The Sword of Stone Chapter 1

First Steps

"Tamako?"

Tamako Shirogane looked up from the needle in her arm. The old man sitting opposite her, his hand comfortably resting on her unpunctured forearm, gave her a smile. It was as warm as his hand, which gave her a companionable squeeze.

"It doesn't hurt too much, does it?" he said, the kind voice of a fellow conspirator, and Tamako couldn't help but smile back. It was a warm day outside, and a little sunlight filtered in through the wide windows dominating one wall of the white office, along with the extremely muted sound of people coming and going several stories below. The room itself was rather spartan: there was a desk in the far corner with a mirror hanging above it, the spindly chair Tamako was resting in, and a variety of charts and lists she hadn't bothered to read hung on the wall behind her. Past the wide windows, the Tsuchikage's tower rose over the rest of the village in the distance, its coned roof looking for all the world like a Kage's hat cast in stone.

"No," Tamako shook her head. She almost expected her hair to swing a little with the motion, until she remembered she'd cut it short just two days before: now it was hardly two finger lengths long, bristly and black. "It's fine. I'm just…" She glanced down at her arm, and then out the window, wincing.

"Ah," the doctor said. He'd introduced himself as Jirou: Tamako hadn't caught his family name. "Needles?"

Tamako nodded, and the man chuckled. "Well, that's unusual, but I've seen it before." He grinned again, white teeth in a sagging face. "You shinobi are strange: you've been handling knives since you were five and you're afraid of a little prick?"

"Well, I'd do my best not to be stabbed with a knife either," Tamako replied in a strained voice, and the man huffed. Despite the sound, his eyes were still warm.

"'Stabbed.' Never had your blood drawn?" he asked, and Tamako shook her head again.

"I have," she said, trying to smile. "It's just not any easier, you know?"

Jirou nodded, looking serious. "Well, it won't be much longer," he reassured her. "Just another minute or so, and we'll have everything we'll need." He sat back, his hand still on her arm, and nodded at her forehead. "When did you graduate?"

Tamako's hitai-ate was still new. It gleamed under the fluorescent lights, unvarnished steel held in soft black cloth. The fabric blended in with her hair, creating the momentary illusion that the symbol of Iwagakure, two rough stones side by side, was affixed to her forehead by nothing. She'd admired the effect in the mirror earlier that day, and immediately felt unreasonably vain for doing so.

"Only two months ago." Tamako shifted in her chair, wincing. "Well, in a week it will be three, but I don't want to sound like some five year old demanding people say he's "five and half," you know?"

"Ha!" Jirou said, his face crinkling. "You shouldn't worry so much: you're a shinobi of the village now. There's no need to be concerned about what people think of you."

"I guess so," Tamako muttered.

"Was it difficult?" Jirou asked, and Tamako considered. "Graduating?"

"Well…" she hesitated, unable to help herself from watching more and more blood pumping out of her arm and into the bag hanging next to the bed. "It was easier than I thought it would be."

"I'm glad to hear that," Jirou said, moving forward. His fingers settled around the needle, and the flow of blood stopped. Carefully, he extracted it from her arm: Tamako felt the slightest twinge of pain and absence, a weight lifting, and then the procedure was over. "My grandson has been talking about joining the academy: he's much younger than you, but I think he already knows himself better than most." He looked Tamako in the eye, and she had to force herself not to look away, feeling a blush creep onto her face. "Someone like you could be an inspiration to him."

"Oh, but I'm really not…" she looked away, out the window, as Jirou packed up the needle and appraised the pack of her blood. "Normal, you know?"

"Of course not," Jirou said, grinning at her once more. "You wouldn't be here if you were. But that doesn't change a thing."

Tamako tried to smile back, but it came out weak and insincere. Jirou didn't seem to care.

"Now!" he said, finally putting all of his equipment out of sight. He shuffled over to a nearby desk and rooted around in it, coming back with a small piece of tape and a puff of cotton. The cotton went over the puncture, and the tape over it. "We can get to the exciting stuff," the old man said as he patted Tamako's arm, ensuring the tape was tightly adhered.

"Paperwork." He turned away, striding with youthful energy. Tamako groaned and shuffled after him.

Tamako walked out of the hospital about twenty minutes later, her arm aching and a sweet stuffed in her mouth. She was probably too old for rock candies, but she'd been unable to resist nabbing one from the front desk on her way out. The nurse hadn't seemed to mind; just smiled and wished her a good day.

She wondered about that as she stepped out onto the wide stone bridge the connected the hospital to the rest of the village. There weren't many people milling about on it, and she barely paid attention to them as she walked forward, flexing her arm and trying to work the aches out of it.

Maybe it was the hitai-ate. Ever since she'd graduated, people had treated her differently. Shinobi hadn't just ignored her. Civilians had given her a little more respect than Tamako, frankly, thought she deserved.

It was weird to think like that. It hadn't been that long ago she'd been one of them, just another daughter of a merchant in Iwagakure, watching shinobi move around the village with supernatural grace with both awe and a little bit of jealousy. Things changed so fast.

Then again, she was only thirteen, wasn't she? She was probably too young to really have a reference for how fast things could-

"Hey!"

Tamako bumped face-first into someone slightly taller than herself, stumbling backwards with an instinctive yelp. She caught herself before it turned into a stumble, but it was too late to save her pride. She felt her face go red, and bowed slightly, hiding it from whoever she'd almost bowled over.

"I'm so sorry!" she said, breathless with embarrassment. "I didn't-!"

"Jeez, Tamako," she recognized the voice, and immediately wished that she'd never left the hospital in the first place. "You don't gotta bow to me. That's just weird."

She looked up, her mouth a pursed line.

Takeshi Nadare blinked at her gormlessly, his wide, flat face infuriatingly cheerful. He was dressed in a simple Stone uniform, with his own twist put on it: a red t-shirt, flexible black pants, with a set of green bandages wrapped around his right arm, concealing everything from his bicep to his wrist with the exception of his elbow. His hitai-ate's cloth was a dull yellow, just like his eyes, and his hair was just as short and black as Tamako's.

He smiled at her, his whole face lighting up. It made him look slightly less dumb.

"Hey, you alright?" he said, pointing back over his shoulder with an extended thumb. "Sensei sent me to come get you."

"I'm fine!" she said, a bit too quickly. Takeshi didn't seem to notice. "Just… didn't see where I was going."

"Yeah, I figured." Takeshi cocked his head, considering the tape around her arm. "Your arm okay?" Tamako looked down at it and shrugged, begging herself to stop blushing.

"It's nothing, you know," she said. "They just had to draw a little blood."

"Oh, that's it?" Tamako flinched, and Takeshi grinned. "Cool," he said, turning half away. "C'mon, Sensei's been waiting. We got a mission to prep for, I guess."

Tamako stepped forward, curious. Just to her left, the edge of the bridge gave way to one of the several canyons running through Iwagakure. She could see a stream down there, and some dull-green shrubbery. It occurred to her she'd never bothered to explore those canyons, but doing so was completely within her ability.

Little things. If it weren't for her being different, she'd never have thought of them in the first place. It was strange to think about.

Tamako shook her head. "Right. What kind of mission?"

Takeshi shrugged. "I'unno. She never tells us anything." He turned his back on her and started to walk away, slowly picking up his pace. "C'mon!" he yelled back. "We gotta hurry!"

He was always too damn casual. It grated at Tamako as she chased after her teammate. Too many 'c'mons' and 'cools.' He needed to expand his vocabulary. And his damn flat face, always grinning. He looked like a cat that hadn't been clever enough to realize smashing its face into a window again and again would alter its features.

Then again, she considered, maybe the team needed someone who was relaxed. It certainly wasn't her.

They ended up meeting atop one one of the barracks, near the eastern edge of the Village. It was a building difficult to access even by the standards of a Village without conventional roads or streets. There were only two bridges that led to it, and both were usually subject to a decent amount of civilian traffic. Shinobi preferred to to get there by either moving up through the canyons, or traveling along the half-dozen power and communication lines that converged on it. Tamako hadn't thought running along a tightrope would be a very necessary skill when she'd been approached about becoming a shinobi, but the last five years had taught her otherwise. Traveling along those lines was one of the fastest ways around the Village.

The square roof of the barracks was capped with a sedimentary cap, smooth and dirty-yellow. The only other things of note on its concrete surface was a variety of relays and water-catchers, along with a small garden filled with tiny flowering trees with bright yellow fruits on the northern edge. It was slightly higher up in the ridges of the mountains that surrounded Iwagakure, and as such offered an impressive view of the rest of the village.

From up there it was easy to appreciate the scale of the village, and the intricacy of its construction. Hundreds and hundreds of cylinder-like buildings of incredibly disparate sizes, each capped with a different kind of colored stone to denote each structure, separated by roughly hewn canyons and connected by an endless series of stone bridges, metal catwalks, and thick, sturdy cables and pipes.

When Tamako and Takeshi arrived, their other teammate was already waiting for them, along with their sensei.

In many ways, Tamako's sensei frightened her.

She was an imposing woman, close to six feet tall. She always towered over her genin, and it was rarely a comforting feeling. She had sharp features: a chin like a razor, a small, angular nose, and perpetually suspicious coal-black eyes. Her hair was long and purple, always tied into a single enormous ponytail. Tamako had never summoned up the courage to ask whether it was dyed or not, but the one time Takeshi had their sensei had sighed in such a manner that the innocent boy hadn't dared to speak the rest of the day.

So long as Tamako had known her, she'd always worn simple brown clothes: a collared shirt and grey pants. Over that, she often wore a flowing red jacket; it was asymmetrical, with one long arm-obscuring sleeve keeping company to an equally asymmetrical ankle-length skirt that concealed her left leg. Tamako had considered it unbelievably impractical when she'd first laid eyes upon the outfit. It was similar to the classic uniform of a Stone shinobi, but flashier and lengthier. But her sensei had never moved with anything but terrifying assurance and envious grace, so Tamako was forced to concede that while she found the long asymmetrical hem silly, it didn't seem to slow her teacher down.

Her name was Yui Tono, and Tamako was sure she had done much more exciting things than teach children before Tamako and her teammates had come along.

Tamako's other teammate was nothing like her sensei, or Takeshi. His name was Hideaki; Tamako had never learned his last name, despite some effort. He was rather squat, shorter than Tamako herself, and his face was marred by a constant frown. His brown hair was a constant tousled mess, and his equally brown eyes were always nervous, never daring to look at one thing at a time. Despite that, he was unfailingly polite, if a little distant.

"Tamako, Takeshi," Yui said, her lips curling. "Took you a while." Hideaki glanced at them, and then went back to analyzing the cloudy sky, his eyes zipping to one after another.

"Sorry sensei," Takeshi said, not really seeming sorry. "Tamako's appointment took longer than she thought it would."

Yui snorted. "They always seem to." She looked to Tamako. "Blood?"

"Yes, sensei." Tamako had difficulty maintaining eye contact with her teacher for long. "Just a little food, and I'll be fine."

"Hmm." Yui scratched her chin. "You're gonna have to hurry, then. We have to move out soon."

Tamako frowned. "Takeshi said we have a mission, but he had no idea what it was," she said, shooting her teammate a dark look. He returned a wide grin. "Are we leaving the village?"

"Just that," Yui nodded, and Tamako felt a flutter of excitement down in her gut. This would only be her third time out of Iwagakure, and the notion was still novel and a little frightening. "We're running supplies to a border outpost. Well," Yui flashed a grin, revealing some teeth, "a little beyond the border, actually. Nothing too intense, but it's time you saw what's out there." She brushed her sleeve. "Pack light, cause you're gonna be hauling a lot of crap. Trip'll probably be… two days, maybe a bit longer if you're lazy."

"Sensei." Hideaki finally spoke up. "That won't really be necessary, will it? Can't you just…?"

Yui narrowed her eyes. "I don't use my seals on just anything," she said, a little imperiously. "Besides, you guys need the exercise." She kicked vaguely in Hideaki's direction. "Especially you, shorty."

Hideaki grumbled, and Tamako held back a grin. Their sensei ignored both of them. "We'll meet at the southern gate in thirty minutes," Yui said. "Be ready."

Takeshi gave an enthusiastic thumbs up, and without ceremony everyone went their separate ways. Yui stayed exactly where she was; as Tamako made her way towards the merchant sector of the Village along a somewhat slack powerline, she looked back and watched her sensei. The woman was standing on the balcony of the barracks, her arms crossed. For just a moment, she and Tamako made eye contact.

Yui smirked, and Tamako did her best to smile back.

A Not Sick Sidestory.