Long before they met Rick…
Long before their names were scribbled on mission scrolls or whispered by curious jonin…
They were just two quiet kids in a world that forgot how to be kind.
The orphanage was quietest at night.
Not because the children slept peacefully—most didn't—but because silence was safer than the dreams. In the far corner of the west wing, where the light barely reached and the tatami mats were thin from wear, Akira would lie awake and listen to the wind through the paper walls.
No lullabies. No goodnight kisses. Just the hollow creak of wood and the distant sound of the river, as if it too had somewhere better to be.
He never cried. Not once.
Uchiha children weren't supposed to cry.
Even half-Uchiha ones.
The caretakers never said it outright, but he saw it in their eyes—how they lingered near the other children, how they offered extra rice to the quieter ones but never him. His father's clan crest, barely intact on a moth-eaten sleeve, seemed to glare at them even when he didn't. His silence was mistaken for arrogance. His strange chakra—dense, humming, slightly off-kilter—was a thing whispered about when they thought he couldn't hear.
They were wrong about a lot of things.
But not about the chakra.
Some nights it did burn. Just under his skin. Like tree roots twisting through his veins. His fingertips would twitch. The soles of his feet would hum against the wood floor as if the earth itself was vibrating with secrets he couldn't name.
He didn't talk about it.
He didn't talk about anything.
Until her.
---
Asenari came to the orphanage during the monsoon season, when the roads were slick with mud and even the jonin were hesitant to patrol outside the gates. Wet sandals, torn yukata, eyes too sharp for someone that small. Her bangs stuck to her forehead in tangled strands. Her knees were scraped. She didn't speak for three days, wouldn't eat the food, and refused to sleep near the others.
Akira noticed her immediately—not because of her pale eyes or the Hyuuga profile etched into her face—but because she didn't flinch when the thunder cracked. She just stood by the window, arms crossed, watching it flash across the mountains.
She didn't cry either.
On the fourth night, she sat beside him in the dark. No introduction. No forced smiles. No awkward attempt to make conversation.
She simply sat.
They stayed like that for an hour—two children sharing silence like a secret. The breeze tugged at the paper walls. Somewhere in the building, a child whimpered in his sleep. But not them.
That was the beginning.
---
It wasn't friendship. Not at first.
It was recognition.
Two ghosts drifting in the same storm, tethered only by the quiet fact that no one else saw them properly.
They never asked each other about their parents.
Akira never said he remembered his father's funeral pyre but not his face. Asenari never explained why her hands already knew how to fold gauze with perfect pressure, or why she winced when anyone raised their voice.
Some things didn't need to be shared to be understood.
Instead, they passed notes in class when the lectures turned dull. Scribbled strange questions to each other—about chakra flow, about anatomy, about why the stars didn't fall even though gravity demanded it.
One time, Asenari left a diagram of a human lung under Akira's mat. Labeled in flawless handwriting. He still had it, creased and faintly smudged from rereading.
Another time, Akira fixed a busted heating coil in the orphanage basement using copper wire, tree sap, and trial-and-error. No one taught him. No one had to. Asenari didn't ask how he knew how. She just sat beside him with a stolen medical kit in case he burned his hands.
She did the stitching when he slipped with the soldering wire. Eight neat sutures across the palm. No judgment. Just a firm nod and a whispered, "Don't be stupid next time."
By the time they graduated from the Academy, they knew more about each other than most genin teams ever would.
And they still barely spoke about the past.
---
Years later, the grove behind the academy would become their place.
Not a training field. Not a hideout. Just… a space. Quiet. Off-grid. Forgotten.
A soft wind moved through the tall grass, brushing against the bark of old trees and rustling the canopy like a lullaby. Dappled light filtered through the leaves, dappling the ground in moving patches of gold. The air smelled faintly of medicinal herbs—Asenari had been drying roots again. Akira recognized the scent immediately: tsuru-sennin, used to slow chakra poisoning and stabilize nervous strain.
He sat cross-legged in the shade, fiddling with the tattered binding of a book on elemental affinities. Not because he expected it to help—he already knew his chakra didn't behave like it was supposed to—but because reading helped quiet the noise in his head.
The book had notes in the margins. His own handwriting, mixed with scribbles that looked suspiciously like Rick's. He ignored those.
Asenari arrived wordlessly, as always.
She dropped a bundle of dried stalks beside him. "Told you it wasn't slippery elm."
Akira picked up one of the stalks, sniffed it. "Still smells like something Noboru would eat by accident."
She smirked. "He did. Two weeks ago. I had to pump his stomach."
"...Impressive."
A pause stretched between them, easy and familiar.
Then, softer: "I remember when you didn't talk at all."
Asenari raised an eyebrow. "You used to glare at everyone like they'd stolen your soul."
"They might've."
"Still could."
He chuckled—a low, rare sound. The type only she ever got out of him. The breeze stirred his dark hair. A crow cawed somewhere above, unseen.
Asenari sat beside him and pulled out her field notes—rows of clean sketches and precise calligraphy, meticulous and intentional. She had built her knowledge the hard way: scavenging half-burned books from mission junkpiles, sneaking into clinics, memorizing what little the medics said while they treated others.
She didn't have a mother to teach her. But she learned anyway.
Akira glanced sideways.
"I never asked… why medical ninjutsu?"
Her hand paused over the page. The ink hovered above a half-finished sketch of muscle tissue.
"I got tired of waiting for someone else to care if we lived."
There it was again—that quiet fire.
Not rage. Not grief.
Just the calm certainty of someone who had survived, and planned to keep doing so.
Akira leaned back against the tree trunk. "I used to think all healing was just delaying the inevitable."
Asenari didn't look up. "Maybe it is. But sometimes that delay's the difference between a name on a gravestone and one in a mission file."
"Morbid."
"Realistic."
He exhaled slowly. She was right, of course. She always had been.
They were genin now. Team 11. Noboru was probably already throwing kunai at squirrels again. Their new sensei hadn't shown up yet—probably on purpose. Standard tactic: let the kids squirm a bit before sizing them up.
Everything was about to change.
But here, in this quiet moment beneath the trees and the sky, with paper rustling and herbs drying in the breeze, they could almost pretend the world made sense.
Almost.
---