Don't own D. Gray Man or Naruto.

Don't own the Cover Art.

Beginning

Saying that Yuushi took to the sealing arts like a duck to water would be like saying that the desert was a little dry; the moment he opened the books on beginning sealing the words and meanings to each seal were like a language in themselves, and Yuushi had been a native speaker the entire time. Ideas and arrays surrounded him in the orphanage, an impromptu nest that he'd fallen asleep on more than once.

Anko and Kaede had tried to study with him in the beginning, before giving up as the theories flew over their heads while Yuushi soaked them up like a sponge. They then decided to help him by making sure he ate and slept. Anko's parents also joined in after he'd walked into their shop one day after an all-nighter with sunken cheeks and dark bags under his eyes.

Kaede's tears and Anko's dressing down following his arrival into the shop had been enough to make Yuushi promise to sleep at least 4 hours on the weekends, his voice only just hiding his confusion and his chest suspiciously warm.

He didn't quite understand what he'd done to get such wonderful friends in this world, but their concern was enough to make him slow down a little in his endless quest for sealing knowledge. So he studied a little more smartly, making sure that he could recognize seals of all types, particularly tattooed or ingrained seals.

It was as Yuushi was changing out of his clothes one day that he caught sight of the birthmark on his collarbone. Normally he would just glance at it then look away, used to it by then, but he'd been researching seals that changed color after activation that day and he paused. Curious of the thoughts drifting around in his head, the redhead stepped closer to the mirror and looked more carefully. Now that he knew what to look for, he could see it clear as day; the slight curve to the right, the "erratic" dots that surrounded the main part. Pulsing his chakra faintly in the typical seal detection manner only confirmed it.

There was a seal on Yuushi, and the boy had no idea why.

But when would he have received it? He'd had the birthmark all his life; there was even a picture of him as a child wearing a shirt far too big for him with the seal out for all the world to see. The ten year old blinked and cupped his chin thoughtfully. Had his mother put it on him? For what purpose?

Yuushi shrugged it off for now, but kept a mental note about it. Once he was able to decipher the intricate seal to figure out what it was doing, he'd decide what to do with it. Until then, it was still little more than a birthmark.

He could wait to figure out that particular mystery.

"Give me back my brush, Anko!" The boy shouted as he raced her down the street, but Anko didn't slow down a lick and instead cackled maniacally back at him, loud enough for him to hear if his enraged howl was anything to go by.

If he studied those seals of his any longer today, his eyes would've fallen out! Really, Anko was just being a good friend and making sure he didn't burn himself out too quickly. The circus had already left, taking Kaida with it, so Yuushi had some months before she'd be back and he was already making some frightening progress with seals.

The redhead could now make about two explosive tags a minute and had already figured out the smoke bomb variant that was mentioned in a few of the books as exercises to recognizing seal structure. He also had at least two storage scrolls full of storage scrolls, and Anko felt no hesitation in asking for a few from time to time. He really needed to sell some of those.

It'd only been two weeks and already Yuushi was studying preservation seals and theorizing on his own variants to the basic model, if what she understood from his notes and explanations was correct.

But she did understand what was pushing him. Yuushi wasn't one to love without committing himself fully to the endeavor. If he befriended a person, they only had to call for Yuushi to come rushing to their side, whether it be for help in choosing what outfit to buy the few times she went shopping or a sparring partner to test out a new strategy or technique.

Yuushi loved and protected with his entire being and somehow, in the few minutes he spoke to her, he'd brought Kaida under his wing, and to see her leaving the village and being forced to obey that bastard of a ringleader was probably tearing Yuushi apart. That's why Anko was doing this.

She needed to remind him that he wasn't alone in this struggle. She and Kaede were going to be there, doing whatever they needed to keep their best friend from falling apart at the seams.

With these thoughts running around in her head, Anko lost track of where she was and so startled when she collided with someone and fell to the ground. A hand shot out and, for a moment, the girl thought it was to keep her from falling. Instead it took hold of the brush in her hand, and tugged it out of her hand efficiently.

Anko was spewing curses even as she fell to the ground.

Yuushi appeared moments later, and a paused to catch his breath and try and laugh at her at the same time. Anko growled. "This bastard let me fall!" she accused, pointing at the blankly staring man.

Yuushi struggled to breathe around his giggles. "You nearly bowled him over, Anko; you totally deserved it!" He finally got his act together and took a few deep breaths standing up straight and nodding to the man. "Thanks for making sure my brush would stay safe. I appreciate it."

The man stared at the redhead for a moment, then handed the brush back. "I saw that it was of a particularly good quality, and didn't want it damaged."

Yuushi beamed back. "You have a good eye." The man gave him a strange look and walked off, and Anko waited until the man was out of hearing range before she let out a loud laugh.

"Seriously, Yuushi? 'You have a good eye'? I'm kind of surprised he wasn't offended!" Yuushi cocked an eyebrow as he helped her up.

"Why would he have been offended? I was sincere. He has an incredible attention to detail to notice something like that so quickly."

Anko stared at him with something akin to amazement. For such a smart kid, Yuushi could be such an idiot sometimes. "Yuushi, that was an Uchiha."

The redhead stared back at her for a moment before hitting a fist into his open palm. "That would explain it!"

"You wrote a report about their first patriarch and you didn't even know what they looked like?!"

"Didn't know what who looked like?" Kaede had just joined them, and stared at them with curious blue eyes.

Anko snorted and jerked a thumb over at the faintly scowling redhead. "The genius here didn't know what an Uchiha looked like, even though he wrote a report on Madara."

"Why would I know what they looked like?" Yuushi snipped back defensively. "It's not like I run around getting arrested like somebody here!"

As Anko loudly denied such accusations, Kaede just shook his head at the two of them. "But really, Yuushi. How did you not know what the Uchiha look like?"

Yuushi frowned at the question, but it was directed more at the two in front of him. "Why do you guys say it like that?" he asked them, serious and silencing Anko with the force of his question. "'What the Uchiha look like'. You make them sound like something completely different from us. Like they sprout wings every other Monday and dance in front of fires. They look like us, a mixture of genes similar yet unique to every single one of them." He looked disapproving. "You guys make it sound like they aren't one of us."

Kaede shuffled his feet at the words while Anko scowled back at redhead. "They aren't one of us, Yuushi. They skulk around like they own the place, the noses turned up at everyone and everything."

"So do the Hyuuga, by your standards," Yuushi countered, beginning to get angry. "But you aren't nearly as disdainful about it."

"That's because I can trust the Hyuuga!" Anko snapped, and knew she'd gone too far when Yuushi's eyes iced over.

"And how do you know that," he whispered heatedly, his chakra rising in response to his intense anger. "Can you read every one of their minds, and know that absolutely none of them mean harm? Can you do the same to every Uchiha, even the little toddlers that want for nothing but the love of their parents, and see evil in them? Can you really grab two families, and shove them into separate boxes entirely?" His chakra entered a crescendo, before abruptly dying, and Anko looked up at Yuushi and flinched.

His eyes stared back at her with a tiredness she'd never seen from him before. "I deal with discrimination like that on a daily basis, Anko," he told her sadly, tugging at his worn clothes, "I won't have friends who do the same thing to someone else." He turned and walked away, the light-hearted moment completely shattered between them as he disappeared into the crowd, Kaede shocked and Anko unsure what to do.

Kaede made up her mind for her as he spun around to glare at her. "We are going to go apologize," he told her, grabbing her arm in a grip she wouldn't be able to shrug off. "Now."

Anko struggled regardless. "Why should I?!" She rebutted, only to flinch as Kaede's grip tightened and Kaede shot her a dark look.

"Because Yuushi already has a hard time without his friends going around and making him doubt that they'll always be around for him."

Anko was completely stumped by that statement. "Why would he doubt us sticking around? We're friends."

"Didn't you hear him? He deals with that kind of stuff on a daily basis, probably from some shinobi and civilians that scorn orphans joining the shinobi forces, and here we are acting like that. And besides, Yuushi's an orphan; what if he finds out one day that one his parents was an Uchiha? He'd think we would immediately hate him after that, just because of his parents." Anko flinched a little at that. She hadn't meant it that way; she just let her mouth run away from her again.

"Alright, alright," she snatched her arm back and sped up to jog through the crowd, Kaede beside her. "I get your point. Let's just go apologize and hope that Yuushi will forgive us."

Behind the two kids, a pair of Uchiha that had overheard the argument shot one another looks, before continuing on their patrol.

"Where the hell did he run off to?" Kaede heard Anko mutter to herself after ten minutes of looking for Yuushi, and fought back the urge to scowl. She didn't have the right to complain.

No, he berated himself silently, it wasn't her fault that things blow up like they did; Yuushi has always been a person who couldn't care less about other people's opinions, barring perhaps his friends, so it made sense that it would chafe to hear one of his friends speaking in general terms about a group of people. And Kaede had been silently agreeing with Anko during the entire fight before Yuushi gave his last words, and immediately a feeling of shame swept through Kaede.

His parents did the same thing, the brunette remembered with a sick feeling in his stomach, telling him to stay away from Yuushi as he was an orphan.

"He's dirty, and will only rob you blind under a pretense of friendship," his mother had warned him, an ugly sneer on her normally pretty face, his dad nodding beside her. "Orphans are just society's scum, Kaede; don't be drawn in by one."

Kaede, not so surprisingly, felt a flash of anger at his parents' words. "You don't even know Yuushi," he reminded them icily, a complete contrast to the fire burning in his heart. "He's the first person to be nice to me at the Academy, and he doesn't mind when I lose myself and start lecturing about random topics to him. Hell, he helped me get over the shock of my first kill, and didn't tease me at all."

His mother sniffed. "Regardless," she told him loftily, "you are to no longer talk with him. He's an orphan, Kaede; he'll just be another nameless death sooner or later, with no one but that Anko girl to remember him." His father grunted in agreement and, for the first time in his life, Kaede saw his parents without any of their masks on. And he didn't like what he saw.

"No," he told them sternly. "Yuushi is my friend, and the only reason I even have another, and I won't let you take that away from me." He stormed up to his room after that, ignoring his parents' shouts for him to come back down. In his room, Kaede gripped the goggles around his neck, and found his resolve grow even stronger. "I won't let them take him away," he repeated quietly. And he meant every word.

Kaede was broken out of his memories as Anko made a triumphant sound and sped up, and Kaede finally saw what she did as he picked up his own pace. Yuushi was sitting at their usual dango stand, staring at the countertop as he mechanically ate the stick of dango in his hand. His head snapped up as their footsteps grew closer, and Kaede felt like scum as he registered the wariness on the redhead's face. He opened his mouth to apologize, but Anko beat him to it.

"Yuushi, I'm sorry, alright?" She looked at him with desperate sincerity. "I was being a bitch, and acting like all of those ignorant villagers and lower-rank shinobi. You're right, everyone's a bit different in their own way; I was just being to hard-headed to really see it. But I don't want to lose you over something like this, so I'm really really sorry." She fidgeted a little as she finished and Yuushi looked at them both to gauge their honesty.

Finally his eyes warmed. "You'll try to do better?" They both nodded so quickly they threatened whiplash, and Yuushi smiled at them. "Then I forgive you." They continued their seemingly aimless meandering through the village, but Anko and Kaede knew that they wouldn't be forgetting this conversation for some time to come, if they ever forgot it at all.

"So," Yuushi began, interrupting the other two's silent conversation and causing them to focus on him. "The Final Exam's coming up. Think you're ready?"

"Hell yeah I'm ready!" Anko cheered, folding her arms behind her head and grinning cheerfully at them. "I'll ace the weapons portion and Ninjutsu easily. I mean, who can't make a bunshin?" The dig hit its mark as the redhead sulked a little in response.

"Shut up, it's not my fault my chakra is huge. I am water walking without a problem and I can't make a single clone. This is ridiculous."

"You really do have too much chakra," Kaede agreed sympathetically as Anko cackled beside them. "Do you think you'll be able to pass? They put a lot of weight in the Ninjutsu portion of the test."

"It'll be a huge hit to my grade, but I should ace the other stuff and thus pass. At the very least I'll make good cannon fodder," he joked morbidly, getting disapproving looks from the other two in response. He cleared his throat awkwardly in an attempt to escape their looks. "Anyway, how do you think you'll do Kaede?"

"Fairly well," the brunet answered easily. "With you too pop quizzing me and each other constantly I think I have a good grasp of the history portion, my weapon skills are average at best, and I have the best chakra control out of all of us that can make a clone," he tacked on at the end when Yuushi shot him a sullen look.

"So say we all pass," Yuushi continued, ignoring Anko's muffled snickering as Kaede shot him an apologetic look. "Who would be our teams, or our sensei?"

"Well," Anko jumped in, smile darkly amused. "If they're fucking stupid enough to assign us to different teams, your teammates will…likely suffer from unfortunate accidents. My pre-planned condolences." Yuushi snorted a little while Kaede shot her a horrified look. "As for sensei…who knows? None of the jounin have really talked about who's applying to be a sensei this year at my parent's stand, so I'm in the dark."

"I'm an orphan," Yuushi deadpanned. "I don't know any jounin on a first name basis."

"My family doesn't like to communicate with the shinobi," Kaede admitted, eyes dropping a little in shame before Anko nudged him out of it. "As such, I don't know any jounin either."

"So…we're all in the dark about our potential sensei," she groused. "Wonderful."

"Oh my gosh, Yuushi," Anko exclaimed, amused when the redhead walked in the day after the Final Exam. "You actually managed to pass!"

The girl cackled as Yuushi threw a senbon on her, catching it between her fingers as she leaned back. Kaede, sitting beside her, obligingly smacked her when Yuushi aimed a look at him. As she spun around to yell at him, Yuushi slipped into his seat beside her and took his senbon back.

It didn't take long after his arrival for the Academy teacher to show up and begin assigning teams. "Team Four," he finally said, Yuushi and Anko barely paying attention. "Yuushi, Mitarashi Anko, and Aikawa Kaede." Having perked up at the first of their names being called, Anko whooped in glee and Yuushi punched the air in exuberance.

"Woohoo! Hear that, guys? Team Four! That can only mean good things for us!"

"Or, at the very least, bad things for our enemies," Kaede drawled.

They completely ignored the other teams being called out and instead chatted quietly to one another – Kaede and Yuushi doing most of the talking as Anko doesn't know the meaning of the word "quiet" – and waited for the teacher to dismiss them. They didn't have to wait long.

"I'm sorry to interrupt," an unrepentant voice cut in, making their sensei screech to a halt in his listing. "I appear to have come too early. None the less, I am here for my students." Golden eyes flashed across the room before zeroing in on Yuushi and his friends.

A smirk crossed the man's face. "Team Four, I am your sensei, Orochimaru," The Snake Sage introduced, the look in his eyes wicked. "It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

Woo! Finished chapter 4! Sorry if I seemed to jump from place to place, I tried to keep the story's flow consistent. And so we see Yuushi's beginning fascination with the Uchiha and the Uchiha's returned curiosity with Yuushi. This will continue being a thing.

Please Review.

Ja ne!