# Chapter 3: Four Little Troublemakers
**I.**
Muzan Senju's first clear memory of his own childhood, not the borrowed ones, not yet, those were still years away, was the smell of persimmons and the sound of Suzu shouting his name across the garden with a mixture of fury and disbelief that he would eventually come to recognize as her signature register reserved just for him.
He was three. He was standing on an overturned wash basin, which put him just tall enough to reach the box of dried persimmons the kitchen staff kept on the second shelf of the pantry, out of reach of children who hadn't yet discovered wash basins made excellent stepping stools. He had already eaten four. He was working on a fifth when Suzu rounded the corner and found him.
"Muzan."
He did not stop chewing. There seemed, in the moment, little point.
"Get down from there this instant."
He got down. The basin wobbled, tipped, and sent him sprawling into a pile of empty grain sacks, which absorbed the fall well enough that his only real injury was to his dignity, and even that recovered quickly once he realized Suzu's fury had, in the space of half a second, curdled into panic.
"Are you hurt?" She was across the room before he'd even finished blinking, hands running over his arms, his head, checking for the damage that hadn't happened.
"I'm fine," he said, with the wounded patience of someone forced to explain the obvious. "I fall all the time."
"That is not," Suzu said, straightening, some of the fury returning now that the panic had confirmed itself unnecessary, "a comfort."
"Can I have another persimmon?"
"No."
He did not get another persimmon. He got, instead, a lecture about pantries and basins and the difference between things that were his to take and things that weren't, delivered with the particular weariness of a woman who suspected, correctly, that none of it would stick. It didn't. Two weeks later the persimmon box turned up entirely empty, and this time it was Renji who took the blame for it, loudly and with theatrical injustice, while Muzan stood beside him wearing an expression of perfect, practiced innocence.
---
**II.**
The three boys had come to the household in the year after Muzan's birth, delivered one at a time like small, solemn parcels the elders had decided were necessary.
Jiro came first, not long after Muzan's first birthday, brought by his father, one of the senior gate guards, a broad, quiet man who knelt before Hikaru with his son's small hand gripped in his own and said only, "He's steady. He'll do well by your boy." Jiro had, even at that age, the watchful stillness of a child raised around men who took vigilance seriously, and he carried that stillness with him for the rest of his life, through every disaster his companions eventually dragged him into.
Kenta arrived a season later, delivered by a mother who looked considerably more harried than Jiro's father had, and who confided to Suzu, in a whisper meant to be private and overheard anyway, that she suspected her son might actually be relieved by more supervision than she alone could provide. Kenta had, by the age of two, already fallen out of three trees, off one roof, and into the koi pond twice, and showed no signs of learning caution from any of it.
Renji came last, and youngest, brought not by a parent but by an elder who simply informed Hikaru that the boy's mind was "sharper than was comfortable in a household without other children to blunt it against," which Hikaru understood, correctly, to mean that Renji had already outwitted every adult tasked with managing him and someone had decided this was a problem better solved by giving him peers his own age to conspire with instead.
By the time Muzan was three, the four of them were inseparable in the specific way that children become inseparable, not through any decision made, but through sheer proximity compounding day after day until separation became unthinkable.
"He doesn't order us around," Jiro told his father once, when asked, with some concern, after his son came home for the third time that month covered in mud, why he kept following Muzan into trouble he was clearly capable of recognizing as trouble. "He just says things like *I wonder what's on the other side of the wall*, and then everyone's already climbing before anyone decides to."
His father, who had served under two clan heads and understood exactly what kind of man was made from that particular gift, said nothing about it, though he watched Muzan rather more closely after that.
---
**III.**
The training yard sat empty most nights, patrolled twice, once at the changing of the guard, once well past midnight, and it was Muzan, four years old and lying on his back in the grass beside Kenta, who first wondered aloud whether the second patrol was as thorough as the guards claimed.
"Grandfather Kuroda says the patrol never misses anything," Kenta offered, though he said it the way children repeat things they've heard rather than things they believe.
"I bet it misses plenty," Muzan said. "I bet if we were quiet enough, we could get all the way to the far wall and back before anyone even knew we were there."
Jiro, who had been half-listening while carving a stick into something vaguely sword-shaped, did not look up. "That's a terrible idea."
"It's a *good* idea," Renji corrected, sitting up so fast the motion startled a bird out of the nearest tree. "It's a terrible idea executed well, which is completely different."
It took them four nights of planning, planning that mostly consisted of Renji drawing an increasingly elaborate diagram of the training yard in the dirt with a stick, revising it each time Jiro pointed out a flaw, while Kenta contributed enthusiasm and very little strategy, before they actually attempted it. They made it as far as the storehouse wall, three of them flat against the shadowed stone while Renji scouted ahead, before a lantern swung around the corner and the whole plan collapsed into four boys sprinting in four different directions and being caught, one by one, within the span of about ninety seconds.
The guard captain who delivered them back to their respective households that night was, by his own later admission to Hikaru, more amused than he let on at the time.
"They got further than I expected," he said, with the particular respect one professional affords another, even a very small and filthy one. "Your boy had them moving in a proper staggered line, sir. That's not something children usually think to do on their own."
Hikaru said nothing to that beyond a tired thank-you, and did not mention it to Muzan, who received instead a week of extra chores and a lecture about the training yard being a place for training, not games, a lecture Muzan absorbed with the solemn, wide-eyed sincerity of a child who had already decided, privately, that the lesson learned was *pick a better night*, not *don't do it again*.
---
**IV.**
The incident with Elder Kuroda's hearing was, by unanimous and lasting agreement among all four boys, the worst-planned scheme they ever attempted, and also somehow the one they told most often for years afterward.
It began with a boast, Kenta's, repeated secondhand from somewhere in the compound, that Elder Kuroda, despite his age, could hear a mouse shift its weight from one room away. Renji had declared this obviously exaggerated. Muzan had declared it worth testing. Jiro had declared, correctly, that testing an elder's hearing by sneaking up on him was likely to end badly for everyone involved, and had been outvoted three to one.
They got within perhaps ten paces of the old man's study before he spoke without turning around.
"I can hear all four of you breathing," Elder Kuroda said, mildly, to the empty doorway behind him. "Kenta, in particular, breathes like a man twice his age climbing a mountain. You should work on that."
There was a beat of pure, frozen silence.
Then all four of them ran, and Elder Kuroda, seventy-one years old, and by every appearance a man who spent his days seated calmly with scrolls and tea, came out of that study and chased them the full length of the eastern corridor with a speed that none of them, even years later, could fully explain or forgive him for.
"He's not supposed to be able to do that," Kenta wheezed later, collapsed against the outer wall of the stable where they'd finally lost him, or more likely where he'd finally decided to stop. "That's not fair. That's not, elders aren't supposed to be fast."
"He was a very good shinobi once," Jiro said, still catching his breath himself. "Before he retired to advise instead. My father told me. I should have remembered that before agreeing to this."
"You didn't agree," Renji pointed out. "You were outvoted."
"I should have voted harder."
Muzan, lying flat on his back in the dirt beside them, started laughing, and once he started, the rest of them followed, the particular helpless laughter of children who have just terrified themselves badly and survived it, and it was that sound, more than any lecture or punishment that followed, that Iori would remember years later as the truest sound of that whole stretch of his childhood: four boys laughing themselves breathless in the dirt behind the stables, alive and unbroken and utterly, gloriously unaware of anything the world was going to eventually ask of them.
---
**V.**
Not every scheme was Muzan's fault, whatever Suzu's suspicions on the matter. The theory about crying was entirely Kenta's own invention.
"If you cry at exactly the right moment," Kenta announced one afternoon, with the total confidence of a five-year-old who has clearly given this real thought, "grown-ups can't punish you. It's a rule. I've seen it work."
"That's not a rule," Renji said. "That's just Suzu being soft on Muzan specifically."
"It'll work on anyone," Kenta insisted. "Watch."
It did not, in fact, work on anyone. Kenta tested the theory that same afternoon on the caretaker who'd caught him attempting to feed his vegetables to the koi rather than eat them, producing tears so sudden and so committed that the poor woman, genuinely alarmed, genuinely convinced she'd caused real distress, spent several minutes apologizing to a five-year-old for a punishment he had, in fact, earned entirely fairly.
It might have worked, too, might have become a running joke they got away with for months, if Renji hadn't been standing close enough to hear Kenta whisper, mid-sob, "*is it working, is it working*", at which point Renji lost the battle against his own laughter so completely, so loudly, that the caretaker's suspicion returned all at once, and Kenta's punishment was doubled for the deception on top of the original offense.
"You ruined it," Kenta told Renji afterward, betrayed.
"You ruined it," Renji said. "I just noticed."
Muzan, who had watched the entire performance from a safe distance and contributed nothing beyond the original suggestion that started it, escaped that particular incident entirely unpunished, a fact Iori pointed out to him later that evening while scrubbing dirt from behind his ears with more patience than the task strictly deserved.
"Renji started it," Muzan said.
"Kenta started it," Iori corrected. "You merely made it sound like a good idea, which I am told is somehow worse."
"I don't see how."
"You will," she said, "eventually," and kissed the top of his head, and did not tell him, could not tell him, how much it frightened her sometimes, watching him laugh through a childhood that was going to end so much sooner than he understood, or than she was ready for.
---
**VI.**
None of them noticed, in those years, that anything about him was different. Jiro fought him for the better wooden sword and usually won on strength alone. Renji beat him at every game of wits he invented, more often than not, and Muzan sulked about it exactly as long as pride demanded before insisting on a rematch. Kenta fell asleep against him some nights in a pile of shared blankets none of the caretakers had the heart to untangle, four boys breathing evenly in the dark, ordinary in every way that mattered.
The mark on the back of his hand, faint, black, shaped like a circle that never quite closed, drew no attention from anyone but Iori, and even she had long since stopped remarking on it, at least aloud. It bathed with him. It scarred once, healed clean, and came back exactly as it had been, unbroken by the wound around it, a detail she noticed and chose, for reasons she could never quite explain even to herself, never to mention to anyone at all.
He turned five in the spring. The household marked it the way it marked every year, small, quiet, deliberately unremarkable to any eye that might wonder why a boy who officially belonged to Elder Hikaru was celebrated with a warmth that seemed, if you looked closely enough, a little too complete for the story everyone had agreed to tell about him. He blew out a single candle Suzu insisted on despite Hikaru's mild protest that the custom wasn't theirs to keep. He demanded a second slice of cake before the first had properly been served, and got it, because by then no one in that household had ever really learned to say no to him.
Formal training would begin within the week. The elders had already said as much, and Hikaru had already begun, quietly, dreading it in a way he hadn't let himself examine too closely.
For three more nights, Muzan was allowed to be nothing more complicated than a boy who had just turned five.
---
**VII.**
He woke on the fourth night with his heart slamming against his ribs and a stranger's grief sitting in his chest like something swallowed whole.
There had been no dream he could describe afterward, nothing with the shape of images a five-year-old's mind could hold onto and repeat. Only the sudden, total certainty of *having been someone else*, somewhere else, for a length of time he had no framework to measure, fragments arriving out of order and without mercy, a sky the wrong color, sounds attached to no names he knew, a feeling of ending, of something vast and final closing over him, that left him gasping in the dark of his own small room with both hands fisted in the blankets.
He did not cry out. Every instinct told him to run to Iori's room, to wake her, to be held until the strangeness passed the way every other fear of his short life had eventually passed in her arms. He lay still instead, staring up at the ceiling beams in the dark, because some new and unfamiliar part of him, older than five, older than the room he was lying in, understood, before he had words for the understanding, that this was not the kind of fear that holding would fix.
Recognition came slower, and heavier, than the fear had. Whatever he had been before this life, whoever had lived and grieved and ended behind the fragments now settling, unwelcome, into the corners of his mind, some deep and wordless part of him understood that this was only the first of it. Not the whole. Not the end. Just the door, opening.
Outside his window, the compound slept on, unaware that the boy inside it had, in the space of a single night, quietly stopped being only a child at all.
Morning would bring him one day closer to the training the elders had promised, swords too heavy for his hands, forms too precise for his patience, the first real weight of what it meant to be raised for a battlefield he hadn't yet seen. But for the rest of that night, Muzan lay awake in the dark of a house built on secrets, holding a second set of memories against his chest like something he wasn't yet ready to name, and did not sleep again before dawn.