I wake before the house does, not because anything is wrong but because lately my body prefers the hour when the shōji are still gray and the sparrows have not yet decided whether to argue, and as I lie there with the rabbit wedged against my ribs like a compliant cloud I notice, with the quiet satisfaction of someone clocking a metric, that my nights have been breaking less often under the weight of small disasters—no surprise geysers, fewer hiccup-storms, much less of the full‑body startle that used to fling me from sleep like a fish from a bucket—so that the darkness now stretches in longer, more civilized pieces and morning arrives as a guest rather than a rescue.
The universe, being excellent at balance, finds another lever to pull, and this time it is hunger, which has been ratcheting upward with an enthusiasm that startles even me; it seems that the more faithfully I run chakra along neat little routes, the more insistently my stomach files requests, and while I did not have a word like metabolism at birth, my nervous system apparently did, because every tidy session is followed by a demand letter written in the language of squirm and squeak. Hikari noticed before anyone else—she always does—and there was a day last week when her expression drew in fine with worry as she weighed me in her hands and made a thoughtful sound, after which I found myself introduced to the astonishing efficiency of a bottle in addition to the familiar comfort of her milk. I accept both like a pragmatic godling: reverently, greedily, and with the understanding that the temple cannot run on incense alone.
The other metric whose curve refuses to flatten is my chakra pool itself, which I can only ever measure in relative terms but which now glows to my sight with a volume that feels almost indecent inside a frame this small; when I compare that glow, discreetly and with all the humility of a two‑month‑old peeking at the neighbors, to the little wells coursing through the bodies of toddlers I sometimes glimpse beyond the garden wall, the scale no longer feels laughable—if anything, it tracks unsettlingly close, as if the body was given a reservoir sized for a different season and has decided to grow into it one breath at a time.
What has surprised me most, though, is not the growth itself but the way everyone around me has begun to act as if the Byakugan is a thing I am expected to use the way other babies are expected to learn to smile; ever since that fourth day when I nearly spooked Hiashi and then wore my innocence like armor, Hikari has become a cheerful chorus whenever the world whitens at the edges and the tenketsu bloom, cooing in a tone that belongs to women praising the proper use of napkins and chopsticks, and the positive reinforcement has done what positive reinforcement always does—turned an eccentric habit into a shared ritual that pleases everyone involved.
On day thirty‑four, during a pause between chores and tea, I caught Hiashi looking at me with a softness that almost unseated him from his own face, a small, contained pride that lived in the corner of his mouth like a secret someone had left there on purpose, and because I am not an idiot I locked that image in a vault and labeled it leverage / keep safe; the next morning I stopped pretending that the sight came and went only by accident and began, instead, to make it a deliberate visitor, invited often and treated with dignity, which is to say that since day thirty‑five I have been toggling and sweeping as openly as a baby can be said to do anything on purpose, and the clan has responded with the kind of approving silence that means a thing is being filed under promising.
The cost of this new normal is counted, predictably, in calories and in the dull pressure that used to bloom behind my eyes, though the latter has softened so much that it feels like a rumor of its former self, a reminder rather than a punishment; I can hold the lattice longer without the metallic edge that once haunted the back of my tongue, and when I let it go the world settles more quickly, like a pond accepting a stone's apology. Most days the balance holds: I check the seal's kindness, confirm that no other gaze is active within our lines, run a few measured circuits, and return to the business of being adored and burped.
Not every day, however, holds kindly, and somewhere around the midpoint of this last stretch—call it day forty‑eight, because the number sits right in the mouth—I forgot my own advice about ladders and thresholds, carried away by the smooth joy of doing a thing well and the audience of one that is my own hubris; the house was quiet, Hikari within reach but occupied, the guards outside and not peering, and I decided to explore the upper edge of endurance with a series of toggles that were, frankly, pretty, a little string of lanterns lit and dimmed along the roof of my skull until the pattern turned from delightful to demanding and the demanding slipped, quite without my consent, into a very bright and very loud ache that split the crown of my head like a carpenter's wedge.
Babies cry for many reasons; this time I cried because my nervous system decided to take command away from my pride and announce the error in a voice no one in the compound could miss. Hikari was there so quickly that I do not actually remember her entering the room; one heartbeat I was squalling at the ceiling with my fists knotted like punctuation and the next I was gathered against her chest where the whole world smelled like green tea and starch and the kind of love that mocks your plans by making them better, and she swayed in a rhythm older than any clan and made a sound in her throat that was half bird, half river, and said my name as if it could fix things by being said correctly.
I did not attempt to be clever; I permitted the wretchedness to drain away the honest way, salt down, breath hiccuping, the ache stepping back from a shout to a scold to a mutter; she did not scold me for inventing pain out of thin air, because she is a mother and not a magistrate, and when it was over she tilted my face to see whether the light had returned to my eyes, decided it had, and kissed the place where the fontanelle pulses with a promise I understood in every language: not on my watch, little one.
Since then I have kept the lesson in the front of the ledger where I cannot pretend to forget it: the headaches are still real, but they are no longer the nightly tax they once were, and the difference between training and taunting the limit is a difference I will respect without needing to test it twice in the same way; the work proceeds, because it must, and because it feels very much like breathing now, but it proceeds within fences marked by milk and mercy.
What has also changed is how I let myself think about the sight when it is not on. I no longer treat the Byakugan as a switch attached to a punishment but as a muscle that will continue to grow as the rest of me does, which is, I suspect, the truest explanation for why the remaining strain lingers at all; the body is catching up to the brief the chakra has already received, and if I am patient—if I let bones harden and channels widen and the secret places of the skull finish setting—I am fairly sure the last of the sting will go the way of the early colic and the ungoverned startle, not vanishing as much as being folded into competence.
Meanwhile the household adjusts around me in tiny ways that feel like weather: Hikari keeps a bottle nearer at hand than she used to, which means I spend less time dangling on the cliff edge between hunger and tantrum; the servants who move through our corridors have learned the exact kind of quiet that allows a baby to float back to sleep rather than fall away from it; even Hiashi, who is not a man much given to overt displays, has developed the habit of pausing at my door when he thinks no one will notice and allowing that soft line to return to his mouth for exactly as long as it takes him to decide he has not done such a thing and therefore does not need to stop doing it.
I keep my end of the covenant by performing my role with art: I beam at appropriate intervals, I practice the syllabic nonsense that will one day have nouns hiding inside it, I conduct elaborate negotiations with my rabbit that end in our mutual satisfaction, and I keep the sight's practice plain and frequent enough that it reads as talent rather than strategy; if the clan wishes to believe that I am doing exactly what they expected a charming little prodigy to do, then I am happy to meet them in that fiction so long as it shelters the work the fiction is designed to hide.
And when the house falls still again—after the second feeding, in the hour that belongs to the sparrows and to me—I run the ritual one more time: sweep for other eyes, find none, lift the lattice, let the world become lines and light, hold it to the edge of comfort and no further, then dim the lanterns until only the ordinary room remains, rabbit and all; the hunger that follows is immediate and strangely satisfying, a receipt stamped paid, and when Hikari answers it with a smile that crinkles the corners of her eyes I decide, not for the first time, that there are worse economies to run than this one, where the cost of sight is milk and patience and a promise to grow into what I am building.
If there is still a thin ribbon of ache afterward, I note it and do not take it personally; aches are letters from tomorrow addressed to the body I do not yet have, and tomorrow, by all available evidence, keeps arriving on time.