My name is Naruko Uzumaki. I'm thirteen, which Sakura-chan says is "basically an adult" and Kakashi-sensei says is "old enough to stop eating three bowls of ramen before missions," and Ojisan, the last time I saw him, said was "old enough to start asking better questions" — which I've never fully forgiven him for, because he said it and then didn't explain what the better questions actually were, and now I think about it sometimes at night like an idiot.
I haven't seen Ojisan in four months. That's not unusual — he travels for Merchant Union business sometimes, weeks at a stretch, and always comes back with some small useless souvenir and a story about a bridge or a bad inn that makes Mitsuki-obasan laugh even when it isn't that funny — but four months is longer than usual, and I noticed, because I notice everything about him, because he's the only person who's ever stayed.
Sakura-chan told me once that the way I talk about him is "a little much." I told her she doesn't understand, because her parents are both alive and boring and normal, and she got upset, and I felt bad, but I didn't take it back. It's true. Ojisan found me when I was five, alone, with a demon everyone in the village was scared of sealed inside me and nobody willing to look past it far enough to see there was a kid underneath. He didn't care about the demon. He never once treated me like I was dangerous, or cursed, or a mistake the village was stuck with. He just took me in. Fed me. Taught me things I probably shouldn't have written down, but he's not going to read my diary, so who cares.
He taught me how to read a room before I walk into it. How to let people underestimate me, because underestimation is a weapon you get to use for free. I used that on the ice-user in the Land of Waves — Haku, before Kakashi-sensei killed him. I smiled at him right up until I didn't need to anymore, and I still think about that sometimes, though not the way Sakura-chan would probably assume.
Today Kakashi-sensei let us go early because Sasuke got hurt sparring — nothing serious, just his stupid pride mostly — and I walked home along the river instead of straight to the Union's satellite office, because I like the river, because it reminds me a little of Takigakure, even though I've never actually been there and only know what it looks like from the way he describes it, half-proud and half-tired, like a man describing a house he built with his own hands and isn't totally sure he's allowed to be proud of.
There's an old man who feeds the ducks by the second bridge most afternoons. He waved at me today, and I waved back, and I thought this is a nice life. A boring life, some days, compared to missions and near-death — okay, not lions, we don't have giant lions here, I'm thinking of one of his stories again, some jungle he was apparently in before he ever got to Konoha, before I existed, a whole life I don't know anything real about except the pieces he's chosen to tell me. But a nice life anyway. Nobody's tried to kill me in three weeks, which by shinobi standards is basically a vacation.
I asked him once why he never talks about his actual family. He said they were gone a long time before he met me, and that some losses don't get smaller with time, they just get quieter, and that I shouldn't worry about it because he'd made his peace with it before I was even born. I believed him then. I mostly believe him now. But sometimes — and I would never say this to Sakura-chan, or Kakashi-sensei, or anyone — I catch him looking at me the way you look at something you already know you're going to lose, even when nothing's actually wrong, even when it's just a normal morning and I'm just eating breakfast across the table from him. I don't know how to explain that look except that it makes me feel, for just a second, very young and very temporary, like a photograph he's already taken in his head of a moment that hasn't finished happening yet.
Maybe that's just what parents look like. I wouldn't really know. He's the only one I've ever had.
Hinari-san told me a letter had come for me today. Not from Ojisan. From Mitsuki-obasan, which was strange, because that's usually his job, his handwriting, his little jokes at the bottom about eating vegetables. This one was just her handwriting, careful and precise the way everything about her is, and it said Ojisan was traveling further than usual, and that it might be a longer while before I heard from him, and that I shouldn't worry, because he'd told her specifically to tell me not to worry.
I read it three times. I don't know why. It's not really different from any of his other trips, except for one line at the very end, almost like an afterthought, that I keep coming back to even though I've told myself twice now to stop:
He said to tell you he's proud of what you're becoming, and that he trusts you to keep becoming it without him needing to watch.
That's a weird thing to say about someone who's just going on a trip. That's the kind of thing you say about someone who's leaving.
I folded the letter and put it in the drawer where I keep the things that matter — a photo of Team 7, a kunai Ojisan gave me on my ninth birthday that I've never once used in an actual fight because it's too nice to risk losing — and told myself I was being an idiot, reading too much into things because I don't have anyone else's normal, boring family to compare mine against.
I still haven't stopped thinking about it. I probably won't for a while.
Training again tomorrow. If Sasuke's ankle heals in time we might finally get a C-rank that isn't secretly an A-rank in disguise, which, knowing our luck, it definitely will be.
I hope Ojisan gets back soon. I have a lot of questions I've been saving up, the better kind he's always telling me to ask.