Their relationship had started out with him camping out in the Uchiha Compound, and not in an out of the way alley, no, but in front of his own house! As if he was saying 'I'm here to stay, if you have a problem, come at me'.
...
Unfortunately, until Sasuke was strong enough, he couldn't turn away a single opportunity to become stronger, and until he reached S-rank, that meant sucking up the sneer and disrespect that he felt towards those stronger than himself, at least long enough to learn something out of it.
Sasuke could have someone kick him out. He was far from powerless, he knew that much, as the last Uchiha-sama loyal to the village, he couldn't easily be buffed away when he voiced complaints.
Even if that hadn't stopped the Hokage himself from butting in and forbidding Sasuke from jumping ahead of a class or three at the Academy, despite his more than stellar results.
No, the annoying chunin, who went ahead becoming one of the Twelve Fire Guardians first and join right when he returned a Jonin, had presented himself with some sort of spar, pushing Sasuke again and again, forcing him out of patterns he didn't even know he had adopted. Then, in a few months, he just... talked.
Often not expecting Sasuke to answer. He talked about Sasuke's errors, firing him to pay attention, and talked about random stuff.
Sadly, the two topics of conversation that Daiki mainly kept up with himself (those being stuff that interested Sasuke and what did not), were strictly intertwined, forcing the Last Loyal Uchiha to pay attention to almost everything that was being said.
Almost unwillingly, Sasuke had found himself considering the words of the older shinobi, who remarked that originality and creativity were of paramount importance, without underselling the severe discipline that the genin had kept up since he first started practising the Great Fireball.
The human mind is akin to a river, from the source it is born from, through rapids and waterfalls, to calm currents and through lakes, you cannot force it all the time: true creativity is born out of the combination of a multitude of different experiences the mind goes through.
Sasuke recalled his words with a slight frown, at first he had been reprimanding himself again and again when he found his thoughts roaming pretty much randomly across the encounters he had with the older ninja.
Surprisingly enough, learning how to play that Guitar that Daiki had quite frankly pulled out of his ass had taught him something that he would have picked up only after several missions run back to back, like many of the chunin force of Konoha-nin were slowly coming to learn: rhythm, which translated itself in timing and pacing oneself.
Sasuke moved with the bare minimum of speed that he could get away with, preserving his strength, not talking, assuming a somewhat relaxed mental state that allowed his senses to pick up irregularities without needing him tense as a guitar's string.
The day had begun badly enough, heavy clouds covering the sun from view and even heavier rain that crashed down on the forest that the Third Batallion of the Chunin Force was crossing to intercept the Iwa Chunin Force which was gunning for some objective that Sasuke didn't have the clearance to know.
The morning had consumed itself in a silence that was tense for most of the people around him, but he hadn't minded that. Orders to keep quiet were welcome in his opinion, he didn't have to feign interest in his compatriots' lives.
Sasuke exhaled slowly as he jumped above a thick root, following the movements of the Jonin keeping an eye out for his section of the Battalion with the Sharingan, burning in his own mind how the teller and somewhat bulkier man shifted his weight in order to optimize his own movements.
Sasuke had unlocked his Sharingan on his first C-Rank mission, turned A-Rank, back in Wave, and since then he had slowly been building upon it.
He only had two commas on each eye, he knew that much, but it was enough to memorize movements, if not to unlock the more powerful abilities of his bloodline.
In any case, keeping it active for as long as he could, had slowly but surely increased his resistance to the drain to his ever-growing chakra reserves, while the transition had become smoother and smoother, until he could activate and deactivate them from blink to blink.
The heavy rain contributed in a not insignificant way to keep the Chunin Battalion from being tracked from the racket that they made when this or that dumbass stumbled.
Shinobi were silent beings, Sasuke had made that philosophy his own in a way few others could understand. His... Ita... no, that man had been quiet, always smiling slightly, always there, always family. Until he wasn't. So, Sasuke kept quiet as much as he could, keeping his expression from betraying his own thoughts, and thusly keeping them quiet too.
Then Daiki had come barrelling in his compound, freely pushing him to his limits and somehow managing to convince him to pick up a guitar and attending the plants into the small green-house that he had set up (Without the Last Uchiha's permission, obviously).
Sasuke had found out for himself that there was something that run deeper than his thoughts after a few weeks of him playing the guitar.
It was... difficult, at the beginning he hadn't truly understood what was happening, but slowly, as his mind associated each sound that the guitar could produce to the different configurations that his fingers assumed over the strings, he had let out those thoughts that he had kept quiet for all of his life.
Sasuke, after years of casually applying his far above average intellect to music and the somewhat mind-numbing actions required to keep up the green-house, had come to realize how that part of his mind that he always kept quiet influenced his movements and actions.
It wasn't something that he would have noticed while practising the rigorous katas of his clan traditional taijutsu, nor Bukijutsu, since both practices required absolute control of even the slightest movement.
There was something, beyond the ... HATE... that always roared in the core of his being, there was ... just something.
Something else, something different. A note or a ripple that occasionally emerged when he modified this or that piece of music that he had learned from Daiki, turning an accord into a minor one, making the music sound somewhat sadder or just more defeated than he would have liked.
Yet, when Sasuke managed to let go of everything but the Guitar, refusing to replicate what he had already learned, in more than one occasion his fingers had kept moving, echoing that note that was less and less subdued the more he kept following it.
That spark, that trembling wavering just behind the roaring fire that was his HATE. And even in his thoughts, Sasuke called the deafening cursing of his feelings for everything HATE, since it was what was needed for the Lat Loyal Uchiha to revenge his clan and clean its name.
Sometimes, in those rare and uncommon stretches of time during which Sasuke managed to find the buried note of something-not-HATE within himself, he had caught himself slowly trailing a finger underneath a damp leaf inside the greenhouse, as if he was reassuring the mindless vegetables.
Or he had realized, with some sort of detached surprise, that his fingers echoed something-not-HATE that he otherwise would have never realized was there.
While Daiki had been away as a Guardian for the Fire Lord, Sasuke had tried, occasionally, to find the mindset in which he could distinguish the note beyond the HATE as he practised against a wooden pole. He couldn't really tell, but he had felt like his strikes were more controlled.
That absolute crushing weight that he otherwise put behind every single punch had become something ready to be unleashed on his command, instead of the only thing that he was capable about.
Sasuke had always been better than his peers, and yet, while he was alone and managed to find that particular mindset, he found that he expected Daiki to somehow hear of that change and commenting, if in a positive or negative way, the Last Uchiha could only guess.
In any case, after more than a week of breakneck march through the forest (breakneck for his less than stellar chunin compatriots), Sasuke had found that the constant movements that mimicked the Jonin he had been studying, had lulled him in that strange mindset in which he could observe himself almost as if he was an external element, his mind classifying and identifying what his senses picked up without conscious input from the young Uchiha.
That was why, when the white noise of the downpour suddenly became unbalanced towards his left, his blood-red eyes immediately found the messenger signalling to the Jonin, his eyes memorising the hand signs that communicated the news without any strain on his mind.
Sasuke' eyes immediately turned to the Jonin he had been mimicking for the past few days, recognizing the infinitesimal clenching of the jaw, the telling twitch of his left hand, the blink of his eyes that came just a tad bit too fast, and the straightening of his shoulders.
He knew what he was going to say before his hands started to rely orders in the Konoha-standard-sign-language.
' FIGHT - IWA FORCES E.T.A. 4 MINUTES - FORMATION 8- SCATTER' what the join hadn't placed in his hand signs, however, was clear to Sasuke: fear.
With a detached series of movements, Sasuke saw himself jump upwards the trunk of a tree while his fingers fished out a couple of kunai that he had already prepared with ninja-wire.
If the Jonin was scared, it either meant a much larger force than the one of the Third Battalion, or simply one composed by higher-ranked shinobi. In any case, the Last Uchiha would keep going, the note behind the HATE trembling just a tiny bit more, making itself known.
To take down that man, Sasuke knew that he needed to reach S-rank. However, with his new detached and calmer mentality, the Uchiha knew that for him to reach that level, he would need to survive first.
...
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