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"Don't be such a brat, Hatake," Tsunade practically snarled when the man finally reported two hours late for the full mission briefing. Anko had given her report and left over an hour ago, but Aiko had waited. It was easiest to find her sensei by lurking around places he eventually had to be.
Aiko and poor Sasuke did their best to be invisible without actually employing any genjutsu while Tsunade raged, cursing like a sailor interspersed with the occasional shriek and the thud of whatever she could grab hitting walls. (The use of chakra sometimes draws the attention of predators larger than oneself, a tip from Konoha's shinobi handbook page 147).
Shizune merely demonstrated her hard-won immunity to Tsunade's frightening atmosphere by rolling her eyes and walking right out of the office. The Hokage pointed unerringly at Aiko. She cringed. "If that brat is still a Chuunin, I'll eat my fucking bra! She's getting promoted and that's final. We need all the Jounin we can get."
Kakashi slumped back against the wall and waved his hand at the thirteen year olds looking spectacularly uncomfortable. "Maa, why don't you two go get drinks and let the grown-ups talk?"
Sasuke outright bolted, making it halfway to the stairs before Tsunade could call out angrily for them to stop. Aiko lingered a little, torn between the desire to flee the woman throwing paperweights through walls and her curiosity. The conversation was about her, after all.
"With all due respect Hokage-sama," Kakashi began in a not-particularly-respectful way, "That decision is mine to make. Not yours. It has always been the purview of an instructor to determine their apprentice ready to move up."
"I'm your Hokage," she snarled, looking downright feral. "You're being ridiculous. It's not a death sentence to get an early promotion. You did yourself, for crap's sake and you know damn well that I can go over your head with this."
Kakashi sighed and straightened, giving her a deadpan expression that indicated he was not impressed by her argument. "Are you really sure you don't want the kid to leave?" he tried one more time. Then he shrugged. "Fine."
'I'm not a kid,' Aiko quietly pouted. She did her best not to let the thought show on her face but almost certainly failed.
"I know that she isn't ready for this promotion in part because I wasn't, so don't tell me that I'm being a hypocrite," Kakashi droned, giving Aiko an uncharacteristically sharp look. She was wise enough to look sheepish. "And no. You can't go over my head. When I agreed to take an apprentice, I had stipulations. Granted, I think that the Sandaime was just humoring me, but he signed them. They're all nice and legal." He visibly dismissed Tsunade, looking idly up at the ceiling as if it held all the answers to the universe's questions. The woman was red-faced and practically shaking with fury.
'She doesn't deal well with having her authority challenged, does she?' Aiko mused. 'It may have been better if I weren't here for this conversation. This… is probably a little embarrassing for her.'
She wasn't entirely sure why her sensei was so insistent about stopping her promotion to Jounin. Aiko didn't mind it, though. Kakashi was one of the few people left in Konoha that she really cared about. She respected Tsunade, but she would support Kakashi over her. He almost certainly had a good reason for blocking her promotion. Besides, there weren't many perks to that promotion. She would probably be removed from Kakashi's team and sent on more dangerous missions.
'Actually, that might be the problem,' Aiko noted. 'Sensei is a little protective. In his weird little way.'
"Whenever you get your filing system figured out, you can read them yourself. If that's too much trouble, I suppose I could go get my copy. I made certain to use small words when I drafted the document, so you should be able to get through it even if Shizune is still irritated with you for acting like a spoiled child." Aiko tried to melt into the floor. He was definitely provoking her on purpose.
'The man is kinda nuts.'
Nuts or not, once again Kakashi-sensei left triumphant. The victory was slightly marred by the fact that he had been assigned a mission out of the village that, as Tsunade sneered, Aiko would not be able to accompany him on because she did not have Jounin clearance. 'Petty,' Aiko sighed. "Hey, sensei," she started quietly. (Her ears were still ringing.) "Dinner? My treat. I wanted to talk to you about an idea I had involving my chakra chains."
"Shishou."
Aiko blinked, a bit confused. "Uh, what?"
"Kakashi-shishou. I'm not your genin sensei anymore and I'm probably not going to take another team. So you're my apprentice." The words were delivered in an off-hand manner, but she was a bit stunned. It was a generous offer (not that he'd phrased it as an offer, the bastard).
Sure, she had technically been classified as his apprentice so that he could take a genin team. But Aiko had thought that was a legal thing. He'd never asked her to refer to him as anything other than 'sensei'.
Aiko felt her eyes begin to water in a very dignified, grown-up way. She honestly hadn't expected that. But his possessiveness made a lot of sense when she thought about it. He had just lost three students in the course of a month—one to the shinigami, one out of the goddamn country with a very powerful but inattentive master, and the third to Tsunade. In some way, he probably thought Tsunade was trying to take away his last student.
Still, mitigating factors or not, it was pretty damn prestigious to be taken as an apprentice instead of just a student.
Aiko sniffled, wiping at her face and giving him a winning smile. "Hai, shishou!"
He eyed her suspiciously. "I'm not going out to dinner with you if you're going to cry," he warned seriously.
She shook her head. "No, I just blinked and an eyelash got in my eye. I'm totally cool, promise."
"Right." He rolled his eye and set off down the street. "I think I want barbeque," he mused out loud.
His apprentice gracefully accepted the subject change and followed him to a restaurant she knew well—it was one that Ino liked. 'You know… If I'm his apprentice now, maybe I should try to emulate him.' Aiko did her best not to snicker. It was traditional, after all. A shishou was a guide for behavior and habits as well as ninjutsu—not just a teacher, but a role model. Plus… it would be really amusing. 'Who am I to spurn tradition?'
As it turned out, Kakashi-shishou did think that her idea was plausible. She had noticed that her chakra chains were heavily tinged with her water-natured chakra affinity, and wondered if it was possible to use nature transformations with them. As they were currently, her chains were just really large and versatile weapons—good for tying people or bashing them to death, and very difficult to break. (To her knowledge they were unbreakable, but it was stupid to assume that there wasn't a way just because she didn't know of it).
Since she had already gone through the trouble of learning lightning transformation and could now coerce her coils into generating lightning-natured chakra, well… Aiko resisted the urge to cackle as best as she could while she explained that she wanted to be able to electrocute with her chains since they would be excellent conductors.
"That is overkill," her shishou commented crisply, for once looking mostly engaged in the conversation. "Who do you plan on fighting, the sage of six paths? I think I can help you with it." He fixed her with a stern glare. "If you electrocute me again, however…." His voice trailed off.
"I will try to resist the urge," she grumbled, a little embarrassed. On the other side of the booth, a man she suspected was an Akimichi stifled what seemed to be a laugh.
She hadn't conducted even initial experimentation yet, because it had seemed like a stupid idea to try before asking someone who she knew had gone through the experience of making his own lightning natured technique. Frankly, she wasn't particularly eager to electrocute herself. After Kakashi returned from his mission and she managed to lure him out of his apartment with food (she was a good cook and he never seemed to have anything in his apartment), she tried for the first time under his supervision at training ground seven.
Now that she had done it, it was almost criminally easy to manifest her chakra chains again. She pointedly made only three—one to experiment on, and the other two as a control group. Her shishou had pointed out that it would be important to know if it was possible to change just one chain to lightning nature or if they would all change.
All three of them fizzled out of existence when she tried to change just one. Aiko blinked stupidly, not quite understanding what had happened.
"I wondered about that," Kakashi commented lazily. "Uzumaki chakra chains only seem to manifest in members with water-natured chakra. I don't think you'll be able to have lightning natured chains."
Aiko scowled in thought, displeased at the development. "But does that mean that I can't attach something like a chakra thread of another nature around it?" she asked after a long silence. Her teacher gave her a strange look. She hurried to demonstrate by manifesting a string and flipping her coils. "See, I can already do that. Remember that I used to think that the chakra chains worked along the same lines as chakra thread for puppeteering? I worked with those until I thought I was going to be sick."
Kakashi slapped a gloved palm to his forehead and shook his head, snickering.
"What?" she asked, offended.
"That is the most ridiculously wasteful technique I have ever heard of," he pointed out, sounding amused.
Aiko snorted in disbelief. "Yeah, whatever. Chakra threads use nothing." She demonstrated by splitting the line she was manipulating into six and wiggling it. He stilled, a strange look on his face.
"I've never seen anyone outside of Suna use more than one at once."
She raised an eyebrow skeptically. "Why? It's not that hard, and the control required isn't even up to introductory medical techniques."
"It's not a matter of difficulty per say," he started, indicating that she should maintain the strings while he walked around and checked how nuanced her control was. "The payoff isn't generally worth it. For anyone other than a puppet master, conventional wisdom says that there's no benefit to using more than one at once. For most shinobi chakra threads are an ace in the hole for when they've lost their weapons or something similar. Believe it or not, they do require a fair bit of chakra for a rookie, and by the time most shinobi get to be Chuunin they already have specialties that are much more effective than anything they could do with threads like those."
"So… my idea is worthless?" she pouted. At least they were still pretty—when she charged them with lightning natured chakra, her strings positively glittered like threads of gold.
Her shishou shook his head. "I don't think so. There's a chance that you could make your idea work, but the threads would have to be ridiculously long to be useful," he cautioned. "In order for them to wrap around the threads enough times that you can be sure they'll touch whoever you'll be touching with them, they'll have to be easily three times the length of the chains."
"That's easy enough," she muttered, trying it out.
It wasn't that easy. When she pooled the threads out long enough to be useful at all, she found that control was becoming an issue after all.
She sat cross-legged on the ground with a thump, quietly manipulating them as best as she could to figure out her limitations.
"Well, it's an interesting idea," Kakashi sighed, pulling out his book. "But it will take far more control than you currently have to make it useful at all. Remember, not only will you have to simultaneously maintain two techniques of different chakra natures, but you'll have to be able to independently control them at much larger distances than you're used to."
"In other words, chakra control exercises are next," she said miserably, unfolding her legs to sit like a rag doll, heels digging into the warm soil. She had never been prone to neglecting the basics, but it was depressing to have to work on control when she had something she wanted to develop that was infinitely more interesting.
~~~
Sasuke sat down across from Karin in the hospital break room, clutching onto a cup of coffee for dear life. Somehow, he hadn't expected that he would have to do the same type of grunt work other medic trainees did when he accepted Tsunade's training offer.
That had been a mistake.
Karin delicately backed up in her chair so that she wasn't in the direct path of her fellow trainee's glower. "So, long day?" she inquired. She knew it had been. Apparently, a new group of Academy trainees had gone through their first real taijutsu lesson (when they began sparring instead of just learning kata), and the waiting room had been filled with skinny eight year olds covered in bruises and scrapes. The initial injuries were actually an intentional part of the lesson—a way for Academy teachers to ensure that students knew how to get treatment at the hospital.
It was also unfortunately a training exercise for beginning medics who were qualified to treat minor injuries but had no real experience working on adjusting to foreign chakra systems and practicing their bedside manner.
Tsunade had given hilariously little training in bedside mannerisms, Karin had noted while Sasuke bulldozed through a list of jumpy kids with a white-knuckled grip on his clipboard and an expression that indicated he was considering using it to bludgeon his way to freedom. She, on the other hand, had been given strict rules and expectations about how she talked to patients.
With her temper, she had already been wrestling with that requirement much more than the actual act of healing, which she had a talent for. Two days ago some dirty old man had grabbed at her leg when she was getting a needle off the cart for an injection. It had been a tactical error. She had smiled sweetly without comment and accidentally failed to find his vein eighteen times.
She had been roundly chewed out. Something about stabbing civilians when proper procedure would be to refer them to hospital security and file sexual harassment charges?
"I had three patients who were apparently brutalized by the same Hyuuga," he deadpanned. "I'm going to be coaxing open tenketsu in my dreams."
Karin winced. "Hanabi?"
Dark eyes glared at her over his coffee. "That's her name? Little monster." She snorted, hiding her amusement at the undue hatred for a pre-genin. If he hadn't ended up having to clean up after Hanabi, Sasuke probably wouldn't have cared one way or another if the girl had decided to break two wrists a day during recess in between tea parties with pink plastic cups.
"I get the impression that she isn't as gentle as Hinata," Karin settled for diplomatically. That was an understatement. From what she understood, Hanabi was a horrible little brat and personally she thought that Hinata would be much better off if the girl hadn't been born. But Hinata was her friend, and there was something of an unspoken rule of friendship that included not telling girls that you'd prefer if their beloved little sister had never existed.
'Even when that brat is the reason they branded Hinata like a cow,' she fumed, pulling her yoghurt out of the fridge and moodily stabbing through the tin lid. The assessment might not have been fair—it wasn't Hanabi who had made the claim that by not even making a good showing in the Tournament she had embarrassed her family. But it was Hanabi who beat Hinata down in a spar with unnecessary prejudice the day before they put the caged bird seal on Hinata. Karin had been in the hospital (changing bedpans and being grumpy about it) when Hinata came in, silently crying after apparently having a painful reaction to her new tattoo. She was both glad that she didn't belong to a clan like that and absolutely fucking livid that they had done that to such a gentle girl. Hinata had explained that she was only having so much trouble because the seal was only meant to be placed on children, as if that somehow mitigated the horror of what the Hyuuga did to their own kin.
Now that she'd been reminded, Karin promised herself that she would check in on Hinata after she got off work. The poor girl had been stressed lately. She had suffered even worse nerves than usual after the sealing, which Karin didn't blame her for. It was a pretty resounding proof that her family didn't value her.
In addition to her family troubles and self esteem issues, Hinata was also dealing with disruption in her routine. Kurenai was the last Jounin sensei out of their circle of acquaintances to return from her emergency duties. An Academy class had been cycled through condensed training in the months since the invasion and had been deployed to fill the genin ranks, leaving more experienced genin to take Chuunin promotions (some of them were even prepared for those promotions). Unfortunately, that also meant that unprepared Chuunin had been promoted to Jounin to fill those ranks. Really, the only group that hadn't seen a sudden increase in mission injuries were the genin (both in-village and those attached to elite Jounin sensei).
She found the girl with Shino on training grounds 8, doing dodging exercises while he apparently worked on his throwing. Karin leaned against a tree with one foot bent up against the trunk and waited, hands shoved inside the pockets of her dress for protection from the chill. It was a windy day, and she eventually conceded defeat and tied her hair back while she waited for her friend to finish training for the day. After a few minutes, the boy paused in his shuriken assault long enough to give her an inscrutable look.
"Hinata. Do you wish to stop for the day?"
She startled like a frightened rabbit, catching the last weapon between her fingertips instead of dodging it. "W-what?"
He inclined his head towards Karin, shoving his hands inside his coat. He was probably cold too, Karin noted with an amused sniff and a hidden smile. Hinata swiveled around almost enough for a normal human to move Karin into their range of vision and visibly relaxed. "Oh! Karin-chan," she breathed.
"Yo." Karin waved before shoving her hand back into her pockets quickly. "If you're done, I make killer hot chocolate."
Shino frowned. "What does it kill? Is it poisoned? Who is the target?"
Karin's jaw dropped and she gave him a bizarre look before noting that Hinata looked equally interested in the answer. 'Ugh, ninja can be so hopeless,' she groaned. "Look, it's just an expression alright? It means that it's really good and I was inviting her back to my house. You're welcome to come too, if you'd like," she added politely. She was pretty sure he wasn't interested, but she didn't want to snub him either.
"Oh," they both said almost in unison. Hinata looked relieved, but her teammate looked disappointed. Karin heaved a sigh.
"Anyway, if you're not done I can wait," she offered, pushing at her glasses and frowning at the way they were fogging up. Hinata tilted her chin towards her teammate and began fiddling with her fingers. Karin pulled off her glasses and wiped them on her shirt before putting them back on just in time to see Shino look faintly amused.
"I think that it would be optimal for the two of us to be done with training for the day. I have yet to eat dinner, and I am certain that you are hungry as well, Hinata." He reached out and plucked his shuriken from Hinata's hand, then strode over to the far side of the clearing and began gathering his weaponry. "Thank you for the invitation, Karin-san, but I am expected at home." She nodded in acknowledgment and the girls hustled to assist him in picking weaponry. Hinata easily found the most, but Karin felt her addition of six kunai, two shuriken and a flat blade she didn't recognize was a respectable contribution to the clean-up for a practice she hadn't been part of.
"Thank you, Hinata, Karin-san." Shino gave a short bow.
Karin bowed in return, quickly followed by Hinata. "Good night, Shino-san."
"Good night, Shino-kun!" Hinata eeped when Karin grabbed at her arm and began hustling across the training grounds, burrowing into her coat for protection against the wind.
"Come on, it is way too cold to linger out here." She pulled the other girl into a run, crossing the dirt paths that led to downtown with top haste. They slowed down when they made it into Konoha proper where the tall buildings provided a wind break, and Karin gave a long stretch and yawn. "What do you think about making tekkamaki?"
As it turned out, they ran into Aiko at the grocery store, who must have been thinking of dinner as well. She was staring at the chocolate section with a vaguely stupid look on her face, so Karin took the opportunity to tug on one of her curls. She laughed in the taller redhead's face when she whirled around, barely avoiding whacking Hinata with her basket. Aiko gave Karin a dirty look. "Oh. It's you," she said flatly, grabbing a chocolate bar off the shelf at random and stuffing it into her empty basket. "Hello, Hinata. How are you?"
While Hinata muttered a greeting of some sort and fidgeted, Karin briskly informed her cousin that they were having tekkamaki and strode off in search of sushi-grade tuna. She was less than surprised when Aiko got a thoughtful expression and declared that she wanted to make sweet potato hosumaki as well. Aiko had a strange fondness for vegetables that Karin would rather leave alone. At least it wasn't thrice-damned ramen.
The three girls collected everything they needed, Hinata awkwardly lugging a large bottle of the watermelon flavored water she liked to drink in the morning, and waved at a bored-looking Nara Shikamaru following around a woman dressed in tan who must be his mother (she had a similar nose and a no-nonsense attitude that manifested in the way she shoved heavy items in the basket he was carrying) before heading out the door.
While they had gone to the closest grocery store, there was still quite a walk back to the Uzumaki residence. There were very few civilian-ran establishments in the largely shinobi areas of town, so it was probably lucky that they were all in excellent physical condition. Still, Karin was relieved when they reached the garden out front.
Karin somehow managed to pry her cold fingers out from under her bag, tucking it against her chest with her open arm, and nudged open the door with a foot. She flounced in first, leaving her sandals in a messy heap and slipping into her glittery red house shoes before tripping into the house and dumping the large paper sack in her arms onto the table. Hinata and Aiko exchanged amused glances, pushing their shoes up much more neatly against the sides of the room before Aiko dug out her own blue slippers (a fluffy affair with sparkly green turtles that Naruto had ripped off cheap necklaces and sewn on as a joke gift). Hinata was such a frequent houseguest in the last month that Karin had actually gone and purchased her a personal pair of slippers (Karin didn't believe in communal shoes, they were the devil's work). Of course, since Karin had picked them, they didn't much suit Hinata at all, but she gamely slipped them on and somehow managed to look pleased as punch about wearing hot pink shoes. She was probably just grateful to feel welcome somewhere. Judging by how often she slept over, Karin was really certain that all was not well at the Hyuuga home.
"I think I have this pretty well in hand," Aiko called, striding into the kitchen and flipping on the lights. "The kitchen is a bit too small for three cooks." Karin shrugged and barely managed to rescue an orange from rolling off the table—she wasn't much of a cook anyways.
"Fine by me, but tell me when you're almost done so I can start hot chocolate. Hey, Hinata, want to put in a movie?" Karin punched on the television and cast an inquiring look at her friend.
"Oh, yum," Aiko mumbled to herself, clattering around for a cutting board.
Hinata looked between the two before gracefully picking her way into the living room. The cat sleeping in the exact center of the couch opened one eye sleepily to glare at her and then closed it again. "Ano, where are the movies?"
"I think most of them are in my room," Aiko called absentmindedly. Karin rolled her eyes. Aiko had the weird habit of dragging the movies into her bedroom. There wasn't a television in there, but she did have nearly floor-to-ceiling shelves where she stored a downright frightening amount of books. The top left shelf was all movies in perfect alphabetical order, pushed back against the wall so that none of them stuck out. Books were arranged similarly below. Her cousin was pretty weird sometimes. Who cared if their books and movies were in alphabetical order? Karin was much more likely to have a pile of her ten favorites by her bedside, coffee table, and by the television.
Nonetheless, she led her friend into Aiko's room because she knew Hinata would be uncomfortable going into someone's bedroom alone. Hinata's eyes widened at the ridiculous display of books. "I've never heard of most of these," she said quietly, running her gaze over the titles. "The little red book of writing?" Hinata squinted. "…historical fashion? Icha Icha Make- eep!" Hinata pulled her hands back, flushing bright red. "Ah, she has an eclectic collection," the girl practically squeaked, turning her attention back to the movies and wrapping her arms around her body.
Karin snorted. "You're telling me," she groused. "I think she wrote like a third of them. The ones with the unlabeled covers—see, they're just dimestore books, like for notes and sketches and stuff. She won't let me read them though. I bet they're really bad." She poked at a green and purple hard cover.
"I'm sure they're good," Hinata said rather loyally, grabbing one of the few titles she was familiar with off the top shelf. Karin leaned in to check the title and was relieved to see it was actually one of the ones she had purchased—a historical drama about a samurai and the girl he married. Spoiler- she was an undercover kunoichi who had been hired to ensure he failed, but it all worked out when she defected.
"Nice," she approved. In the front room she lit the cherry blossom scented tea candles that Aiko kept on tea saucers for some reason and pulled out extra pillows and blankets from the hall cupboard.
"Karin, if you want to start hot chocolate now would be a good time," Aiko called from the other room.
"Oh, crap. Coming!" Karin hustled in, Hinata following at her heels like a duckling. The brunette settled at the kitchen table politely and flipped through the book sitting there- a guide to native flora and fauna with medicinal uses that Karin had left out the night before.
"Did you know that Sasuke signed Tsunade's summoning contract?" Karin half-asked, half informed while she pulled open the cupboard and withdrew measuring cups and a pot. She'd found that out on break. Hinata sounded politely interested, but Aiko made a genuinely baffled face at the news.
"It seems really early in his apprenticeship to start that, doesn't it?" She scraped perfectly seasoned rice out of the pot and into a bowl and started cutting dried nori, moving to the side to give Karin room to work.
Karin shrugged philosophically, measuring out milk and cocoa and dumping them directly into the pan with a glob of butter. "I dunno, maybe Tsunade is taking advantage of how much chakra he has. It's nothing on you or Naruto, but he's no slouch." She critically eyed the mixture and then added extra sugar with a faintly guilty expression and a none-too-subtle poke at her flat stomach.
"I don't know much about summoning contracts," Hinata ventured, flipping a page and leaning down to examine an illustration more closely. Her face tightened. "My honored father has one, but only Clan Heads sign it. I…. I was under the impression that they required large amounts of chakra to utilize, so Karin-chan's suggestion seems sound."
Karin stepped over the elephant in the room that trumpeted around and stomped on peanuts at the reminder that Hinata would never be signing that contract. "Pass the dark chocolate, would you?" She began shaving off tiny curls to garnish the whipped topping while the cocoa began to simmer.
"I got a letter from Naruto today postmarked last week," Aiko changed the subject. Hinata looked up none too subtly, and Karin stifled a grin. That girl practically jumped half a foot every time someone said his name.
"Oh?" Hinata prodded, unusually aggressive.
Aiko gave her an amused glance, pausing in spooning hot rice out onto nori. "Yes, his training is going well from what I gather. He isn't allowed to tell me where he's been or anything, but the letter was sent from Tea Country of all the places. Apparently his shishou taught him a genjutsu."
"That's interesting," Hinata commented thoughtfully. "I didn't know that Naruto-san had a knack for genjutsu."
Aiko barked a surprised laugh. "He doesn't, not at all," she confided conspiratorially, giving downright frightening attention to precisely arranging raw tuna slices. "I bet it was hard work for him. In fact, I don't think he ever figured out that Iruka-sensei's Big Head no Jutsu is actually a genjutsu. I used to get him out of bed sometimes with an olfactory genjutsu of cookies baking. The look on his face, every time..."
Hinata giggled. "That's a little bit unkind, isn't it?" She splayed a hand out on the table as if examining her chipped nail polish.
"Nah," the girl dismissed, squeezing the bamboo roller and unfolding it to reveal another perfectly formed roll. She set it on the plate with the others and began working on the last roll. Karin gave her cousin a weird look.
"Are we really going to eat that much?" she asked a bit skeptically.
Aiko furrowed her brow and looked at the food she'd made as if she was a bit surprised to see it. "I guess I'm cooking on auto," she said after a pause. Then she shrugged. "Whatever we don't eat will go in bento tomorrow, I suppose. You'll take one too, right Hinata?"
Karin made a face. "Second day tuna?"
Her cousin made a face at her. "We'll eat those first, okay? Ugh, nag nag nag." She stuck her tongue out at the shorter girl. Hinata stifled a giggle while Aiko changed the subject to ask Karin about medical chakra control exercises. She didn't know anyone quite like the Uzumaki family. She wasn't entirely sure if that was a tragedy or good for Konoha's relatively peaceful atmosphere. If she didn't manage to marry Naruto, she was going to have to marry Karin instead so that she could stay here forever.