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."
"You must have thought about it, though, what things I might have done in the past as an ANBU agent. In Root."
I shrugged, "I do not judge what choices people have to make to survive. If someone being in ANBU bothered me, I would not date Kakashi."
"But that's not the same," he insisted, starting to sound a bit frustrated. "You saw his past. You don't have to wonder what he did. Besides, he was never Root. He was never at the heart of the worst of it, as you well know."
I sighed, unsure of what he wanted to get out of this thread of conversation, other than ammunition to berate himself with later, that is. I am no stranger to self-loathing, but that did not mean that I knew how to handle his.
"Tatsuya," I rubbed the sleep-depravation caused headache forming between my brows, "I can only judge on that which I have seen, and what I have seen is that while you can be a little surly, you are dependable, skilled, and pleasant company. Your past is your own; I have not seen it, and that does not bother me."
"Oh, okay."
He gave no other response before laying down on his bedroll with his back to me and feigning sleep.
I could not help but roll my eyes at his silhouette before getting up and pacing around the perimeter of the camp. My leg was stiff from the healing, and I had nothing better to do with my time while I waited for the sun to rise and the day to start. I already knew that any attempt at further sleep would be fruitless, especially without Kakashi to help coax me back into slumber.
I wanted to pretend that now that the mission was coming to a close and I would be returning shortly, that I was thinking of Kakashi more frequently, but that would be a lie. I had not stopped thinking about him this entire time.
I stopped that self-deprecating line of thought: this fight had been a major upheaval in my life, and I was allowed to fixate on it in its aftermath. I didn't need to start beating myself up over my own uncontrollable thoughts.
But think about it I had, perhaps a little obsessively. And all that thought, alongside my surprisingly helpful conversations on the topic with Tatsuya, had led me to a couple of what I considered to be important realizations.
Mainly, both Kakashi and I have no idea how to deal with the stress caused by the looming threat my nightmares represent. Something like this, involving the health, safety, and wellbeing of a loved one is always, no matter how well adjusted someone is, simply hard to deal with. Add to that Kakashi's trauma with violently losing loved ones, especially in his tender and formative years, paired with my trauma of being ripped away from everything I knew, and you have a cocktail of emotions that neither of us were mentally prepared to tackle. Especially since neither of us are particularly open or practiced in talking about feelings. It really could have gone so much worse.
The topic trampled over both of our most sensitive fears. Of loss. Of separation. Of watching what you love get ripped away.
And what had happened?
Kakashi had tried to fix it without considering my wishes, and I had lashed out, alienating him before our fears could come to fruition on their own, grasping at any sense of control no matter how destructive.
I still had no idea how to actually mend this, of course. I mean, if there were an easy answer, we never would have gotten to this point in the first place.
I did have a fairly good idea, however, of where I wanted to start: an apology and an explanation of the situation as I perceived it. Perhaps we could solve the rest together.
I would also tell him how much I loved him.
I had first told him "I love you" romantically over a year ago, shortly after we had started dating, and I had repeated it fairly frequently. At some point, however, I just sort of stopped. When it became clear that he was not going to say it back any time soon, my declarations had slowly petered out into nothingness. I regretted that now. Why leave something I was so certain of unsaid?
Besides, there was something slightly hypocritical about the way I had grilled him over the phrase when I had ceased saying it myself.
My agitation about it was slightly amplified, to my eternal mortification, by the constantly simmering knowledge, like an itch, of what else I had brought up in our fight. When I had challenged Kakashi about his fear of intimacy after he had finally said "I love you," I had opened the metaphorical floodgates, and I could not escape the thought of it now. Not when I felt the absence of his guarded displays of affection so keenly. Not when I was currently limping around a couple of dunes in the silent, predawn desert and wishing instead that I was in his arms being soothed back to sleep.
We had held hands, snuggled, even kissed, but after a year and half of dating, those boundaries had never been tested. Hands stayed in respectful places, clothes undisturbed, and heated kisses quickly ended. He would come soothe away nightmares, but after our relationship began, never had he spent the night.
I would have been fine with it, wholeheartedly, if that was what Kakashi wanted, if that was all he was comfortable with. But I knew that it wasn't. Hell, before we had gotten together, he had said and done more open and suggestive things than anything he'd done while we were actually dating. Like making the relationship real had put a stopper in his desire for me, and that was just so frustrating it made me want to scream.
And by god was it beyond mortifying to realize that a not insignificant part of my petty rage and anger, part of the reason I had lashed out so meanly, was due to horniness.
It felt so silly, so selfish. So not worth any of this.
Not to mention immature. Like I was imploding my happiness and relationship over something that I had spent most of life apathetically ignoring.
God, if Alan could see me now, he would never let me live it down, not after all the lectures about his own life choices I'd subjected him to over the years. Not that he could "live" anything down now. Still, he would have a hearty laugh at my expense and teased me until I died of embarrassment myself.
Instead, he remained dead and out of reach, Kakashi was faraway in the Leaf, and I watched our large camp slowly come to life as people started waking and preparing for the long day and probable fight ahead of us.
Despite the awkward way our conversation during the night had ended, Tatsuya sought me out after packing up his bedroll, quietly hovering nearby. Like a shy kid sticking close to their older sibling on the first day of school, I thought with a smirk. Knowing better than to share that observation aloud, I simply grinned and repacked my medical pouch, taking stock of my supplies.
The rest of the camp parted around us like water, all except for Kankuro, who appeared unfazed by the ANBU's presence.
He sauntered up, a puppet slung over his back, arms draped around his shoulders, as he fiddled with a few joints in its wrists, fixing something.
"We should reach the outpost at the end of the day, but before we head out, there was something that I wanted to discuss with you two."
"What do you need?" I asked, trying not to be too distracted by the nimble way the puppet's delicate fingers twitched.
"An outfit this large is not built for stealth, and I know that suppressing the chakra of a group this large would be more than just taxing, so I was wondering how the two of you are feeling. No pressure if you are not up it, you were just injured after all, but if you're willing, I was hoping the two of you could go ahead. I have a couple of skilled jounin I could send with you, too, if needed."
Tatsuya stopped sulking and entered the conversation, "What would our directive be? Scouting? Distraction? Clearing out the first wave of combatants?"
Kankuro shrugged, the puppet draped over him copying the motion, "I was going to leave that up to you. You both know the value of surprise, and having a small team that they can't sense coming would be valuable. Whatever help you're willing to provide, I'll plan around it."
Tatsuya and I looked at each other, and even with the mask, I could tell that he was waiting for me expectantly.
"I wouldn't want to take on much melee combat right now, not while the bones in my ankle are still so delicate, but I could certainly help scout and possibly set up some sort of ambush. Perhaps we could get in a good position for when the rest of you arrive so that we could take action if anything started to turn nasty. Perhaps a good location to provide ranged support?"
Kankuro nodded, "That would work."
"Good, we can head out about an hour ahead to get a lay of the land, and I can send one of my ninken back to report my scouting results to you."
"Excellent. Will you two be wanting any jounin to join you?"
For this I looked to Tatsuya, wanting his opinion, and he picked up the conversation for us.
"No."
The quick response caused Kankuro to raise one eyebrow in question. "You sure?" he asked. "If something goes awry, we might be too far away to help. And Ana is still injured."
"I will keep her safe," Tatsuya declared with absolute certainty.
Kankuro's brow raised further at the declaration, and he looked over at me.
I shrugged, "You heard him. So when should we head out?"
"As soon as you're ready."
"I believe that we are ready now," I mused. "I guess that means we'll be on our way. See you at the outpost when we clear out the missing nin."
Kankuro reached out to clap a hand on my shoulder, wiggling the puppet on his back, "Take care of yourself. They probably know to expect us by now; it's been over three days since you handled the first outpost."
"We'll be careful."
He just nodded one last time, and Tatsuya and I started out across the dunes.
I had to admit to myself that it was much more comfortable returning to just the two us traveling together. While the looks that I was getting from the Sand ninja were not negative, per say, their attention, caused by my reputation, widespread knowledge about my relationship, and my familiarity with the Kazekage's brother, was stifling. And that was not even counting the way that they were reacting to another village's ANBU in their midst.
It was refreshing to be freed of the constant looks, some more subtle than others. It felt a little like being an animal in a zoo, and I had always found the zoos back in my old world depressing. They smelled and the enclosures seemed so cramped. Even if I don't really know the first thing about most wild animals or how zoos were even run, I could never shake the feeling that it was a bleak existence. There's just something about seeing a tiger in a concrete and glass box that caused an existential crisis.
I almost shared my musings but at the last moment chose to keep them to myself. The thought of explaining another thing foreign to the ninja-world just seemed like an exhausting prospect. Better to keep these thoughts to myself than ponder the fact that I would never come across another person who had seen how small and sad the bear enclosures at the Denver Zoo are.
The day passed quickly. I had spent so much time running around in the nearly featureless desert landscape over the last couple days that it was starting to drive me a little nuts. What I wouldn't give for the sight of a tree. I'd even take a scrawny shrub at this point.
"Do you miss grass?" I asked before I even realized that the words were slipping out.
"So fucking much," was the instant and honest reply.
"Me too. Thank god I was dropped in the Land of Fire all those years ago. I don't think that I would have been able to handle it if I ended up in the Land of Wind." I chuckled, "I mean, the desert has its own sort of beauty, you know. But so does space, and that doesn't magically make it somewhere I'd like to live."
"What's wrong with space?"
"It's literally a vacuum."
"'Literally'?" Tatsuya asked, and it took me a moment to understand the confusion in his voice. Ah, Danzo must not have bothered to teach him about space. The thought was strangely heartbreaking; there were few things that I had loved more growing up than learning about space and dinosaurs. I had had so many picture books, and I would spent hours just staring at images from the Hubble Telescope, transfixed.
So I began to talk, explaining vacuums and matter and stars and solar systems, mostly rambling, and Tatsuya, despite the many opportunities I gave him to shut me up, simply listened. He asked a few clarifying questions as we went, but I honestly did not know how much he absorbed, or if he was even trying to retain any of it. It was probably just the desire to have anything to focus on besides the rolling hills of sand, sand, and more sand. He must have really been missing grass to put up with my info dumping, I thought.
As the sun set, I paused in my overly-excited musings about blackholes to slow my pace to a stop. "I can just barely sense the next outpost. How close do we want to risk getting?"
Tatsuya took off his mask to wipe off his face, holding it cupped in his palm while we talked. "I trust your judgement. Get as close as you need without them sensing us back."
"Can do. Follow me."
We crept along the shallow valleys of the dunes as the sun finished lowering beneath the horizon and dusk painted the ocean of sand in shades of indigo and blue.
"Look," Tatsuya pointed, "the stars are starting to come out."
I followed his finger and saw a single bright point of light twinkling above. "It's probably a planet," I said. "It's so bright, and we can see it before night has fully set in."
"But I thought planets were tiny compared to stars, so why would it be brighter?"
"Distance," I answered, pointing out the next direction we should creep to stay out of sensory range. "Even though stars are huge and produce their own light, they are so unimaginably far away that by the time their light reaches us there's so little of it left that, to the naked eye, other sources of light easily outshine them. Like our closest star, the sun, or sometimes even the bright lights we make places like in cities. In my old world, we called it light pollution. There are whole regions that can see little or almost none of the stars."
"What were the stars like where you grew up?"
"Bright," I said with a smile. "Even though I grew up technically on the edges of a city, it was more of a collection of subdivisions than a metropolis, and it was in the mountains. Also, there was a large ridgeline separating us from most it. It would get nearly pitch-black at night, so dark you could hardly even see your hand in front of your face, and you could see the galaxy, the Milky Way, on a clear night. I had my own crappy telescope growing up and would pretend to be Galileo and take notes on what I could see in a little journal."
I could tell that Tatsuya did not understand much of what I had just said, but he did not ask. Perhaps the details did not need to be explained for the wistfulness to be understood.
"There was a spot growing up," Tatsuya whispered, even though we were still far out of the outpost's hearing range. "My cousin found it. We'd watch the stars from there."
I thought that I could remember that from my visions, of Yukimi dragging a young Yamato there, but I couldn't be sure. It had been too long, I realized. I was already forgetting so much.
"Here," I said, activating my byakugan. "I should be able to get enough of a look from this distance."
My vision flew ahead, and I found to my pleasant surprise that there were far fewer missing nin here than at the previous outpost. There were only eight in the main room, four stationed at various points along the perimeter, and three deeper inside. Additionally, there were three signatures being suppressed (potentially by a jutsu? It was too far away to tell) that were likely to be surviving Sand ninja.
Stopping the tiring flow of chakra to my eyes, I summoned Hokomaru and relayed what I had seen to her so that she could pass it on to Kankuro.
As the coyote vanished into the twilight, I rolled my eyes. "Of course the outpost where we have a whole platoon of ninja is the one with about half the number of enemies to fight."
"It's probably because we took out the other outposts that there are so few. No one wants to be the last missing ninja left waiting for the village to sweep through and clean them up. When they got zero news from the other outpost for two days, not even an injured straggler wandering into camp, a lot of the more self-preserving ones would have left," Tatsuya explained.
"Makes sense," I nodded, "I wouldn't stick around if I thought that a village could be sending a Naruto or a Gaara through to clear me out."
"Exactly. Those are the trickiest missing nin to deal with: the ones with a decent sense of self-preservation. It's more effective than the fanciest jutsu."
"Missing nin ran away from the battle, it was very effective," I muttered under my breath, inaudible. I had just explained asteroid belts; I didn't have it in me also describe Pokémon.
It did not take long after that for the Sand ninja to arrive, and I let Tatsuya know when they got into range. "I was thinking," I continued, "that since we don't know Kankuro's plan, perhaps we should hang back and see if anything needs our help. A fight going poorly or someone escaping, for example."
"I had another idea," he said as he knelt on the ground and drew out a rough floorplan of the Sand's outposts, and I internally chuckled about the week or so he had spent cooped inside one, wondering if that added to the accuracy of his quick drawing. "You said that the hostages are here, right?" He poked a back room drawn in the sand, and I nodded. "Then what if we snuck in and made sure that they don't come to harm?"
There was an external wall to the room, and securing their safety would eliminate one of the greatest risks that came from the relative lack of surprise caused by attacking with such a large group.
"I like it," I grinned.
New plan in mind, I hid our chakra signatures, and in the newly darkened night, we crept around to the back of the outpost. This side was partially buried in a dune, and as we pressed up against the wall, the first sounds of a fight could be heard around the front.
Tatsuya ran through a number of seals and then pressed his palm against the wall, and I poked my head around the edge of the small opening he had just created, hardly big enough crouch through.
Inside there were three unconscious ninjas, their flak jackets dusty and grimy and wearing Hidden Sand headbands. None of three were stirred by the sounds of fighting, but I could still feel their chakra signatures, so I could be sure that they were at least not dead.
"Move or guard?" I whispered as quietly as I physically could.
Tatsuya answered with a quiet question of his own, "Injured?"
Ah, that was a good consideration, so I slipped inside and approached where the three, hands bound behind their backs, were propped seated against the wall.
It was incredibly dark inside the closed room, so I brought a little medical chakra to my hand prematurely to light the space, and it painted the bruises on their faces with its faint green tinge. I took in the rest of the situation with a critical eye, scanning but not yet seeing anything that seemed too urgent. Nothing externally visible, at least.
One by one, I sent a little bit of medical chakra through their meridians and discovered some bruising and contusions, a fractured rib, and a sprained leg, but nothing close to the kind of injures that Toru had encountered. According to Hanako, he had fought back fiercely, and Fudo had retaliated brutally once they had been captured. Whatever had happened when this outpost was taken, no one had been subjected to that level of violence. Or, a more cynical part of my mind supplied, if they had, they were already dead before we'd arrived.
I crept back to the hole in the wall and whispered, "Movable," and then moved back to make room for Tatsuya to enter as well.
As soon as he stood inside, I felt a chakra signature rushing towards us. It was not one of the Sand ninja that we had been traveling with, and I gestured to the door frantically, trying to convey this with fevered pointing.
A missing nin burst through the door, clearly planning to make use of the hostages to try and escape being captured or killed, and as he did so, Tatsuya grabbed me by the shoulder, pulling me back, as he stepped into the doorway.
The missing nin, a ferrety man with shoulder-length hair, had only a moment of shock as he was greeted by the sight of not three unconscious prisoners but the smooth mask of an ANBU agent, before the short sword stabbed him just below the collar bone, and he fell dead.
The rest of the fight ended quickly from there. Kankuro's puppet could be seen down the hallway harassing the few survivors, who were now surrendering. Peeling myself from the wall where Tatsuya had pushed me out of the way, I returned to the sides of the three injured ninja and started healing the most serious injuries first. There was some sort of drug in their system, one that I could have identified if I had the time or need, but I could feel that it was only suppressing their chakra and keeping them asleep. Furthermore, it was already wearing off on its own.
As I worked, a Sand ninja came by and sealed away the corpse of the missing nin Tatsuya had killed, and the ANBU himself stood leaning against the doorjamb either resting or watching, I couldn't be sure. Later, Kankuro came by and knelt at my side to ask, "How are they?"
"None of them were too severely injured, thankfully, and the sedative that's keeping them asleep will wear off in the next two to three hours. You'll want the hospital to follow up with them to make sure that it didn't throw anything off with their chakra networks."
He nodded, and then sighed, "Thank you for securing them. We didn't lose anyone in this fight, but if they had managed to use the hostages against us, that might have easily changed."
"Don't thank me," I grinned, "thank Kemuri." I nodded towards the ANBU agent who was still standing casually in the doorway, as if he wasn't the current subject of conversation. "This was his idea."
The Kazekage's brother did a visible double take but then recovered admirably quickly. He stood and gave a small, grateful bow of his head in the ANBU's direction. "Thank you for looking after my village's ninja."
Tatsuya nodded once in recognition but did not answer beyond that.
Kankuro turned back to me, "We'll probably stay here for a couple of days to clean up and make sure that there aren't any nin lingering in the region, but the two of you will not need to hang around and wait. If you head out tomorrow morning, you'll only get back home a day late, even after all this adventure. Gaara showed me your original mission scroll, perks of having your little brother as a Kage," he winked.
A one day journey to the Village Hidden in the Sand and then, with Tatsuya and my healing ankle, three days back to the Leaf. Four days until I'd have to face Kakashi again. Hopefully I'd be ready by then.
"Sounds good." I stood up as well, a little stiff from kneeling on the ground for a while, and clapped Kankuro on the side of the arm. "It's been nice getting to work with you. Even if it's only been a couple of days, my usual scroll running missions are pretty lonely, and I have enjoyed the company."
Like a true ninja, he turned bashful in the face of genuine feelings and chuckled, scratching his chin. "It's been good seeing you too. Perhaps, when they don't have you running scrolls constantly anymore, we can do it again. At least one good thing should come out of all this business between our villages, you know."
"At least one good thing," I echoed, unable to hide my smirk. Oh how Temuri would disagree with that sentiment. "In case we leave tomorrow morning before you are awake, I'll wish you goodbye now. See you soon, Puppet Master."
He waved and walked into the hallway. "Later, Vision-Nin, ANBU. Safe journey back."
I did not sleep well that night, even though Kankuro had been kind enough to let Tatsuya and I each get one the of the outpost's few beds (there were few enough wounded, luckily, to allow such an indulgence). The dreams weren't the worst I had ever had, but in each I was looking for something or running away, and I kept waking keyed up with adrenaline and panicking about a task needing to be completed but unable to remember what. Each time it took an hour and a half or two to fall back asleep again. When I pulled myself out of bed just before dawn, I had probably only managed about three total hours of rest.
Tatsuya met me right outside the door, pack on and ready to go, but he did a double take when he saw me. For a second I was confused until I realized that I forgotten to hide the dark circles beneath my eyes. I had to have looked like a vampire or a stage-makeup zombie. Clearing my throat, I pulsed my healing chakra with a sheepish smile and returned my face to a semblance of liveliness.
"Shall we?"
He nodded, and I could almost feel the unvoiced thought about my sleepless dark circles.
As we set out across the desert, he took his mask off. It was getting hot stupidly quickly, and since there was no one else around, there was no reason for him to suffer in the stifling heat trapped beneath the porcelain. Especially since he was still wearing long black sleeves to cover the handwritten seal on his right arm.
After talking so much the day before, we were happy to pass the time in mostly silence, stopping only during the hottest hours of the afternoon where I made my tent into a sunshade once more and we sipped on water.
It was late when we made it back to the Sand Village, the night patrol at the gate warier than the ones I typically encountered during the day. But after verifying my mission scroll, they let us in and escorted us to the center of the village to a room. Tatsuya had, of course, relaced his mask and walked with extreme stiffness the entire time we were inside the gates.
They took us to an empty barrack near the center of the village, filled with narrow twin bunks, and I barely slipped my shoes off and pulled up the covers on the farthest bed from the door before sleep overtook me.
The dream hit me almost as soon as I closed my eyes.
I was in a cave. The air was cool and clammy against my skin, so thick that it almost felt like it was crawling over me with every step. Hansuke was there, the short chuunin oddly silent and dressed like he had been the first time I'd met him all those years ago on the mission where we escorted Asari, as opposed to his now-typical Leaf ninja garb. It did not strike me as odd.
I opened my mouth to ask what we were doing, but he shushed me. I blinked. That wasn't like him.
It must have been the cave.
Everything was painted with a green wash, like the glow of healing chakra, and the thick air crawled down my back once more.
It tingled down my spine like flowing sweat. Slow and cold.
Skittering.
My whole body shuddered.
"Where are we?" I whispered.
Hansuke stopped and frowned. "You don't know?" he asked with Alan's voice and then Alan's face.
"No," I admitted, ashamed. I should know, I thought. It should be oblivious but I didn't know and it was all my fault. Wasn't I supposed to know everything?
I shuddered again.
Alan groaned and massaged his temples. "You left me all alone and you don't even know why? You forgot why you're here?" His voice ended almost in a hiss. It was tone I'd only heard him use a few times over all the many years we'd been friends, and never had I heard it aimed at me.
"Sorry."
"Sorry isn't good enough."
"I have nothing else to give."
Alan's face contorted, blurry, only a sensation of rage and disappointment, and I felt it close in and wrap its fingers around my chest.
"Sorry."
I was choking by an unknown hand, the darkness all around taking a new shape that I recognized.
Moonlight streamed through familiar windows, across countertops and reflecting in the sink of my childhood kitchen.
I was on the ground.
I knew the spot as I gasped for air.
It was where my parents died.
"Sorry," I whispered again. "I don't know why I'm here."
When I opened my eyes, they were wet with tears. For the first time, Tatsuya, on the next bunk over, was not pulled from his own light sleep by my nightmare, and I sighed in relief.
I was starting to feel very guilty about the way in which I was consistently interrupting his rest.
A new concern crossed my mind that I had not considered before. Kakashi had expressed his worry about if something were to go wrong on a mission because of my poor sleep schedule, and for the first time I realized that it wasn't just me at risk. It's not like ninja were heavy sleepers on missions, and they were always in close quarters by necessity. My stomach dropped like a bowling ball: I could not in good conscience drag others along with me, knowingly exposing them to greater danger. I could not put my own pride over the safety of others. I could not be that selfish.
Tsunade had cleared me for missions after the war. Now that things had gotten to this point, I might just have to un-clear myself until the nightmares were handled.
I kneaded the headache forming between my brows and sat up on my twin bed, tucking my knees to my chest.
Minami was on watch that night, and he padded over to wrap behind my back, the largest of my summons taking up almost the entire mattress. I curled my fingers into his thick fur and let it ground me. His was always the softest of my pack's, and he was equal parts proud of it and fussy in its maintenance.
Several hours later, Tatsuya stirred, and he seemed shocked to see me already awake. That sent another spear of guilt through me: he had expected to be awakened by my nightmares and was surprised that that was not case.
I had truly become a flight risk.
My sleep schedule would be only unfortunate and unhealthy in a civilian context, but on missions, it could be the difference between life and death. What would happen if we ran into an opponent like Fudo Kyodai while strung out and exhausted? And tired for no good reason, too.
"I don't think that I can go on missions anymore," I whispered. And it took everything to keep the silent admittance from bringing me to tears.
Tatsuya swung his legs out of the bed and sat on the edge of the thin mattress, feet planted on the floor, to face me. "What makes you say that?"
"Tell me honestly, have you gotten less sleep than usual on this mission because of me?"
He hesitated just a moment before opening his mouth to reply, but that was answer enough.
I sighed and continued, "You don't have to placate me. I know the truth. I think that I've known it for some time, but tonight it really hit me. If I keep going on missions, I will drag down everyone around me. I put more than just myself at risk."
"So what are you going to do about it?"
I shrugged and curled my knees tighter to my chest. "I don't know." I chuckled dryly, throat tight, "Tell Kakashi he was right, I guess. That's something I've never been all that great at, admitting when I'm wrong."
"Who is?"
If the laugh I let out at his question was a little wet and broke in the middle, he was kind enough not to comment on it.
Without another word, I got up and padded my way over to the bathroom to get ready for the day and have a few moments of solitude to get myself together.
When I came back, circles under my eyes gone, face refreshed, and hair neatly braided, Tatsuya was ready to go as well, sitting on the floor as he played with Minami's ears. The coyote's tail was wagging and he was panting happily right into the ANBU's face, paws planted on his knees.
It surprised me at first. Nishi has always been an attention hog, happy to get pets and affection from anyone willing to give it (one of the reasons why I tend to summon her when I know that I'm going to be interacting with others), but Minami not so much. He was perhaps the shyest of the ninken. Only Hokomaru, silent and serene, was more aloof. I didn't know if that was due to personality or age; I hadn't known her since she was a pup, after all.
I knelt on the ground next to my summon and scratched the spot on his back that always made him melt as I asked, "Did you make a new friend?"
Minami nodded very primly.
"Do you want to join us on the road today? If you're too tired after the watch last night, we can always summon you tomorrow instead."
He stepped back, shaking out his coat, and acting very professional and not like he had just been enjoying scritches. "I suppose I could join you."
I snorted, "I am grateful that you'll grace us with your presence. I'll call you back after we leave the village."
Minami disappeared with a puff of smoke, and I grinned at Tatsuya. "Sirloin," I said.
"Huh?"
"That's the key to their hearts. If you want them to like you, nothing works better."
"You feed your summons steak?"
I laughed. "Yeah, it's why I'm fairly poor. Between enough meat to feed five hungry coyotes and all the art supplies I churn through in a month, my savings are perpetually doomed."
He tried brushing the coyote fur off the dark fabric of his sleeves only to frown when it went nowhere.
"Never had a pet before, I'm guessing."
Tatsuya just shook his head, and I slung my pack over my shoulder.
"What about you?" he asked as we started making our way through the hallways, and he replaced his mask over his face.
"My parents had a husky mix when I was born. His name was Sputnik, it's a long story, don't ask. Some sort of joke because he had a really big head, and it always made my dad laugh. He was a great dog. We put him down when I was eight, and my parents couldn't bring themselves to replace him. They had been finally discussing getting a new dog after I had graduated from college and was probably going to move far away. But then they died, so no new dog."
"No new dog," he echoed, and I nodded sagely.
It felt like only seconds later that we were in Gaara's office, handing him a report of our end of the mission, and the Kazekage raised where his eyebrows would be as he skimmed through it.
"Well, done," Gaara hummed. "Here's my response to the Hokage's message, ready for your return, as promised."
I took the scroll from him and put my protection jutsu on it before slipping it in my pouch. "Thank you, lord Kazekage. Is there anything else that I can do for you while I'm here?"
"No, that should be all."
Understanding that as the dismissal it was, Tatsuya and I bowed, and then we made our way out of the Sand Village.
As soon as we were back out on the dunes, I hiked up my pack and summoned Minami. "Next stop, the Leaf! As fun as this mission has been, I'm ready for the comforts of my bed and shower."
The three of us starting running, and if we were going perhaps a bit faster than is advisable, given the heat and my recent injury, who could blame us? Not when we were rushing in the direction of shade. And grass and trees and greenery.
The journey really did go by too quickly. The miles melted away under our feet, and before I knew it, the incredibly familiar forests surrounding the Leaf grew around us.
It was a pleasantly uneventful trip back, the only occurrence of any note happening on the second and final night we camped. I had sensed yet another ANBU squad in the distance, and I almost asked Tatsuya about it. But I decided that my idle curiosity was not worth putting him in an uncomfortable position with questions he either could not or should not answer. So I let it lie and continued on our journey.
I could not help the sigh of relief that slipped out as we approached the large gates of the village, and that the guard noticed my presence and greeted me (unlike in that horrendous nightmare that I did not know was a nightmare at all for most of it, and that I was trying with all my soul not to think about).
Part of me was incredibly surprised that Tatsuya did not vanish from my side the moment we crossed through the gates, and the two of us drew some stares as we wandered through the streets together. Even within their own village, ANBU are a rare sight, at least in their official black ops uniforms.
When he leaned over to ask me a question under his breath, I suddenly understood his continued presence, however.
"Ready to face him?" he asked, and it felt like my soul was punched out of my body.
Fuck. Kakashi was right there. I could see the Tower peeking over the top of the buildings around us. There were only minutes left between me and it.
I could already feel the crisp, unmistakable spark of his chakra signature up ahead in his office.
"No," I admitted in a near-whisper. "I feel like I'm going to puke."
"What's the single most important thing that you want to tell him? Maybe start with that, and then whatever else happens, at least you got that out of the way."
"That I love him," I replied immediately and then blushed a little bit at just how loudly I had stated it. God, I'd nearly shouted.
Tatsuya snorted with laughter, and I elbowed right in the ribs between the front and back panels of his body armor.
"Don't tease me! You're the one who asked!"
He raised his hands in surrender. "Fine, fine, I asked! And the whole market heard your answer."
"Asshole," I muttered and tried to elbow him again, but the jerk sidestepped it.
"I thought that I had always been very upfront about the fact that I am, in fact, an asshole?" He even had the nerve to cock his mask-covered face at me in a mocking angle.
Before I could start a new and more targeted assault on his ribs, Tatsuya wisely changed the topic.
"I'll have to report to ANBU headquarters, not the Hokage, so I won't be able to accompany you any further. But I think that's a good thing. The two of you need your own space to work things out, and I don't want to be in the middle of it."
"Yeah," I sighed and deflated. "It's probably best that we don't have an audience. If last time is anything to go by, we'll probably embarrass ourselves."
And with that, we had reached the Tower, coming to a stop.
Before Tatsuya left, he hesitated once, as if he was struggling to say what he wanted. I had thought that we'd gotten past that, but apparently not.
"Be careful," he finally muttered, and at my confused face, glancing up to where I knew Kakashi's office to be, he clarified. "I don't mean with that. I wasn't lying when I said that I was confident you guys would work things out. I mean with what Fudo said. We haven't discussed it since it happened, but it's not something to take lightly when an S-Ranked criminal issues you a personal threat." He massaged where the seal written in his blood hid beneath his sleeve. "Just watch yourself and don't take any risks, okay?"
I nodded, earnest and genuinely touched by his concern. "I will. You too. If there's anything I can do to help with the seal stuff, let me know as well. And don't worry, your identity is safe with me."
He nodded, patted my shoulder once, a familiar gesture that he hadn't extended once the entire mission, and then vanished in a poof of smoke and leaves.
Squaring my shoulders, I swallowed down a hurricane of nerves and maybe a little vomit as I pushed open the door to the Tower.
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Starting out 2024 strong with about 10k words all at once. I've had Chapter 16 planned for a long time and written for a while, but Chapter 15 took me forever to finish. Glad that I'm finally able to share both with you guys. Enjoy!
See you at the next update!