybe it would be better if I kept doing this instead.” She ducked her head as she said it, as if contradicting a teacher was an unforgivable sin even if he was not there to hear it. Naruto was aghast. If her taijutsu was worse than her shuriken jutsu, then… his mind drew a blank. He could not imagine what that would even look like.

“Hey, you’re from that elite Hyūga clan, right?” he said cheeringly. “Don’t you guys all have this amazing bloodline that gives you perfect telescopic vision in all directions? I bet if you use your eye-technique you’ll be able to hit the target for sure!” But instead of cheering up as he had hoped, she only shrank back further. “Or… not? Yeah, maybe using the Byakugan would be unfair to the others; good thinking Hinata-chan. I mean, if the others were doing Shuriken practice and not… sparring,” he finished lamely.

It was quiet for a moment, only the constant din of the other students’ distant kicks and punches filling the silence as Naruto waited for his partner to muster the courage to speak.

“…Hyūga Hiashi-sama says that… that his heir shouldn’t need the Byakugan to hit a target,” she whispered at last. “He says that if… if I’m going to f-fail regardless, I shouldn’t s-sully the Hyūga name by using the Byakugan to do it…”

Naruto opened his mouth to reply, closed it, and then opened it again when the implications of the words ‘Hinata-sama’ and ‘heir’ finally dawned on him. “You’re lord Hiashi’s daughter?” She nodded almost imperceptibly. “Oh, wow. I, uh, I think I kinda dragged mud all over your dad’s face a while back. Well, I mean it was his statue, but now that you’ve said that I’m kinda wishing it had really been him instead.”

A small ‘eep’ sound escaped from her lips, but it was hard to tell if it was supressed mirth or embarrassment. Either way she was blushing furiously.

“Well, okay then,” he said after a while. “If that jerk’s gonna be like that, we’re just gonna have to show him, right Hinata-chan? Uh, Hinata-sama… chan?” She blinked. “Uhm, what I mean to say is, we’ll just have to train until you’re the best shuriken thrower that’s ever been! Then your dad will have no choice but to acknowledge you…” he trailed off when he saw her pained expression, and he felt a strange sense of familiarity at the sight. “Or maybe you’ve been trying to do that your whole life and you only seem to be getting worse?” She shrank back further than Naruto would have thought possible. “And I guess, everybody else keeps telling you that you can succeed if you just try hard enough, and you don’t want to disappoint them so you say you’ll do your best…” A tiny, mewling sound escaped from her lips. “Ah…”

It was a strange experience, but also somehow vaguely reassuring, to meet someone who had it worse than him. So what do I do? All ordinary attempts to help her failed, and all the best tutors in the Hyūga clan only ever made it worse, which means I gotta be clever about this… He turned to the wooden shuriken target, which really seemed like it should have been struck at least once through sheer chance alone. Then he looked at her feet, the position of which she had paid such painstaking attention to just moments ago. “Okay then,” he said at last. “Throw a shuriken.”

She looked at him in confusion, but did as she was bid. Her posture was just as rigid as it had been the last time, and the projectile went wide off the mark. She looked at him and flinched, as though expecting him to berate her. “Keep going,” he said. “But throw them faster.” She threw another, missing once more.

“Again! Faster, faster!” Her form slipped, and then started to disappear entirely as she ratcheted up the pace. “Now switch targets! Hit that one! Miss on purpose! Aim to the left! Now turn around!” She nearly fell over in her haste to comply. “There’s an enemy hiding in the bushes, take him out! Now scare that squirrel! Badger that bush! Close your eyes and throw blindly! Now turn around again! That target hates ramen, kill it! That one insulted your mother, teach it a lesson! Now-”

The shuriken struck the target dead in the centre with a loud *crack*, splinters flying in every direction. A horizontal crack appeared along the wood and the bottom half fell off entirely, hitting the soil with a muted thud.

“Yes! I knew it, I knew it!” Naruto danced around triumphantly, punching the air with whoops and cheers. “I knew there was nothing wrong with your aim, but you’re too insecure and it was making you focus on your form too much, and I knew you musta been told a thousand times that you should act more natural but that only made you more fixated on your stance, but I figured if I could just distract you until you forgot all about it your instincts would take over and…” he trailed off as he looked at Hinata. Her right arm was still outstretched and trembling, her whole body was quavering and there were tears falling from her unblinking white eyes, the veins around them pulsing and throbbing with chakra.

“…Hinata-chan? Are you…?”

She dashed off, sprinting away at a speed faster than he would have thought possible, disappearing into the distance before he could say another word.

“I didn’t… I didn’t mean to – what did I do?”

Why can’t things ever go the way they’re supposed to?

There was a polite cough behind him. “I’m afraid Hinata-sama’s mother died from her illness a few years ago. I believe the two of them were quite close… it can’t have been easy for her, growing up in that household with only her lord father and his servants to raise her.”

Naruto turned around, and found a white-haired man standing there. “Mizuki-sensei.” There was an anger bubbling up inside his stomach, reaching high enough to burn his throat like bile. “Why… why does Hinata have to be here? She shouldn’t even be a ninja!” He hadn’t been able to bring himself to say it to her, it would have sounded too mean and cruel and callous, but that did not make it any less true. “Even if I haven’t talked to her much, it’s obvious just from looking at her that she doesn’t have any killing intent at all! She doesn’t want to fight or throw shuriken or learn to kill people… so why, why on earth is she even here in the first place?”

“Because she is the Hyūga heiress.” Mizuki smiled apologetically, as if to say that he did not quite agree with it, either. “Though based on the rumours going around, it seems like her younger sister might replace her for that position, regardless. I’m afraid one simply cannot be the heir to Konoha’s greatest remaining clan without also being a great ninja in one’s own right. The clan would never accept it.”

“But that’s wrong,” said Naruto, and though he had never truly thought about it, he knew the words were true even as they poured forth. “That’s so wrong. There are millions of people in the Land of Fire: There must be tons of them who want to be a ninja, and Hinata-chan would much rather do something else. So why can’t they just switch places? And why does a leader have to be a powerful ninja, anyway? When was the last time someone like lord Hiashi ever fought anybody? It doesn’t make any sense!”

“My, those are some very precocious ideas you have there, Naruto-kun – you’d best make sure the Anbu don’t overhear you, or they’ll make you Hokage and force you to fix all the Village’s problems overnight.” Mizuki’s grey eyes twinkled with mirth, and Naruto felt his anger flare, but his teacher shushed him before he could object. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, Naruto-kun, just that I’m afraid there’s little you can do about it. The fact of the matter is that power has always run in families: Even if you’re lucky enough to be entered into the academy, most ninja never gain access to any of the truly powerful techniques. Without that secret knowledge it is essentially impossible to rise over the rank of chūnin, who are little more than expendable foot soldiers in the eyes of the Village Council… while those with powerful connections such as Hinata-sama are born into positions of influence whether they want it or not.”

Mizuki’s voice had taken on a morose tone as he spoke, the same as when he had told Naruto about the events that had left him a pariah with no hope of ever being promoted, and Naruto felt a flash of guilt stab through his heart. Here he was, complaining bitterly about the unfairness of the world when just this morning he had been given an entire scroll filled with forbidden techniques by Jiraiya of the Sannin, just because he happened to be his adopted son.

A realization occurred to him, then. The scroll! He could… and why should he not? Jiraiya had left him to his own devices, while Sakura thought that studying for the exams was more important, and Mizuki was his teacher after all. He told the man of all that had happened – of his plans with Sakura to discover the true nature of chakra, of the scroll and his own ambitions to become a great ninja like the Fourth Hokage. As the words poured forth his frustration edged its way into his voice, and he found himself talking freely about Iruka-sensei, of Sasuke and Sakura and even Jiraiya until he stopped himself at last, having said much more than he intended. “Anyway, if you help me out I’ll ask my dad to let you learn a technique from the scroll as well,” he finished hastily, since that was the deal he had originally meant to offer him.

His teacher listened to this all with attentive silence, his eyes having widened in surprise and then with increasing interest, perhaps even eagerness. “Of course I’ll be happy to help you, Naruto-kun,” he said carefully. “But if those techniques are so secret I think we should find a more private place to do it, without prying eyes… how about the abandoned forest cabin, at the edge of the village boundaries?”

Naruto nodded eagerly. “I don’t have the scroll with me right now though,” he pointed out. “And I still gotta practice for the exams first. Could we do it at the start of next week, in the evening?”

Mizuki smiled warmly at him. “That will do just fine.”