The Old Bell Next Door

After Fire Line class, Che's throat had been warned not to strain itself carelessly, but the wind of East Row Two soon carried another kind of sound to his door.

A new district only truly began to feel like a place to live when the neighbors did.

For the first few days after they moved in, every door in East Row Two stayed tightly shut. Adults were busy taking inventory, children were busy getting used to the sound of the wind, and whenever patrol footsteps passed at night, people inside lowered their voices. But by the fifth day, the smell of food began drifting through the cracks beneath doors, water buckets clinked beside the water point, and children finally dared to linger by the roadside a little longer.

It was on that day that the old man next door heard Saori's broken bell.

Che was squatting at the doorway, whittling wood chips. He had picked up the scraps beside the training ground and wanted to carve them into little wooden markers for labeling practice sheets. Kiyo sat beside him, watching with the solemn expression of someone overseeing the manufacture of ninja tools.

"Can that be used as a kunai?" Kiyo asked.

"If the enemy is a rice ball, maybe."

"Why is a rice ball the enemy?"

"Because it nearly defeated you this morning."

Kiyo wanted to argue, but remembering how slowly he had indeed eaten, he could only shut his mouth.

Saori came out from next door with her doll in her arms. She had sewn the broken bell back on, and the stitches were much finer now. When the wind blew, the bell bumped against the doll's collar and gave off a faint, hoarse jingle.

It was not a clear bell sound.

Yet it sounded more like a sound than it had a few days ago.

The door next door suddenly opened.

An elderly Uchiha man with graying hair stood inside, holding an old teacup. He looked at the doll in Saori's arms—or rather, at the broken bell.

Saori immediately stopped.

Kiyo grew tense too, as though they had just done something serious enough to be entered into a file.

The old man spoke. "Whose bell is that?"

Saori hugged the doll tighter and did not answer.

Che set down the wood chip and stood. "It's hers."

The old man looked at him. "I asked her."

Che closed his mouth.

Saori lowered her head, her voice tiny. "My mother gave it to me."

The old man was silent for a while before walking out. His left leg limped slightly, and one of his wooden sandals dragged softly across the ground as he walked. Che noticed the faded, worn old insignia of the Military Police Force on his cuff. The old man had probably once served in the Military Police Force, though he had long since retired.

"The clapper is crooked," the old man said.

Saori looked up. "Can you fix it?"

"I can make it sound more like a bell. I can't promise it'll sound like it used to."

Saori looked at her doll, as if weighing whether "more like a bell" was enough.

Kiyo murmured, "More like a bell is already good."

The old man glanced at Kiyo, then turned to Che. "What are you whittling those wood chips for?"

Che looked down at his half-finished work. "Little markers for keeping records."

"Records of what?"

"Training. Water collection. Wind direction. Rice ball combat strength."

The old man frowned. "What's that last one?"

"Life experience."

The old man stared at him for a moment, then suddenly snorted. "Kids these days talk like they're taking the long way around."

Che wanted very much to say that taking the long way was sometimes safer, but he held it in.

The old man told Saori to bring the doll inside. Saori hesitated, but Che did not urge her. After a while, she carefully followed him in. Kiyo wanted to go too, but Che caught him by the back of his collar.

"What are you going in for?"

"I want to watch him fix the bell."

"You're too enthusiastic. You'll make the bell nervous."

Kiyo thought about it seriously and decided that made sense.

Faint metallic sounds came from the old man's house. Che sat back down at the door and resumed whittling, though he was no longer very focused. He heard the old man ask Saori's name, ask when the bell had broken, ask whether her mother had come from the southern side. Saori's answers were brief, but she did not fall completely silent.

That was rare.

Saori usually seemed to fold herself up behind her doll. When someone asked her something, she only revealed the tiniest corner of herself. But the bell was something she was willing to show others. Its broken sound had instead become a thin thread connecting her to the old man next door.

Not long afterward, the bell rang once.

It was still somewhat hoarse, but clearer than before.

Kiyo's eyes lit up. "It rang!"

Che stopped whittling too.

The sound was brief, like some small object in the old clan district that had not been completely burned away finding its place again in the new district.

When Saori came out, her eyes were a little red, but her lips were curved in a smile. The old man followed behind her and handed Che a short piece of thin wire.

"Your hands drift too much when you whittle. You'll cut your fingers easily. Use this to press the line down. Don't force it with your fingertips."

Che accepted the wire. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me too soon," the old man said. "If the children in your row get noisy later, I'll scold you."

"Then we'll try to be noisy rhythmically."

The old man glared at him.

Nao happened to be returning from the water point. Hearing that, she swept Che with a cool glance.

Che immediately corrected himself. "I mean, we'll try not to be noisy."

The old man snorted. Before closing his door, he looked once more at Saori's bell.

During evening training, Saori set her doll beside the field. Whenever the wind blew, the bell would ring occasionally. Each time it did, Kiyo could not help turning around. Uchiha Jian reminded him twice, and the third time, he directly made him stand for an extra quarter hour.

Kiyo looked aggrieved. "It rang by itself."

Jian said, "Do enemies ring by themselves too?"

Che said quietly, "Some enemies don't. Rice balls do."

Kiyo nearly burst out laughing, and his stance crooked again.

Jian's gaze fell on them.

Che immediately looked into the distance, as if nothing had happened.

That night, Che wrote in his records:

Neighboring old man, highly likely retired Military Police Force, old injury in left leg, can fix bells.

After writing that, he thought for a moment, crossed out "highly likely," and changed it to:

Neighboring old man scolds people and fixes bells.

That sounded more like what had truly happened today.

Then he wrote:

The new district is beginning to have sounds.

Not patrol sounds, not wind, not the sound of wooden crates being dragged.

The smell of food, water buckets, children's laughter, the faint metallic sound of an old man repairing a bell.

The edge was still the edge.

But life was beginning to grow even at the edge.

After dinner that day, the old man next door sat outside with his teacup.

He did not speak first. He merely placed an old file on his knee and slowly wiped it. Kiyo wanted to go over and look, but Nao pinned him in place with a glance. Saori stood in the doorway hugging her doll, and the bell occasionally rang in the wind. Every time it rang, she lowered her head to check whether the thread had loosened.

Che sat on his own threshold with his bowl in hand and felt that East Row Two had suddenly developed a strange kind of order: the old man was responsible for pretending not to care, Saori was responsible for pretending she was only passing by, Kiyo was responsible for obviously wanting to join the excitement, and Nao was responsible for stopping all the children from actually doing so.

In the end, the old man spoke first.

"Don't shake the bell every day."

Saori immediately stopped moving.

The old man added, "The new thread needs a few days to settle. If you shake it loose, I won't fix it a second time."

The words sounded harsh, but Che understood the meaning beneath them: the old man knew the bell was important to Saori, which was why he reminded her not to rush.

Saori said softly, "I'll be gentler."

The old man snorted and continued wiping the file.

Kiyo held himself back for a long time before finally asking, "Grandpa, did you used to catch bad guys?"

Nao's chopsticks froze in midair.

Che looked at Kiyo too, thinking that this child's straight-line questions were sometimes more dangerous than kunai.

But the old man did not get angry. He looked at the file in his hands, and only after a while did he speak. "I caught them. And I caught the wrong ones too."

Kiyo froze. "What do you do if you catch the wrong one?"

"Apologize. Compensate them. Remember it," the old man said. "Some things can be made up for. Some can't."

The wind swept along the road, and the bell rang softly once.

Che stored those words in his heart. The Military Police Force was not a symbol. Within it were old men who repaired bells, scolded children, and admitted they had arrested the wrong people. Konoha was not a single mass of black, and the Uchiha were not a single mass of white. But politics and hatred loved nothing more than burning people into the same color.

He suddenly remembered the piece of wood Takuya had mentioned.

You could not assume the whole piece of wood was the same just because you saw black.

That observation was becoming a more difficult kind of judgment.

Only later did Che learn that the old man next door was called Uchiha Sosuke.

Nao told him the name. She said Sosuke had once handled street disputes for the Military Police Force. He was not mild-tempered, but he was handy enough to repair door latches, bells, and old ninja tools. On Nine-Tails Night, a collapsed beam had crushed his left leg, leaving him with a permanent drag in his step.

"Don't keep bothering him," Nao said.

Che nodded. "I'll try to only listen when he takes the initiative to scold someone."

Nao looked at him. "There's no sincerity at all in that 'try.'"

"Then I'll make an effort."

"That's not much better."

Che smiled and said nothing more. Sosuke's presence gave East Row Two another texture left over from the old clan district. Not all of the past remained in ruins. Some of it dragged an injured leg, held a teacup, and continued scolding children outside a new doorway.