Knitting Fate (Canon Patchworking with Uchiha Ren Part II)

Sixteenth Thread

"I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me." 
― Noël Coward

One day after Ren's temporary leave has ended, her team is trying playing Jesuses by waterwalking. And promptly failing, honestly. Well, maybe except for Hana, who has damn good charka control (she is shaping up to be a medic-nin) and does it after few tries. Hibiki and Ren? Not so much. Hibiki is an airhead who can't put enough attention into doing so, and is currently shrieking as he falls into the water. It's only knee-deep, but fucking freezing.

And Ren? Ren is not a person who pulls their punches. Never was. She is not subtle, she is not gentle, she is hardly precise. Standing on water isn't all that hard. But when she tries to walk? The water promptly explodes underneath her feet, because she might be natural at drawing her white-hot, so very Uchiha-y fire chakra, but it does not mix with water at all. Trees were easy. Trees were steady, and hard, and had uneven surface to which she could just glue herself to stick, but water? Water is a bitch and Ren hates her. Water is cold and slimy and constantly moving, and Ren feels like a cockroach trying to imitate water pond skater. And, which is easy to conclude, she is failing. In quite epic manner.

The worst thing is she knows what she does wrong. She pushes too much of too hot chakra into her feet. But the water is cold, and she doesn't control it – also, the only solution she ever faced before was 'if it doesn't work, do more', not 'do less' or 'be precise'. Precision was for surgeons, and she was a detective. She chased people, punched people and shoot people. No need for precision there, just stamina and semi-accuracy.

Want to know a super secretive secret? Water and fire did not mix well. Or at all. Surprising, isn't it?

It wasn't helping that Hibiki was having as much – if not more – problems than her. He, for instance, was putting too little charka into his feet. So, instead of exploding underneath his feet, he was walking as if on gelatin or pudding. He was sinking slowly until he broke the little the focus he had once cold water reached above his ankle-high ninja shoes. And went down with a quite pathetic shriek.

Ren wasn't all that better, only instead of shrieking she took to cursing. At the top of her lungs.

"Why is it so hard to tone my chakra down?!" she whines eventually, just as pathetic as she feels, which is very, as she falls onto her ass next to Hana. "I never thought that my inability to pull my punches would be such a disadvantage."

"Oh come on, don't do that," Hana pats her shoulder. "I managed only because chakra control is something natural for me. Otherwise I wouldn't even dream of going medic."

"I'm not going medic," Ren huffs. "I'm going to be the reason other villages will need more of them!" she bellows, much to her friends' amusement.

"Hardly, if their patients will just run onto the liquid surface where you can't reach them," a new voice chirps in, and Ren bends her head backwards and grins.

"Hi, Hound," she says. "You look weird without the ANBU attire."

"I'm not even going to ask," Shibi says from above the scroll he is reading, and Kakashi actually pouts at her.

"Maa, Ren-chan, ANBU identities are supposed to be top-secret!"

"You've been my babysitter since when? Like, January, I guess, yeah?" she states the obvious. "It's your voice. And the hair. Actually, it's more the hair. Any birds nesting there this year yet?"

"Cocky," Kakashi says, but there's a bit of amusement in his eyes. "And do refer to me as Hatake-sensei, or at least –senpai for the time being, okay?"