Commoner Problems

Because I just realized that there's a whole new perspective to explore.

Yamazaki Midori was not a shinobi. Not one bit. They'd checked him for chakra at the age of three and hummed that he could possibly enter the academy, but everyone knew they failed all the civilians eventually. And Midori was a normal person. No wild dreams, no suicidal personality-traits, and no excessive tsuyoku naritai because that stuff was far too outdated. Nope. He was normal.

He spent his life reading good literature and studying to become a tailor. And trying to forget the fact that he had a girl's name.

.

At the age of fifteen, Midori met his very first shinobi close-up. It happened on his way home, down the sunlit paths of Konoha, amid the evening breeze. He was walking down this path, minding his own business and admiring the Sakura blossoms, when he saw her.

She was turned away from him, but beauty almost radiated off her silhouette. Her hair matched the blossoms perfectly, blowing gently in the wind. And damn it was pink, pinker than his cheeks at that moment, and he just knew, knew that when she turned around and revealed the face that went with that hair she would be stunning.

Haruno Sakura turned to look at him. He had been right.

And then he saw the forehead protector around her neck.

"Nope," he grunted, turning away. "Not worth it."

.

It wasn't often that he had to visit the Yamanaka flower shop, but there was this girl he really liked and he'd heard that the owner was quite skilled with flowers, even if she was one of the shinobi.

So this was how Midori found himself hesitantly pointing to a bouquet selection over the counter, trying to hide the blush forming on his cheeks. The blond girl's eyes lit up, and she started firing questions like it was part of her job description.

"Who's it for?~"

"A girl."

"What kind of girl?~"

"Just someone I know," he grudgingly pulled a handful of coins from his back pocket. "Listen, I don't know a thing about flowers, but make sure it says something… um… lame. Like 'I love you', or something like that." He tried to hide his burning cheeks but the dammed kunoichi girl was eyeing him like some kind of hawk.

"Owahh!" She wriggled in delight. "That's so cute, Midori-kun!"

How the hell did she know his name? Damn shinobi.

"Could you just give me a stupid bunch of flowers?"

"Sure~" Ino drew out an elaborate arrangement of vivid red flowers, a mix of roses and carnations and stalks of buds. "This must be what you're looking for, then. It means 'I'd die for you, my love.''"

"Yeah yeah how much is it?" He muttered.

"Two thousand ryo."

"That's expensive!" He gaped at her.

Ino pouted. "How are you willing to die for her if you can't even empty your pockets for her?..."

"I don't want to die for her! I just want enter a normal relationship and maybe break up after a while!"

"Ah but that's what you have to avoid!" With that, she leaned over the counter, exposing the copious size of her chest and nonchalantly distracting his mind from the amount his fingers were drawing out of his wallet. "See, this is how we shinobi profess our love for each other. Oh! The transience of life!"

"This is how we shinobi profess our love."

Midori dropped the bouquet and ran out of the shop.

He didn't want to have a shinobi relationship. Most shinobi relationships lasted all of three seconds.

.

The chunin exams, he was told, was a wonderful thing that happened about every four years in Konoha when little shinobi from all across the Five Countries came by and beat each other to death. For this reason, Midori locked all of his doors, told the mailman not to come until next Sunday, and hid out inside his bedroom where it was presumably safe.

It was perfect, he mused as he took out a pen and started calculating his business's profit and loss account for that civilian fiscal year. A great opportunity to ignore the craziness of the world and just do the things that would maybe get him through life in a nice house with a family of two kids. The chunin exams lasted about a month, and during this time all the contact he had with the outside world was his daily look out the window, just to ascertain that the world hadn't ended yet.

The first twenty-nine days passed peacefully, and Midori whistled and made his way thought a balance sheet, creating his budget for next year. Clothes sales were high this season, especially among young girls.

On the thirtieth day, he yawned, crawled out of bed sometime after noon, and glanced out the window to see a giant sand monster rising from what seemed to be the depths of hell and roaring loudly enough to shake the earth. His window shattered with the force.

Midori carefully shut what was left of the curtains and crawled back into his bed.

.

There was, he mused, no one in the village who had not yet come across Uzumaki Naruto. Because Uzumaki Naruto was the picturesque idiot hero that every village inevitably had. That one kid whose life goal seemed to be hammering his name into everybody's psyche and wouldn't stop until he'd saved your life at least three different times.

Midori's turn came when he was twenty years old, and walking down the street, humming to himself with a bundle of his latest merchandise in his arms. The past two years had been good for him. Business had gone well, everyone liked his new Suna-inspired women's clothing line, and that Uzumaki Naruto kid had been out of the village.

At that moment, a clang sounded above him, and he looked up to see a bundle of orange carefully balanced on the street pole by his house, looking around the village with one hand shading his eyes.

"This place hasn't changed a bit!" Uzumaki Naruto exclaimed.

"Get off my street pole!" Midori yelled up at him.

.

Yamazaki Umi was a civilian girl. She was the kind of character that mangaka use to fill in crowd space when they don't have enough characters to go around. Which isn't necessarily a problem in this particular show, but it suffices to say that she was as normal as they come.

But every kid is, in some way, attracted to the concept of greatness, and Yamazaki Umi hadn't inherited an inclination for the opposite from her father. So she watched the procession of new genin touring the academy with their fingers stick from candy and their eyes wide open, and her heart fluttered with excitement. She pulled at her father's hand.

"Tou-chan, I want to go be a shinobi!" Umi squealed.

"No," Midori told her. "Spare me, please."