A Hole in One's Village [Kakashi Hatake]

Chapter 15: Returning

The bones in my ankle creaked like breaking ice, glaciers crashing, a squeaking sound I felt in my teeth followed by sharp snaps and ending with a shattering boom as my own chakra exploding threw me across the sand.

My vision was burned a featureless white, the blank afterimage from looking into an exploding nova made of my own life force.

Hairs stood up along the back of my neck. This was the middle of a fight, someone was trying to kill me. I was not safe. 

I needed to move.

But no matter how much I blinked, I could not clear the white from my vision. It just started to dance and flutter with dots of colored light, like static from an old TV.

My fingers pushed into the sand below me, trying to lift myself up, but it was slippery, greased. Polished ball bearings rolling beneath my fingers, making me lose what little balance I'd regained, face planting into the sand.

With twitchy little fingers, it started climb into my face, crawling up my nose, wriggling between my lips, prying apart my eyelids.

I squirmed, trying to escape, but it was burying me. Suffocating. Invading.

And a gentle hand shaking my shoulder woke me up.

The first thing I did was wipe at my eyes and nose, blinking to take in the dark starry sky.

Tatsuya was sitting with crossed legs, hands in his lap and mask on, as he alternated his attention between me and the rest of the Sand Ninja encamped nearby. 

With a sigh, I too cast a discrete eye towards our fellow companions, and it seemed that my nightmare had escaped everyone else's notice. Embarrassment flowed away like water, and my sigh shifted to one of relief.

"Thank you," I whispered.

Tatsuya just nodded.

"Are you not going to sleep?"

"I slept for a little bit already, but," he hesitated for a moment before plowing onwards, "I always get too nervous to rest for long when surrounded by so many people."

I sat up as well, straightening my disheveled bed roll as I did so. "Makes sense."

We sat together in silence for some time, and several times, Tatsuya tensed as if he was going to say something only to stop just before the words could leave his mouth.

Already used to this common shinobi ailment of having a hard time talking about anything personally important (an affliction, I must admit, I also suffer from much of the time), I simply waited. Besides, it was the wee hours of the morning, and my mind was drifting about in a restless sleepiness. Waiting came easily in such a state.

"Would you," he finally started, but with a voice so uncharacteristically weak it petered out. Clearing his throat, he started again, "Would you still have saved me even if, say, I had done things that didn't warrant trusting?"

The question gave me pause, although I knew that if I hesitated for too long before answering it would look bad. Cupping my chin, I mused, "Having not been in the situation, I can't speak definitively on how I would react to something like that, I guess. That's something that you'd have to live through to truly understand how you would react to it, you know. But, I think that I still would save you. There are few crimes that I think could be considered deserving of death, and betraying trust, while not great, is certainly far from one of those. As a medic, I have healed many people who had committed questionable or even horrible acts; I saved their lives whether or not they deserved it. And I did it because, whether or not they deserved it, I had the ability to save them, so it was the right thing for me to do." I shrugged, "I didn't become a ninja to become judge, jury, and executioner. I think that some do, but that was never the appeal for me. I mean, I have killed plenty of people on missions, but only in combat. I am much more interested in protecting those that I can."