A Record of Not Fighting

Yamashiro Takuma's record arrived sooner than Che had expected.

The next morning, Mine clipped a thin sheet of paper to the board without reading it right away. A small stone weighed down one corner, and whenever the wind slipped in through the window, the page trembled lightly, as if it knew today's contents would not be easy to read aloud.

Kiyo sat perfectly straight.

Saori hugged her cloth doll, the bell not wrapped too tightly. Che saw her fingertips pressing against the bell's edge, loosening and tightening. Keisuke sat in the back row, his face colder than yesterday. His eyes were on the board, but he looked at no one.

Mine finally spoke. "Yesterday was about familiarizing yourselves with the process. The Academy recorded several points. First, Group Two as a whole completed the route smoothly. Second, during the water-trough formation, you adjusted according to instructions. Third, signs of a verbal conflict arose on the return trip, but no one fought, and you stopped before a teacher needed to intervene."

No one fought.

Those three words landed in the classroom like a stone—not too heavy, but not light either.

Kiyo asked softly, "That needs to be recorded too?"

Mine looked at him. "Of course it does."

"But we didn't fight."

"That's exactly why it is worth recording," Mine said. "Many records do not only state what you did. They also state what you did not allow things to become."

Che lowered his head and looked at his hands.

Last night, he had written, "No fighting. Do not turn words into blades." Now, that same meaning had appeared in the Academy's record, and it felt strange. It was neither praise nor punishment, but a kind of being seen. In the past, he had always feared records, because they could become labels, scrutiny, and clues for the future. Yet this time, the record preserved a moment that had not worsened.

What did not happen could still matter.

Mine continued, "But that does not mean there was no problem. Keisuke."

Keisuke in the back row raised his head.

"Your emotions affected the team yesterday."

Keisuke clenched his teeth. "I didn't fight."

"So I did not say you fought." Mine's voice remained even. "I said you affected the team."

The classroom was so quiet that they could hear the window paper rustling faintly.

Keisuke's face reddened slightly. He would probably rather have been told his movements were wrong than hear that his emotions had affected the team. The former sounded like a training issue; the latter was like laying his chest open for everyone to see.

Mine did not force him to answer immediately. She only turned her gaze to Che. "Che."

Che looked up.

"You did not turn your words into blades. That is progress. But you still like to speak as though you can summarize what is in someone else's heart."

Kiyo secretly glanced at Che.

Che did not argue.

Yesterday, he had said that Keisuke feared others looking down on the Uchiha. It was not wrong, but he had indeed spoken Keisuke's thoughts for him. Even if he had only wanted to stop the conflict, those words had had an edge. Keisuke not fighting did not mean he had not been cut.

"I'll remember that," Che said.

Mine nodded, then looked at Morita Yu's empty seat. Morita Yu was not in the Uchiha preparatory class today, but his name seemed to be sitting in the classroom all the same.

"In the future, you will be on teams with Konoha children, share desks with them, and train alongside them. Conflict does not always come from hatred. Often, it comes from a sentence spoken too quickly, a step taken too urgently, or a gaze that is too hard."

She tapped the board. "Today, we practice repeating."

Kiyo blinked. "Repeating what?"

"Repeating what someone else says without adding your own judgment," Mine said.

Che's heart sank.

This lesson was clearly aimed at him.

Mine divided them into pairs. One person would say something emotional, while the other could only repeat the facts, without interpreting the speaker's feelings for them. Kiyo went first. He said to Che, "I feel like the words are targeting me every day."

Che said, "Kiyo finds daily literacy practice difficult."

Mine nodded. "That works."

Kiyo protested, "It lost the part about being targeted."

"That is your feeling, not something he should add for you," Mine said.

Saori said to Che, "When the bell rings, some people look at me."

Che paused. "Saori notices that when the bell rings, people look at her."

Saori nodded.

When Keisuke was assigned to pair with Che, the air in the classroom hardened again.

Keisuke looked at Che. After a long while, he said, "I don't like the way Konoha children look at the Uchiha."

That was more direct than yesterday.

Che could think of many explanations: sensitivity after relocation, clan pride, fear of being looked down on, distrust of Konoha. But he could not add any of them.

He said slowly, "Keisuke does not like the way Konoha children look at the Uchiha."

Mine watched him. "Anything else?"

Che shook his head. "No. I don't know why he dislikes it unless he says so himself."

Something shifted in Keisuke's eyes.

This time, Che had not spoken his heart for him.

After the exercise, Keisuke did not speak to him. But when he left the classroom, he did not deliberately bump into the corner of Che's desk either. Kiyo considered that very important and ran over to whisper, "He didn't bump the desk today."

Che said, "The desk escaped disaster."

"So did you."

Che looked at Kiyo's serious face, and his smile gradually faded.

Maybe that was true.

Many conflicts were not resolved by winning. They were resolved by cutting one less wound today, bumping into one less desk corner tomorrow. It was slow enough to test anyone's patience, yet it felt more like life than a glorious victory ever could.

That night, Che wrote in his record:

Academy record: Not fighting is also worth recording.

Then he wrote:

Repetition exercise: Do not explain another person's heart for them. Speculation must wait until the other person offers clues themselves.

After finishing, he looked at the page and suddenly thought of how many future misjudgments might begin here: believing he knew why others hated, why they loved, why they betrayed. His old memories told him the outcomes, but they did not necessarily tell him every path within each person's heart.

He wrote the last sentence very slowly:

Knowing what happened does not mean knowing people's hearts.

After the repetition exercise ended, Mine did not dismiss them immediately.

She had everyone write down what they had just repeated, then add a column after it: "What I don't know." Those three words were harder to write than any answer. Kiyo stared at his paper as if he had been asked to admit that words were not entirely his enemies.

"'What I don't know'?" Kiyo asked. "I have to write down what I don't know too?"

"Yes," Mine said. "If a ninja cannot distinguish between knowing and guessing, they will mistake guesses for intelligence."

Che's pen tip stopped.

That statement was almost certainly aimed at him. His old memories had given him too many things that seemed like knowledge. Who would betray whom, who would die, who would become a hero, what would happen in which year and on which night. But those were outcomes, not the paths inside people's hearts at this moment. Treating outcomes as intelligence, and intelligence as human hearts, sounded clever but was actually dangerous.

Keisuke wrote very slowly.

After "I don't like the way Konoha children look at the Uchiha," he paused for a long time before finally writing, "I don't know whether they all think that way."

The line was small, but Che looked at it for a long time.

Keisuke had not admitted he was wrong, nor had he suddenly become friendly. But on paper, he had left room for "I don't know." For who he was now, that might already have been difficult.

Saori wrote, "I don't know what others think when they hear the bell."

Kiyo wrote, "I don't know why words are so hard."

Mine saw it and fell silent for half a beat. "That counts too."

At last, there was a little laughter in the classroom.

Che wrote, "I don't know why Keisuke dislikes that kind of look. I also don't know whether Morita Yu always apologizes so awkwardly."

Kiyo whispered, "The second one sounds like a fact."

Che replied quietly, "Facts need continued observation too."

When Mine collected the papers, she did not judge them as good or bad. She only said, "What you learned today was not to keep quiet. It was to leave room for what you do not know. Only by leaving room can you have the chance to see more later."

That night, Che copied those words into his wooden notebook.

Leave room for what you do not know.

That was harder than filling it with warnings.

Che wrote that point into the last line of the day.

He did not write it in large letters or mark it for emphasis. The more important such a rule was, the easier it was to forget when things became truly tense. So he merely added a tiny character for "pause" beside it, reminding himself to let that one word step forward before he spoke next time.

The next day, Mine returned Keisuke's repetition paper and had him rewrite one line.

Not because he had written the characters wrong, but because he had crossed out "I don't know whether they all think that way" too heavily, as though unwilling to admit it. Keisuke stood before the board, his expression unpleasant, yet he still rewrote it. Che saw the scene, but did not look for too long.

For some people, being willing to leave room for one unknown was already difficult.

Staring at it would only turn into another kind of pressure.