Impossible to Forget

Chapter 6: Tap tap tap tap. Tap.

Tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap.

Tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap.

Tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap.

With an angry groan, I slapped my right hand over my fidgeting left, halting the nervous tapping of my pencil on the desk. Looking up from the scrolls that I was reading through, I sighed and let my eyes focus on something that wasn't within two feet of my face. Sakura was going to have to yell at me for getting eye strain, again. Even though my hip was all healed up, she still found things to lecture me about. Apparently, I've never been particularly good at taking care of myself; something that Sakura felt the need to remind me of constantly. Kakashi ensured me that that's just how she shows that she cares.

There was a dull pounding behind the left side of my forehead. Great, the eyes strain seemed like it was giving me a headache too now. Trying to let my eyes wander freely in an attempt to lessen the pain flowing from my optical nerves, I looked at everything but my desk.

My office was very different than it was a year ago. Gone were the other two desks with Toukuro and Shikaku's name tags still resting on the polished surfaces. Before, my back had been to the only window in the small room, but now my desk was at the opposite wall, facing the window and the village beyond. Two chairs were in front of my desk at a slight angle, and a low bookshelf was under the window. The top row of the shelf was filled with a beehive-like lattice that house lots and lots of scrolls. The next shelf down had mission files, and the final shelf, the one closest to the floor, was filled with data books, bingo books, and mission rosters. The top of the bookshelf housed two little meditation balls on a pedestal that someone had gotten me a while ago. Yeah, I never used them, but I liked the way the spheres with their chrome finishes glinted in the sun filtering through open venetian blinds. Next to them was a picture of Anzu and I on the day that she was accepted into the Academy.

Tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap.

Tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap.

Ugh! I clenched by hand around the offending pencil as it kept tapping against the edge of the desk.

The scroll on my clean desk seemed to mock me as it lorded its elusive nature over me. I had no other paperwork to turn to as the menial tasks of my department that used to dominate my time had been passed onto to two aides in the room next door who sorted out the large number of mission scrolls and wrote brief daily reports me. It was a nice medium. I like to look over every mission to find patterns that could spell danger for the village, but there just isn't enough time in a day for someone to do that and still sleep so the summaries allowed me to read all of the missions without reading the mission reports themselves.

Tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap.

Tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap.

I gripped the pencil so tightly that my knuckles turned white. That damn tapping was going to drive me insane. The scroll just seemed to taunt me further. I had nothing else to work on today. I couldn't find other things that I could do to procrastinate on my work with other work because I was too efficient  for work to built up in my department. I just needed more data. I needed more intel. How could I figure out my mother's motives and plans with a short poem and a couple of vague observations to go off of? It didn't matter how smart I was. It didn't matter if I had great powers of deductive reasoning because even I needed a solid starting point. I knew that she was planning something with Kakashi and that Sasainako and Kanaye had been tangled up in it somehow, but that's all that I knew. The holes in my knowledge were just too great to be overcome with willpower alone.

I was starting to wonder if Sasainako had been completely honest even in her last moments. There was something bigger going on, and I had no idea what it was. It was like a huge inside joke between a close group of friends, and I was on the outside, feeling hopelessly lost.