Survival: A Series of Recollections

Bingo: Stranded/Survival

“Katsurou?  Katsurou!”

“I can’t see a thing!”

“What in fuck is going on?”

“We gotta-- we gotta...”

“Shit, fuck-- close your eyes, put your head down, don’t--”

“Where’s it coming from?”

“Get behind me, I’ll--”

“Nng...”

“I don’t... where’s Jia Min?”

Silence fell.

“... uugh... guys?”

“So I heard it didn’t work.”

Katsurou looked down from his perch on a thick branch, several metres up the tree.  His teammate, the only one who spoke with any regularity, stood on the ground at the base of the trunk, her bare, dirty feet balancing her comfortably on the thickly braided wood of an upraised root.  The usual ruffled skirt was absent, baring her ankles and calves up to the ragged edges of knee-length muddy cutoffs, which were only visible until the equally soiled hem of her green tank top appeared, falling loosely around her narrow hips.   He wondered what she had been doing earlier, and whether she stopped it to come find him, or if this had just been a convenient detour.  “What didn’t?”

“The surgery.”

“Oh.  Yeahhhh...”  He trailed off, his grip around the kunai going lax.  The whetstone dropped into his lap as Katsurou reached up to scratch the back of his head.

Leaves rustled as Kayoko began to climb up to where he sat, mindless of the rough bark that scraped her thighs and left light pink welts on the soft undersides of her arms.   Silence stretched on just long enough for him to start to feel awkward, but as she swung up onto a branch just below his, she said, “You gonna move?”  He didn’t respond.

For a minute she gave him a weathered look, as Katsurou stayed slumped against the trunk, and there were no branches thick enough to facilitate her climb onto his perch further down her branch.  The lines on her face turned sour, and Katsurou let a little shout as the wood beneath him started to shift and writhe, bending toward Kayoko, who smiled and hopped daintily--as dainty as any person like Kayoko could do something, while covered in mud and sweat--onto the branch.  He was firmly clutching the kunai he’d been attempting to sharpen, but instead was forced to slam into the trunk of the tree and secure it with chakra so he’d have a handhold to prevent him from falling.  Kayoko met his glare with a mocking sneer, and plopped onto the limb in front of him.

“I walked by the apartment building.  They’re fixin’ it up, though they got a list of casualties outside.”  Katsurou knew her angle, of course; he was no master of subtlety, not like the twins or Shizuka, but as a mediator he had to know a fair bit about conversational structure and argument buildup.  “Is she okay?”  Then again, Kayoko wasn’t any more subtle than he, and she tended to think even less carefully about what she said.

Shrugging, Katsurou said, “She’ll live.  I mean, it wasn’t life threatening thankfully, but... they weren’t able to fix the damage to her spine, and she’ll probably never walk again.  Sakura-san said she’d try a few other things.”

Kayoko had dark eyes and a hard stare that felt like she was perpetually judging everything around her.  Many had trouble talking freely when pinned with her scrutiny.  Katsurou usually just ended up talking more.

“Obaasama had okaasan when she was really young.  She’s not old enough to not be able to walk anymore.”

“Lots of shinobi have debilitating injuries,” Kayoko pointed out.  “Some our age.”

“But she was a civilian.

She shrugged, then stopped the movement, and eyed him.  “So, are you okay?”

He mimicked her shrug, and said nothing.

Neither of them had been at the scene when the bomb was dropped.  Jia Min had seen the smoke from miles away, and the three of them had departed to investigate.  They had been intercepted by their sensei, who told them carefully that there had been a botched assassination attempt on Konoha’s council.  A shinobi of unidentified affiliation, who had been apprehended mere minutes after the explosion, had attached bombs with a chakra trigger to the underbellies of birds and directed them over the governmental building where the council was meeting.   The plan, Lee said, was to drop the explosives onto the building, but the shinobi overshot herself, releasing the jutsu after the birds had passed the shinobi district.

The bomb ended up taking out half of a civilian apartment building.

Many had died instantly, others were burned or crushed and left to die if aid could not reach them in time.  Shinobi evacuated as swiftly as possible, filling the hospital to the brim with near corpses.

Katsurou’s grandmother had lived in that apartment building, as they all found out after Lee stopped stalling them.  Kobayashi Michiko had already been removed from the wreckage, undamaged save for the rafter that had fallen on her while she was attempting to make her way out of the building, their sensei explained steadily as he held onto his young student’s jacket, restraining him from acting out in his panic.

What Lee had not told the children was that Michiko’s spinal cord had been damaged in the accident.

“You don’t have to act like it doesn’t mean anything,” Kayoko said suddenly.  She’d folded her legs close to her chest, and was resting her chin atop her knees.  A bit of dirt from her pants had smeared the edge of her jaw.

“Of course it means something,” he grumbled defensively, “I’m just...”  A hand drew through his hair, ruffling his dark bangs and pushing them up at odd angles.

“Frustrated?”

“Helpless.”

She paused.  “Ah.”

He shifted, partly from physical discomfort, mostly from emotional.  “But I mean, it’s fine.  You, of all people, don’t need to--”

“Pffft.”  Ever condescending, Kayoko laughed in his face.  “Yeah, all I got is my dad and my retarded team, don’t rub it in.  That doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to have your dumb-ass sobby civilian family bullshit.  I don’t care.”  It wasn’t exactly an offer to cry on her shoulder, but Katsurou smiled anyway.

Lightly, he nudged her with his foot.  “You’re so sweet.”

“Call me sweet again and I’ll break your grandma’s legs myself.”

The sand was flecked with dried bloody footprints, sucked of moisture seconds after they fell, leaving red-tinged sand which then surrendered itself to the cloud of golden grains that dusted over each imprint until they were no more than gentle divots in the vast, hostile wasteland.

Monochromatic, finely textured waves rolled as the harsh wind blew, obeying the guidance of its firm, demanding fingers.  To the desert, the wind was like an imploring caress, reformatting landscapes and building dunes and hills even as it destroyed others.  A constantly moving, constantly recycling, living landscape.  Each gale stroked the sandy earth, lifting fine grains into a dance that was as beautiful to the eye as it was deadly and destructive.

They were formidable partners, so did the Sunan myths tell, the wind and her scores of brothers; she reigning over deconstruction and recreation, unpredictable instability, they rushing alongside her, howling their bloodthirst as they stripped skin from bone in their sister’s wake.

A low bush creaked and rustled, hissing as it bent its wiry branches to the storm’s demand.   Roughened air tore through its tough leaves, blowing sand to scrape persistently at its spindly outstretched limbs, and the plant groaned long notes as the wind screamed in fury, threatening to tear it from its roots.  But though the desert wind tried, the bush clung fast to the loose sand, secured deeply into firmer ground with hard roots.  It trembled, otherwise unperturbed, wide branches arcing around the small crater of sand beside its trunk in which the two shinobi had fallen.

They burst through Kayoko’s front door, both of them shivering from cold, both of them laughing anyway.

“Fuck me,” she snickered, “it’s subthermal out there.”

As Kayoko pushed back her hood and slammed the door shut, Katsurou reached forward to twist a piece of her hair between his fingers.  A broad grin split his face.  “You have icicles in your hair, Kai.”

“Do I?”

“Yeah.”  He selected another lock and lifted it up to show her.

She snorted, waving it out of her face.  “Last time I let Lee-sensei force me to do push-ups on thin ice.”  Mockingly, she lowered her voice:  “If you distribute your weight evenly enough you can keep from falling through!  I believe in you, precious student!”  Katsurou chuckled.  She wasn’t as good at mimicking Lee’s voice as Jia Min’s mother was.  Kayoko could never sound enthusiastic enough.  “Fuck that,” she snorted.  “If I hadn’t caught myself on the water surface after the fucking thin-as-a-ballsack ice cracked, I would have been an icicle.”

“Your mom is an icicle,” he shot back, jerking her hood over her eyes and darting through the vestibule into the main area of her family’s tiny apartment.

Her heavy, slightly damp coat hit him solidly in the back before he could fully escape, and he heard her retorting, ‘My mom is a bitch,’ as she rounded the corner behind him, but Katsurou had frozen in his tracks.  A million relevant icicle metaphors (well, maybe only two or three) came to mind, but he didn’t have time to ponder that before all the good humour left Kayoko’s voice.

“Otousan?  Why... do you look like someone pissed in your rice bowl?”

Yamato stood just at the mouth of the hallway, arms crossed over his chest, one shoulder braced against the wall.  His customary forehead plate was absent, head bare, and in the yellowed light of their living room the lines on his face seemed to amplify with the shadows, stretching ominously into an intense frown.  “Your mother left this morning.”

Both of them were looking at her, now.  She’s good, Katsurou thought, as he quietly sidestepped, awkwardly half-sitting on the worn arm of their couch.  Kayoko’s face didn’t so much as twitch, and if he hadn’t been so well-acquainted with her body language, Katsurou would have missed the way she shifted her weight into a slightly more defensive stance.  “That’s different from usual, how?” she asked casually, sounding both unshaken and casually innocent.

Pushing off from the wall, Yamato took two steps forward, then stopped, glancing down at Kayoko’s coat where it had fallen when Katsurou dropped it, and still lay, melting cold, dirty water onto the carpet.  “She packed her things,” he said tightly, not moving to pick up the coat, just staring at it.  Before she could blow it off, he continued, perceiving her preparatory intake of breath without looking up:  “Everything.”  When she said nothing, he clarified further, “She said that you told her to get out, and that she was sick of dealing with you, so she was going to leave ‘before you tried to kill her or something.’  Then she packed her bags and left.”

The apartment was overcome with a suffocating silence.  Calmly, Kayoko walked forward and picked up her coat.  Without breaking the stillness, she serenely hung it on the chipped coatrack against the wall, then leaned down to turn on another lamp.  Her elbow bumped Katsurou’s knee, and they met each other’s eyes for a brief moment before she shifted her gaze away.

“Kayoko.”  Yamato’s tone was sharp.

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” she said suddenly.  “At least I didn’t lock her outside the apartment this time.”  It was the least appropriate time to be laughing, but Katsurou had to swallow a snicker when he remembered the time Kayoko had stolen her mother’s key, and then locked and warded the front door to their apartment while her mother was out, leaving the apartment inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t a shinobi with the ability to climb four stories to the window.  Yamato had been on a mission at the time, and the wards prevented the landlord from opening the door, effectively leaving Kayoko’s mother trapped outside of the apartment for a number of days before a sympathetic jounin finally broke in through the apartment window to release the wards.

Really, the only thing Kayoko had been sorry about was having to pay for the broken window.

“Both of them are equally bad!”  There was a pause, involving Yamato glancing sheepishly at Katsurou, slightly embarrassed about yelling at his teenage daughter in front of another kid.  Part of Katsurou wanted to leave--he’d never actually witnessed a fight with any adults until becoming a shinobi, as his parents and all of the family friends took intense pains to keep their emotional business private, excluding anyone save the involved parties, but children especially.  However, Kayoko sent him a threatening look and he knew that his presence was probably the only thing preventing their home from turning into a warzone, and if he left his teammate unguarded in this she would murder the fuck out of him the next chance she got.

He offered Yamato a weak, forgiving smile, and tried to be discreet as he slid further onto the couch.  Kayoko stopped glaring daggers at him, and turned them toward her father.

Choose your weapon,  Katsurou thought in his head as he watched them face off.  Three, two, one... Fight!

Kayoko threw the first punch.  Well, the first verbal punch.  “Okay, so oyakoukou and all; I’m shaming our family by not respecting my elder, but since when has our family had any fucking honour for me to ruin?”  Yamato took it, Katsurou presumed because he did not want to get into discussions of familial honour in front of a stranger.  His teammate, ever brutal, continued her assault before her father could piece together anything to say.  “Why are you so upset, anyway?  You never loved her.  I don’t even think you liked her most of the time, not much more than me, anyway.”

Katsurou was pretty sure dogs cared more about Kayoko’s mother than Kayoko did herself.  He did not voice this.  

Instead, Yamato finally spoke.  “You needed a mother,” he said quietly, “We agreed that we’d stay together for your sak--”

“Okay, okay.  ‘tousan?  First, when did I ever ask for a mom?  I have hated that bitch all of my life.  If I thought I could get away with it, I would have kicked her out sooner.”  He tried to interrupt her, but Kayoko raised her voice, yelling over him,  “Second, fuck you.  Don’t--”

“Kayoko--”

“Don’t pretend this is about me, you fucking asshole.  You just didn’t want to raise a kid all on your own, right?”  He tried to interrupt her again, but she charged ahead.  Kayoko was good at running people down helplessly in arguments--even her own parent, it seemed.  “Well, it isn’t a problem now.  I’m all fuckin’ raised, so you don’t need her anymore.  Yay, no responsibility!”

Yamato found his voice.  “You think you’re behaving like an adult?  Maybe if you listened to her more--”

Kayoko snarled.  “I don’t fucking need that cunt to take care of me--get that through your thick fucking skull.”

“Listen up,” he finally snapped, “you won’t speak to your father, or about your mother, like that, young man--err, lady.”

In an instant the anger around him had fizzled down to nothing, but it was too late:  Kayoko reeled back like she had been struck.  Katsurou shot up off the sofa just in time to catch her bare shoulders as she slammed backwards into him, but she tore out of his grip a second later, charging toward the long hallway behind her father.

“Kayoko, wait--”  Yamato raised his hands toward her in a desperate gesture of surrender, and he looked so genuinely apologetic that Katsurou almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

She dodged him, disappearing into the hallway, and the sound of her bedroom door slamming reached both of their ears.  It echoed, and then tense quiet spread poisonous fingers through the small apartment.   Yamato looked like he wanted to sink through the floor.

They stood alone in the living room, facing each other without speaking; Katsurou knew that Yamato was a respected veteran, but his face was hard and accusatory in spite of this.  For a second, Yamato seemed like he was going to say something, but the silence was suffocating and closed in on him, forcing his throat tight so no sound could escape.  He pressed his lips together and turned his gaze to the wet spot Kayoko’s jacket had left on the floor.

A short moment later, Kayoko’s bedroom door banged against the wall as it was flung open.  Yamato whirled around to face her, but Katsurou saw the emergency backpack slung over her shoulder before her father had completed the rotation.

She stopped dead in front of her father, her scowl deadly enough to pierce flesh from intensity alone.  “I’m leaving,” she said.  “I’m moving out.”  Yamato tried to speak, again, but Kayoko wove around him and grabbed Katsurou’s arm.  “Go find her, bring her back if you want, but I won’t be here.  Have a nice life.”  For a moment Katsurou thought that Yamato was going to try to physically stop Kayoko from leaving, and even though he knew Yamato was an elite shinobi who could wipe the floor with his fifteen-year-old self in seconds, Katsurou reached for his weapons pouch, ready to defend his teammate if necessary.

It wasn’t necessary.  Yamato dropped the hand that had briefly twitched toward her, and then the wall blocked Katsurou’s view of him as Kayoko steadily pulled him toward the exit.

“We’re staying at Jia Min’s tonight,” was all she said, loud enough for her father to hear, before the front door swung closed with a resounding final note.

The wind gradually died down, and night began to fall.  Blazing sun, alternating with a sandstorm thick enough to blot it out of sight, faded away to darkening sky and creeping chill.  Her hands shook from nerves and cold as she held the canteen and forced her teammate to drink, rubbing a chapped palm against his throat to make him swallow.

There were blisters on his ears, and burns on his cheeks.

She looked out into hopeless emptiness, staring at the stillness until the diminishing light turned the landscape shallow and flat.

They were alone.

“Jia Min’s house is too far away,” Katsurou argued as he walked alongside his teammates, each footfall landing with unusual weight.  “I have a first aid kit in my room.  We can patch up and recharge before hauling over to the hospital.”

“If someone hadn’t dropped the supplies pack into the river, we’d have a first aid kit now,” mumbled Kayoko bitterly, voice muffled somewhat beneath the bloody cloth she was holding against her neck and face.  Jia Min elbowed her, in an ‘I’d like to see you try to balance two heavy bags while hanging upside down off the edge of a bridge and trying not to get skewered by enemy projectiles’ kind of gesture, but Kayoko brushed him off.

The team had descended from the North, and ran into Konoha’s wall where it met the mountain face of the Hokage monument.  Rather than circling the wall however many miles to the gates, Jia Min scouted out one of the various hidden entrances, which was a low tunnel that even at their height they had to practically crawl through—a considerable feat with all their various injuries.  The tunnel opened up beside the river, and after narrowly avoiding being cut down by the ANBU guards, they commenced stumbling their merry way home.  But the hospital was at the opposite end of town in the heart of the shinobi district, which is also where Kayoko’s apartment complex was located.

Even for Rock Lee’s youthful students, walking all the way there on empty stomachs and sore, bleeding bodies was a massively unappealing option.  Not to mention Kayoko’s tiny one-room apartment was barely big enough for her and her belongings, speak not of two other bodies.

So they were walking alongside the river toward the civilian district, arguing over whether they would bunk down at Jia Min’s house, or Katsurou’s.

Even with Jia Min’s confirmation that the walk to Katsurou’s was a shorter distance, Kayoko continued to protest.  “What about your family, idiot?  I look like a bear tried to rip out my throat, and your mom is already scared of me without me getting blood on her shit.”  The boys paused.  It was the first legitimate point she’d made in the last ten minutes.

“It’s late,” Katsurou said slowly, contemplative.  “We should be able to sneak in.”  Jia Min snorted.

Kayoko grumbled, “If we can’t sneak into a civilian household at night, we don’t deserve to be ninja.”

They walked in mostly silence, but for the occasional bickering between Kayoko and Katsurou, then lapsed into broken sign language when they reached his house.

‘Follow me,’ he signed, then, ‘don’t talk.’

He unlocked the back door, ignoring Kayoko’s sarcastic gestures at the side, and ushered his teammates into the house before quietly removing his shoes and taking the lead again.  Several paces in his foot almost hit a shadowy object laying on the floor.  He instinctively bent to pick it up, but just as his fingertips brushed the soft fur of one of his sister’s stuffed animals, pain seized his abdomen.  It was only Kayoko seizing his shoulders and steadying his stance that kept him from collapsing on the spot.  For a moment he was dizzy and blinded by watering eyes; he waited until he could move again before drying his face with his sleeve, clearing his vision to reveal Jia Min standing in front of him.  He made the sign for ‘wound,’ then fiddled around with his hands for a while, creating various nonsensical gestures, before he settled on the sign for ‘split,’ and then proceeded to hunch his shoulders and paw at the air a few times to imitate crawling.

While he appreciated Jia Min informing him of this, Katsurou mostly got the message by the blood rapidly soaking through his black shirt, making it stick to his skin.  “Shit,” he mumbled, unzipping his vest, only to grimace when Kayoko mockingly signed ‘don’t talk’ back at him, then none-too-gently patted his shoulder to get him moving again.

It was a brilliant attempt at stealth.  They managed to climb the back stairs without noise, despite the fact that they were old and creaky, and in the same manner reached the hallway leading to his room.  The windowless space made it somewhat hard to see, and so Katsurou only had a second’s warning of Jia Min delivering a warning tap against his arm before the sound of creaking hinges reached his ears, and a light coloured, blurry figure peeked out from around a doorjamb.

“Katsu-nii?”

And thus their mission was ruined by his half-asleep kid sister.  Way to go, team.

“Hey there, Bachiko,” he whispered hoarsely, trying to keep his voice as low as possible.  He could feel his teammates’ sidelong looks, which he staunchly ignored by focusing on the yellow nightshirt and shadowy limbs melting through the darkness toward him.  “Did I wake you up?”

“No,” she said, staring up at him with wide, bleary eyes, and Katsurou felt a pinch of relief.  At least they weren’t crap as shinobi.  “I was awake and wanted juice.  Why are you up so late?”

At his side, Kayoko was shifting to duck behind Jia Min’s back in an attempt to conceal the murderous, horror-film worthy gash that ran along her throat and partway up her jawline.  It was a nonlethal surface injury, and had mostly dried on the journey home, but it still looked like unholy hell.  Following her example, Katsurou surreptitiously re-zipped his vest; it should be too dark to see the blood on his shirt in this light, but he really wasn’t looking to take chances with his sister’s psyche.  Up until this point, he’d tried his best to prevent his family from seeing the worst of the dangers of shinobi life, and he was uninterested in changing what was a relatively successful record.

He casually and gingerly ruffled his sister’s hair, “Just getting back from work, baachan.  Hey, you should go back to bed.”  He shot a glance at his teammates--rather, at Jia Min, and the back of Kayoko’s head.

This turned out to be a mistake when he looked back to Bachiko, who was protesting, “But I want juuuice” with no illusion of volume control, and reaching for the lightswitch.

Katsurou only managed to get out “Bachi, don’t--” as he reached for his sister’s hand before the sudden gesture pulled the torn muscle in his stomach, cracking the dried blood further and causing him to double over on the spot.  Like before, he felt Kayoko’s arms snatch him before he could crumble (crushing his little sister in the process), and heard Jia Min moving just as quickly to snatch Bachiko out of the line of fire.  His vision went white, then black, then an interesting shade of red, before he finally was able to perceive enough visual input to see Bachiko squirming within Jia Min’s hold.

There was only enough time for Katsurou to register the terrified horror in his baby sister’s eyes before she let out a piercing shriek, summoning his parents, who burst out into the hallway a moment later, only to stop at the sight of their son, blood dripping from his mouth and clothes, held by a girl with a ragged gash for a throat, and a strange-eyed boy holding onto their struggling daughter.

After that, he blacked out.

He never found out what happened following his graceful exit from the situation.  Jia Min, obviously, wouldn’t talk about it, and upon being questioned, all Kayoko did was snarl at him.  What he did know was that Jia Min had ended up having to send out a flare to summon a shinobi to take Katsurou to the hospital, since Jia Min and Kayoko were both too weak to carry him themselves.  He knew that his mother had had to clean up his blood, and that it had stained the floor a little.  He knew that his little sister couldn’t stop looking at him like he was going to break at any second, having finally realized what shinobi work actually meant for her brother’s safety and health.

Also, he knew that he’d gotten kicked out.

In Kayoko’s words, at least.  Katsurou said that ‘kicked out’ was a little strong--his mother hadn’t really favoured the decision, but his father decided after watching his wife weep while she cleaned up her son’s blood from the floor as said son was being rushed to the hospital by a masked stranger who had burst into their home unannounced, and simultaneously trying to console his hysterical daughter, that if Katsurou was going to continue to get the hell beaten out of him in his crazy profession, it would be for the best if he didn’t rely on their home as a base for post-mission recuperation.

It wasn’t so much ‘kicked out’ as ‘given an ultimatum’:  quit shinobi work and be a normal boy who didn’t traumatise his mother or sister by showing up half dead in the hallway in the middle of the night, or move out.

His mother had sported suspiciously damp eyes throughout his father’s speech, but all she’d said on the matter was a soft, “You are old enough to live on your own... if you wanted to,” and then leaned up to kiss his forehead.

“You can come stay with me,” Kayoko said later, when he groaned and dropped his head into his hands in conflicted exasperation.

“Only if you get a bigger apartment.  I’d rather kill myself than live in that matchbox with your nasty ass.”

Kayoko went through the motions with robotic efficiency.  She covered Katsurou, who needed the warmth more than she did, and sent up flares to pierce the night sky with bright explosions of red.  Hopefully if someone saw him, it would be their teammate or another ally.  Ignoring the cold, she began to dig a deeper ditch underneath the spiky desert shrub.  Sand found its way into every piece of her clothing, scratching inside her sandals and irritating her skin, but after half an hour of work that almost kept the subfreezing temperature from getting to her, she had Katsurou in a hollow of sand with his head pillowed on one of their packs against the wiry trunk.  He mumbled in irritable bursts, barely aware though he was; she slid through the thick sand and underneath the blanket she’d put around him, manhandling his body to allow her to apply salve to the various sand burns on his wrists, face, and neck and chest.

She secured the perimeter, even though there was nothing to secure.  Other than the rattlesnake, creeping toward Katsurou’s makeshift nest, which she speared in one shot, most of the nightlife avoided their miserable camp.  For a while she amused herself by using senbon to discourage scorpions and solfugids from considering Katsurou’s body a suitable hiding place.  Sitting guard too long began turning limbs to ice, so Kayoko warily wandered the surrounding area, making sure she never got too far from where Katsurou was resting fitfully.  There was a cactus just off the side of a dune to the West, and she marked its location mentally, in case they should run out of water.

When she got back, she checked Katsurou for desert buggers again.  She found a lizard under the corner of the blanket, which hissed at her when she shooed it away, and a spider creeping across his shoulder, which she killed.

Throughout it all, she forced herself into activity so she didn’t have to think of her full team as it entered the desert, or the sudden sand storm, or the unseen enemies that had threaded small black projectiles into the wind gales, taking advantage of her team’s blindness (on two accounts) and inability to dodge.  Nor would she think of the sound of a blade tearing across Katsurou’s chest, leaving only a small surface scratch against his skin, but severing the front of his cloak, allowing the savage wind to steal it within seconds.  She sat guard, watching out as innocently as she could, forcing herself not to remember screaming Jia Min’s name into the din even as she pushed Katsurou to the ground and threw her own cloak over his face.

She especially didn’t relive the feeling when she was able to open her eyes for the first time in what seemed like years, blinking away grit but seeing nothing but sand for miles and miles.  After that, Kayoko didn’t let go of Katsurou, even for a moment, as she dragged his stumbling form through periods of lull in the sand storm, and dropped them both to the ground when the weather turned foul once more.

But her teammate’s soft noises of discomfort could not ban worry from her mind.  He’d been struck twice by the unknown enemy’s mysterious projectiles, both shallow cuts, neither of them showing signs of being poisoned, but he’d been delirious and clumsy and half-gone ever since, no matter how much water or food she forced down his throat.

Kayoko rubbed her numb hands together and hummed an off-key rendition of a song Jia Min sometimes sung.

A small kangaroo rat snuck up and sniffed her foot, before darting back out of sight.

When there was nothing else she could justify doing, she dragged herself back beneath the branches of the bush alongside her teammate and pressed herself against his back, trying to suppress her shivers so that she would not wake him.

Katsurou entered their house and was immediately greeted by the smell of smoke.  Specifically taima.  It was noticeable from the moment he opened the door, and he was positive that by ‘noticeable’ he meant ‘identifiable by normal people without super ninja skills.’  Kicking off his shoes, Katsurou meandered through the various storage units that made up their landlord’s living space, heading in the direction of the staircase.

“Hey, asshole!” he yelled as he climbed the stairs to their shared floor.  “What the hell are you doing smoking inside?  Our landlord’s gonna kill us if the smell gets in the walls.”  He wasn’t really mad, of course, merely following their customary ritual of giving each other as much shit as was feasible at any given time.  The owner of the scrunched three-level house was barely ever around, being a half-mad pack-rat who was constantly traveling and camping out, then always coming back with more junk, which he proceeded to stuff either in one of the many boxes on the ground floor, or in the topmost level of the building; it could have been another apartment, but nothing lived there but mice and a wide collection of useless crap.

Considering how much he and Kayoko yelled at each other, it was probably for the best that they had the place to themselves most of the time.

He wandered to the minifridge they’d tucked into a corner of the room; it was a leftover from when Kayoko had made a foray into living in the complex of miniscule one-room apartments that hosted mostly ANBU and jounin--those being people who needed a place to keep shit and occasionally sleep, but were otherwise too wrapped up in their jobs (and various psychoses) to have much need for an actual home.  There was nothing in the fridge except a bottle of orange juice and half a carton of eggs.  “We need a new fridge,” he said to the back of Kayoko’s open bedroom door, from which the strong odor was wafting innocently.

The smoke was the only thing exiting her room, however, as his roommate had not said a word to him since he arrived.  Knocking the fridge shut with a knee, he wandered toward her room.  “Did you pass out or something?”  Katsurou pulled the door the rest of the way open, then paused in the doorway.

No, he thought, she wasn’t asleep or unconscious.

Kayoko was curled on her bed, in nothing but her nightshirt (a garment that had, once upon at time, belonged to either he or Jia Min); her face was buried against her knees, long hair curtaining her bare legs in messy, haphazard strands.  An arm was wrapped around her legs, her fingers lightly cradling her other elbow.  Her forearm extended almost elegantly, hand poised daintily in the air, holding a joint that, from the look of the intact ash (complete with empty ash tray on the floor) and her tense shoulders, she hadn’t even touched.

Hm.

“You’re going to get ash on your bed,” Katsurou said quietly, not sure what else to say.  Very deliberately, Kayoko twitched her thumb, flicking the end of the joint.  Freckles of grey scattered across her bedspread.

Okay then.

He warily moved closer to the bed, leaning forward slightly.  “Give me that,” he sighed, “you’re just wasting it.”  If it wasn’t obvious before, the fact that Kayoko didn’t respond when he removed the joint from her hand indicated that something serious was wrong.  Usually he got punched for touching her bed, and punched twice for daring to baby her.  Katsurou put it out, then dropped it on her bedside table.  That was the easy part.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, figuring she’d hurt him less if he didn’t beat around the bush.

Silence.  And then:  “My dad died.”

He could feel his brain malfunctioning, even as he attempted to grapple for something to say; every diplomatic, mediating instinct he’d ever had curled up and died on the spot, leaving nothing but empty husks of useless formulas and would-be good intentions.  He couldn’t even say ‘oh,’ or ‘ah,’ or God forbid, ‘I’m sorry.’  Kayoko didn’t look too offended.  She didn’t even move.  Katsurou didn’t move, either, still perched in an awkward partway lean over her bed, with one knee denting the mattress.

Eventually he got uncomfortable enough to move, shifting carefully until he was sitting next to her.  She didn’t kill him.  He spoke quietly, hating the silence:  “Shit,” because articulation had left him.

At seventeen years, one would have thought that he would have experienced at least one friend who’d lost a parent, or at least a sensei, before this.  Most of the previous generation were far older than what was expected of them.  He guessed that was a good thing.  He’d seen kids die.  No one close to him or his family.  Civilians did that.  Lived past thirty, many of them.  His own father was forty-three.

Katsurou didn’t notice either of them moving at any points, so frozen in surprise, pain that didn’t belong to him in the first place.  Nonetheless, at one moment it dawned on him that their arms were touching, that a fold from her shirt sleeve was pressing against his bicep.  He thought the shirt might have been Jia Min’s, looking at it up close.  It was hard to tell.  The fold was uncomfortable, an irritating lump leaving an unwanted impression in his skin.  He slid his arm until it was behind hers, then his shoulder was at her ribcage, gentle bony protrusions through the worn, dark fabric of Jia Min’s old shirt.  Then again, maybe he recognized that one tear at the collar.  Maybe it had been his after all.  His wrist touched her opposite hip, and the bones in his hand remained unbroken, even though his arm was across her back and the hem of the shirt was wrinkled so his skin touched hers.  He didn’t think of what touching her unclothed body meant; they didn’t think of each other that way.  Kayoko didn’t move, didn’t twitch, not even to punish him, and she wasn’t the type who would lay her head in the crook of anyone’s neck for comfort.  Katsurou’s forehead came to rest in the hard plane of her shoulderblade, and his uncomfortably arched spine didn’t bother complaining.

He hadn’t even known Yamato.

“I didn’t care when my mom left,” Kayoko mumbled suddenly.  It was the last thing she said on the matter.

“Kayoko?”

“What?”

“Where are we?”

“We’re in the desert, Katsurou.”

“Is that why it’s so hot?”

“Yeah.”

“My chest hurts.”

“Nothin’ more I can do about that.  Sorry.”

“S’okay.  Nnn...  my throat feels dry.”

“Do you need a drink?”

“Mmph.”

“Here, you can--oh.  I’ll... be right back.”

If asked, Katsurou would have sworn that he’d meant to close the door.  Up and down, cross his heart, it was completely a neglectful accident.

The house was empty, he thought.  When they’d come in, his roommate had been out (along with the landlord, but no surprise there--he hadn’t seen the man in over a month) and he figured he’d hear her if she returned.

He neglected to consider that as the years had progressed, Kayoko had become catlike in her silence.  With a closed mouth, the most sound she made at any given time was the whisper of long hair and shifting skirts.  

That afternoon she was not wearing a skirt.  Pants, neither; when Kayoko slipped in the window of her bedroom, she was wearing form-fitting shorts, habitually moving with her limbs apart so there was nothing to brush together or create even the slightest noise.  Her feet were soft and soundless against the floorboards.  Quite a contrast to the growly, stomping creature she’d been as a young teen, and sometimes Katsurou... forgot.

With a certain woman’s tongue halfway down his throat, Katsurou probably wouldn’t have noticed even if she had made noise.  (Her name was Nagashi Ami, which Katsurou thought was kind of ridiculously cutesy, but mostly because he knew Kayoko ruthlessly mocked names of such traditional girliness.  Thankfully he didn’t intend for her to ever know Ami’s name.)  They’d navigated somewhat clumsily, as horny teenagers generally did, from the staircase, somehow making it into his room mostly unscathed.  His next instinct had been to close the door, but approximately the instant they crossed the threshold she had jumped him, and then it was very much ‘what instincts?’  The door stood open.

The next thing he knew, Ami was kneeling on the edge of his bed, and his belt was somewhere to the... well, it was somewhere.

That was about the part where Kayoko came in.

More accurately, Kayoko entered the scene with a ragged sound of horror and surprise that stopped him dead.  Ami stopped a second later, delicately removing her mouth from whatever part of his anatomy it had been occupied with at the time, and warily glanced around his torso.  Katsurou was too scared to turn around.  Also his pants were halfway down his thighs.

“You motherfucker.”

Oh yeah.  This was going to end well.

“Pull up your pants so I can beat the shit out of you.”

Ami had taken the opportunity to haul all of the sheets off of his bed and cocoon them around her.  “Who is that?” she asked, voice quiet.

“My roommate.”  Katsurou smiled at her, then jerked his pants up around his waist, albeit somewhat delicately.  He turned around.  “Please don’t shoot.”

“That’s a good idea, actually.  Stay there while I get my fucking crossbow.”

Behind him, Ami made a sound that was largely fear, with a bit of shock mixed in.  For her sake, as she was a civilian and had no idea what shinobi actually did (beyond “protect the country”) and for all he knew she believed the horror stories about bloodthirsty kunoichi killing machines that sometimes cycled around civilian circles, Katsurou sighed dismissively; “You’re so full of shit, Kayoko.”

Not that he actually thought she was full of shit.  If Kayoko had had a crossbow, Katsurou had no doubt she’d be firing it at him right now.

“Get out here.”

“No.”

“Get out here.”

“No.”

“If you don’t get out here I’ll break your legs.”

“You are not allowed to use the house as a weapon, you crazy bitch.”

“Who says?”

“Our landlord.”

“Fucker isn’t here, he can’t say shit.  Now get out here, because if I get fined for hurting a civilian I’m making you cover it.”

Katsurou sighed as Ami scrambled off the bed.  “She’s not going to hurt you, she’s just a loveless curmudgeon with a giant ball of hate where her heart should be, and the only time she feels anything is when she’s ruining people’s lives,” he said, but she was fetching her shirt and looking terribly like she didn’t believe him.  Oh well.

He was on his way out of the room when his bedroom door suddenly had spikes, one of which nearly pierced the shell of his ear before he ducked and threw himself to the side.  The mini fridge loomed ominously in the corner, and he almost crashed into it while coming up out of the roll.  Distantly, he heard Ami shriek, and briefly regretted the fact that she had to witness Kayoko’s bullshit, and even more briefly regretted that he would probably never get to sleep with her now.  But really, he cared more about seriously upsetting her.  Really, his dick had never softened up so fast in his entire life.

On that cheerful thought, he ducked again to avoid Kayoko’s fist.  “This is our apartment,” she growled, trying to sweep kick him.  Katsurou jumped in the air, then flipped over her.  His poor door tried to stab him again, and he danced to the side like a nervous horse and then took up defense in the middle of the room.

“Technically it’s our landlord’s house and if you keep trying to kill me with my door it’s going to warp.”

She continued like she hadn’t heard him.  “If you’re going to fuck some tacky slut in our home--”  (“Hey, don’t call her a slut...” he protested lightly) “--then at least have the decency to close a door--” (dodged an uppercut to the jaw, then was nearly taken out by a wooden spike splintering out from the floor) “--because I never want to see your bare ass again.”  Kayoko halted her attack.  “Damn it, Kanii, I’m going to have to rip my eyes out now.”

A slow grin overtook his face.  “You’ve seen my ass before.”  He didn’t think about what that sentence would imply to his would-be lover.

“I was too deep into the late stages of hypothermia to care.”

“Pfft.  You liar.”

“Finish up your shit.”

“I think I am finished,” he said, glaring at her without any real heat.  Kayoko looked positively angelic.  “Ami-chan?”

She must have spent their whole battle time getting dressed, because after peeking around to make sure the coast was clear, Ami slid out of his bedroom and started edging toward the stairs.  “I’m going home.  Sorry, Katsurou-kun.”  Regardless of her speaking to him, her eyes never left Kayoko.  Kayoko now looked manically angelic, in a fallen angel kind of way.

There was surprisingly little disappointment.  Katsurou hadn’t expected her to stick around anyway.  “Do you want me to walk you home?” he offered, mostly out of courtesy.

Ami shook her head.  “I’ll be fine, bye.”  Then she disappeared down the stairs.

Kayoko waited approximately forty-five seconds before bursting into loud, raucous laughter.  Really, her basic lack of tact or propriety was of legendary proportions.  When she finished laughing, she wiped her eyes with her wrist and gave him a reprimanding, but somewhat sadistically amused, look.  “Ami-chan?”

He grumbled.  “Oh, shut up.  You’ve already ruined one thing for me, no need to rub it in.  Your sadism has been fed enough for today.”

“It was your own fault,” she sneered.  “If you ever do this again, I’m kicking you out.”

“You’re the one who wanted to live with me in the first place.”

“Never again.”

Everything was in sharp focus.

It was after noon of the second day.  Up until then, Kayoko had kept them alive to the best of her abilities.  Hydrated, from careful water rationing, and then she’d methodically taken apart the cacti she’d found, forcing Katsurou to eat it despite his complaints about the taste and the texture.

She was caught between facing the burning, searing sun, or sweating to death underneath the blanket, which Kayoko had turned into a shallow tent below the bush for them to hide under.  The shrub’s long branches did nothing.  Katsurou was sweating and delirious, his brief foray into semi-lucidity having been eradicated by the heat the previous day.  He fussed and squirmed under the blanket, but she forced him to stay beneath it; without his cloak he was defenseless against the sun and vulnerable to stinging, flying insects.  Her attempts to get him to travel during the night had proved futile, so he wouldn’t have had the strength to move outside of the nest anyway, despite him seeming to desperately want to.  She didn’t blame him--the heavy material was built for insulation and warmth, so its protection from the sun was counteracted by the amount of heat trapped below.

All attempts to identify their location were futile.  Even if she succeeded in finding a landmark, they couldn’t travel.  The only thing they could do was wait, stay alive, and hope for help to arrive.

As she sat in her shift outside the bush, again having to kill whatever desert animals decided their tent looked like a cozy place to hide (except she was saving the bodies this time, for food), her head throbbed from dehydration.  The majority of water and food was going steadily to Katsurou; the copious sweat dripping down his skin and soaking his clothes worried her almost as much as his inexplicable loss of functionality and coherence.  Katsurou didn’t usually sweat that much.  She rubbed her blistered hands, gently massaging the oily residue from the salve into the chapped skin of her wrists.

An hour passed, then two.  The third dragged, and despite the protective headcovering her face stung and her lips cracked and bled.  On the fourth, she crawled back under the tent with her teammate, wiped his forehead with her sleeve, and panted quietly.  She loosened her robe with weak fingers and reached for the burn salve, eyeing the angry red patches of skin dotting Katsurou’s body.  Soon she’d go cut down another cactus head, and would fire the second-to-last flare.

She still didn’t know where Jia Min was.

Calmness and assurance that her desert-raised teammate knew how to survive solo in his place of birth left her, at long last.  With his Byakugan he should have located them by now, especially considering he could travel with his eyes covered.  

Kayoko squinted her eyes half-closed against the sun, and prayed that he was still alive.

“What’re you doing, Kai?”

Looking up, she saw Katsurou crouching on her windowsill.  “I’d ask you to knock, but.  Still:  Privacy?”

“Says the girl who will unlock my door to get inside if she doesn’t feel like waiting for an answer.  What if I didn’t respond because I was jacking off?”

“That was completely different,” she sniffed, stuffing a knee-length skirt with a split down the side into her pack.

“Was not,” came the petulant retort.  He climbed through the window, dropping to the floor and then shifting to lean against the wall.  “Anyway, random packing.  What for?”

“I don’t have to answer you, asshole.  Next time I’ll just let you die.”

“I wasn’t dying!”

Kayoko chuckled lowly, then seemed to fall silent in intense contemplation between two identical looking tank tops.  When the silence stretched on too long, Katsurou inched down from the wall and scooted toward her, trying to scope out what she might be packing for by examining the items on the floor and what he could see of the inside of her pack.  “So, I ask again…”

“I won’t be home for a while,” Kayoko said.

“Why?”

A worn pink bag, which he knew from years of missions contained her toothbrush, hairbrush, soap, and other hygiene products, made its way into the by now half-filled travel pack.  “I’m...”  She covered her hesitation by delicately sniffing a shirt, after which her face contorted and she threw it into a messy pile across the room.  “I’m getting a surgery,” she said finally, voice stronger and determined.

Katsurou sat up straighter, looking notably worried.  “What?  Why?  Are you okay?”  She waved a hand dismissively to calm him down, but he batted it away just as quickly.  “Is it from an injury?  Why didn’t you tell me before?”

Kayoko sighed.  Heavily.  “I’m fine, don’t worry.”

“Surgery isn’t a big indicator of fineness!  Kind of the opposite, actually.”  For a second he actually looked a bit angry.  It melted away into something infinitely more complex and hard to deal with.  “Kai, you don’t have any like... problems you’ve been hiding from us, right?  We’re a team and you should... yanno.”  His usual coercive, Team Unity mediation fell short, and he mentally heard Lee-sensei weeping over his failure.  “You should be able to come to us about shit,” he finished lamely.

She sent him a long, flat stare.

It became apparent that he was missing something.  

“... it’s a non-serious surgery.”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

The stare turned imploring.

“Routine maintenance?  Growth removal?  Tooth extraction?”

She shook her head no, repressing a wince.

“... cosmetics?  Donating a useless organ to charity?”

Now the stare was exasperated.

Katsurou was trying to figure it out, he really was.  “So you aren’t in bad health and they aren’t experimenting on you for science, what could you possibly--”  Kayoko abruptly slammed a fist down on the floor and pinned him with an incredibly venomous glare.  “... oh.”

He got it.  “Oh.  … oh.”

No longer was Kayoko looking at him.  She was staring intently at her pack, shuffling through a few items she’d already vetoed as if to make absolute sure that she didn’t want them.  A pair of shorts he knew she hated got thrown into the bag, though she’d probably take them out later.  She spent a good, long time elaborately fitting them into her bag, and by the time she finished cramming everything down it only appeared one third of the way full, though the sides bulged awkwardly.

“How long is recovery gonna be?” he asked quietly.

“We don’t know.  Tsunade-sama is mostly making it up as she goes along.”

“Are you worried?”

She shrugged uncomfortably.  “I trust her.”  Tsunade had been personally caring for her since she was around eight years old, after all.

Katsurou asked the next question delicately:  “How long until you’re back on duty?”

“No fucking clue.”  

“Ah...”

“Can we stop talking about it?”  Kayoko still wasn’t looking in his direction, and had taken to fiddling with the zipper on an empty weapons pouch.

Katsurou stood up slowly, and considered saying a great number of things, but eventually settled on, “I’m hungry.  Do you want some soba?”

The last flare went off at midnight.  Kayoko thought that if they weren’t found this night, tomorrow they’d start the path to a slow, painful death from heatstroke.  She was severely dehydrated, and she suspected that Katsurou wasn’t as hydrated as she was trying to keep him; there was really only enough cactus to last them a day more, and she still couldn’t go very far because small-scale sandstorms began kicking up again and she couldn’t leave Katsurou alone.  She had carefully eyed the creatures she’d killed, trying to remember which ones would kill them and which were safe to eat.  Two small brown non-venomous snakes, a scrawny rabbit, and a highly poisonous sand worm that she’d found curling its nasty way underneath Katsurou’s body.  It got a few inches further beneath him before Kayoko stopped panicking long enough to drag it abruptly under the sand with the shrub’s roots, then unearthing its writhing, disgusting body a few feet away and chopping it in twain with a kunai to the belly.

Not wanting to eat snakes just yet, she’d spent two hours on her hands and knees in the sand, searching with chakra through the bare ground and pulling whatever roots and twigs she could find toward her so she could start a fire with which to cook the rabbit.  She’d eaten, but Katsurou had mostly coughed up the tough meat; with no water to boil it, Kayoko was unsure what else to do.  She wrapped the rabbit’s eyes in a piece of fabric (after doing her best to get all the sand off) and squeezed the moisture into his mouth, mostly out of spite so she could harass him about eating rabbit eyes as revenge for putting her through all this bullshit.

When they got out of here, in the hypothetical “some time after now.”  If they survived.

But as always, the night stretched on and finally Kayoko gave up watch and dragged herself under the shrub to try and warm up her shivering teammate.  Even with her cloak, the blanket, and her skirt, which she’d torn in half and used as another blanket, leaving her in nothing but leggings, Katsurou was still shaking like a leaf in a windstorm; he hadn’t slept a wink that night, instead twisting on his side and mumbling quiet, nonsensical protests.  Kayoko ignored her own shivering and cocooned the makeshift coverings around him and wrapped her arms around the pile, edging her head onto the pack beside his until her forehead pressed against the damp skin of Katsurou’s neck.  Irritably, she jerked the collar of her cloak up to cover the back of his head and most of his face, then replaced herself against the rough fabric.

She fell asleep.

Kayoko did not awaken until she felt Katsurou squirming to free himself from the cloth around him.  “K’yoko,” he slurred, and she groggily scooted back to avoid being elbowed in the stomach, “sss’m one... coming.”  He had to say it twice before she understood him, but she’d picked up on the presence of people long before she deciphered his message.

She was bothered by two things:  The first one being that her mysteriously ill, incapacitated teammate had woken up and noticed people approaching before she did.  The second one came when she tugged the covers off of Katsurou and looked into his face.  He was frighteningly pale, with chapped grey lips and lines of red along the white of his eyes, and his tongue was swollen.

At the rate she’d been forcing liquids into him, how had he managed to get so dehydrated?

That of course wasn’t her main problem right now.  Her eyesight was far from its best, and she couldn’t see the approachers in the dark.  There weren’t enough roots for her to feel the vibrations approaching.  Kayoko briefly wondered if it would be best for them to be killed by enemies so they didn’t have to die from heat stroke or dehydration, or if she should just murdersuicide them both right now to prevent them from being kidnapped and facing a possibly worse fate.  She was pretty sure that that was just the exhaustion making bad suggestions, though.

“Be quiet,” she whispered to Katsurou, “and for fuck’s sake, I know you’re sick, but calm the fuck down.  Stay still.”  Squirming through the thick sand as quietly as possible, Kayoko shifted to the end of the blanket so she was just peeking out from beneath the cloth under the bush.  It was dark enough to conceal their little hiding spot, thanks to the branches providing cover and the blanket being generally the same colour as sand.

She didn’t have much to fight with in the desert.  There weren’t many trees, but she knew from experience that skinny, tough branches could be manipulated into vines that were far more trouble than they looked, and she could at least try to incapacitate them .  Ideally, they’d just move on by without noticing or bothering them, but Kayoko didn’t think that very likely at this point, especially since Katsurou was having a hell of a time concealing his chakra signature.

Speaking of...  A wave of unsuppressed, unfamiliar chakra signatures descended upon her, and Kayoko sucked in a breath, readying a kunai in one hand and preparing to begin hand seals with the other, hoping for the advantage of taking them by surprise and getting the first hit, or the first few hits before they counterattacked.

Maybe if she got lucky and killed them all they could eat their bodies until Katsurou was well enough to travel again.  Scary thought.

Scarier was the fact that she knew that, alone in these conditions, up against what was clearly a group of trained shinobi, she would be overwhelmed in moments.

The idea of them not being hostile for some reason didn’t occur to her, possibly the lack of hydration combined with stress making her paranoid and irrational.  It wasn’t until a host of cloaked, shifting shadows in the midst of the already shifting sand appeared on the horizon that Kayoko felt a flicker of familiar chakra.  Her signature was masked, but they were coming right for them.  For a time that seemed both long and short, she waited, watching them draw ever closer, and at twenty meters she finally managed recognition.

Throwing decorum to the wind, Kayoko scrambled from the cover, sinking up to her ankles in cool sand as she climbed from the self-made dune.  She faced the group as they moved in, and forced her heartbeat to stop speeding up when one of the figures dropped his hood back to reveal white eyes that reflected eerily in the moonlight.

He could probably see it, though, freakish gifted perception of his.

They didn’t hug each other, when Jia Min landed in front of her and saw bagged eyes and burned and cracked skin.  He didn’t look surprised, but concern was still there.  “Katsurou is under the bush,” she said, to draw the attention away from herself.

Two people moved quickly to where she indicated and began to move toward the shrub to retrieve him.  He must have been preparing to attack, despite being about as threatening as a kid hiding under the blankets with a foam sword, because Jia Min turned a fraction toward the bush and gave a brief, low whistle, which was their signal for ‘safe.’  Their teammate was unearthed a moment later; his legs wobbled when the shinobi tried to help him to stand, after which Kayoko heard a woman’s voice say, “Lay down; I’m a medic,” as she none too gently touched a hand to his chest and assisted him to the ground.

With him being seen to, she turned back to Jia Min, frowning.  “What took you so long?”  He shrugged, and made a gesture with his hand that she couldn’t decipher.

“You were separated by the sandstorm,” said someone at her left.  “And then enemies of our family attacked your team.  Jia Min fought them, but once he killed them, he couldn’t find you or Katsurou.”  Kayoko eyed the short, brunette man and tried to remember his name.  Swarthy skin and dark brown eyes made him hardly an easily identified figure, and the cloak covered up any other potentially recognizable marks.  “He came to our village to collect a search and reinforcement team.”

Jia Min was suddenly pegged with an angry glare.  “You went to Suna instead of looking for us?  You have Byakugan, you fuck, you didn’t need to--”

Instead of let Jia Min explain himself silently, the unidentifiable annoyance spoke up again:  “You and Katsurou went miles off course.  Suna was closer, and it would have been suicidal to risk traveling alone with as few supplies as he had on him for gods know how long.”  

Kayoko hated the fact that he spoke like he knew them, when she was siting here just struggling to recall his goddamn name.  “What are you, the interpreter?” she sneered.

He shrugged.  “Kind of.  Jia Min could direct the team but it didn’t help if no one could understand what he was saying, so otousan sent me.”  Kid must be one of their eight billion cousins, then.  Kayoko had met all of them on multiple occasions, but nothing about her was at its best right now: not her memory, and especially not her temperament.  She couldn’t even talk to her fucking teammate without his snotty cousin interrupting.

“How cute.”  Her tone crossed between deadpan and a growl.

Jia Min looked awkward.

“Iwao-dono?”

“Aa?”  So that was his name.  Well, she wouldn’t have remembered that.

The medic was standing.  “Sarutobi-san is in fair physical condition--dehydrated with medium-severity surface burns and a few mild cuts with low-severity infection at one location--but he has been under a disorienting genjutsu for some time; I released it, but the prolonged exposure has affected both his mind and his body adversely.  This level of healing is... outside of my expertise.  We should return to the village, where a specialist can repair whatever damage the jutsu might have left behind.”  Genjutsu?  Fuck her, she hadn’t even considered that.  Kayoko tuned out the rest of the conversation, proceeding to mentally flog herself with twice the usual brutality for not even attempting a kai or any non-physical attempt at figuring out what was wrong with him.

Fucking stupid.  She hated genjutsu.  It unnerved her--now more than ever.

The Kazekage’s brat was organizing the team, and she heard Katsurou speaking, still slightly clumsy, but understandable and once again back to his good-natured drawl, if an extremely tired and confused version of it.  He was talking to the medic, and said her name twice, but Kayoko couldn’t bring herself to go near him or talk to him.  She kicked the sand uncomfortably, ignoring Katsurou’s voice and Jia Min’s stare.

“Do you need help?” asked a male voice suddenly, and Kayoko looked up to see a face on which only dark, kohl-lined eyes were visible, the rest of his features obscured by a cloth pinned around his head in the fashion of many Sunan shinobi.

Stepping up beside her shoulder, Jia Min nodded, not giving her a chance to respond to the question herself as he nudged her toward the masked man.  “No, it’s okay,” she said, glaring at her teammate.  “I can travel.”  Jia Min rolled his eyes.  There was a sharp pain in her forehead as Jia Min’s fingers tapped the top of her spine, forcing chakra into one of her tenketsu.  Kayoko’s body dropped like a stone, unconscious, and he almost considered not catching her as some passive aggressive punishment for being a git.  Distantly, he could hear his cousin laughing.

“Why do you hate festivals so much?”

Over the course of Katsurou’s recovery, which had involved a few side-effects and some minor lingering issues that had required them to bring a Yamanaka to Suna to fully purge his mind of the enemy chakra before he could travel again, Kayoko had been mostly avoiding him.  It was stupid.  Jia Min had actually, verbally, told her she was stupid, which was a good indicator of how truly massively idiotic she was being.  Once he could hold a conversation again without spacing out or lapsing into nonsense, Kayoko rejoined their team, though remained sullen and irritable.

It wasn’t his fault.  Complete opposite, really.  They’d been through countless numbers of life threatening situations together throughout the years, and had saved each others’ asses and supported each other through various tragedies, but Kayoko had never so thoroughly fucked her duty as a teammate up as she did by neglecting basic fucking training and allowing her teammate to spend nearly three days under a disorienting jutsu that could have potentially left permanent scars on his mind.

Jia Min, who figured out almost everything that had happened just by staring at them for a while, had told her again (he’d spoken twice on the issue, which made her feel even more shitty) that she wasn’t helping by letting her guilt drive her away from her best friend.

She looked at him oddly, a sour expression marring her face, ruining the effect of the make-up Jiroushi and Shizuka had bullied her into putting on.  The yukata, lent by Yuzuki at the twins’ behest (as all of her friends seemed determined to make her as feminine as possible for the festival), itched her skin uncomfortably.  “I think they’re stupid,” she said, ignoring the fact that Yuzuki’s yukata was impeccably well-made and the itching was probably not from the fabric.

“You’re stupid,” he said charmingly, then sat beside her on the bench.

She was stupid.  Her face darkened at the reminder.

The cultural festival hummed around them; Konoha was filled with members of all countries, all in various formal attire from their respective villages and places of origin.  She’d joked to Jia Min that she should have dressed like a hooker to celebrate her mother’s culture.  Katsurou hadn’t been around to hear it.

Katsurou was giving her a strange look at the moment.  She glared at him.  “What?’

“Hey,” he said, as if she hadn’t asked, “They’re doing one of the classical dances from Ame.”  She followed his gesture toward the park, looking through a thin ring of trees to the cleared space within, where indeed a number of people were going through the motions of one of Amegakure’s famous cultural dances (some were making it up as they went along, namely their beaming Hokage with his ever-radiantly-pink wife) to the slow trilling of flute music.  “Remember when we took that mission a few years ago in that small village in Arashi no Sato?  That one girl taught me the steps for that.  We should go dance.”  He grinned at her.

Ever the fun-killer, Kayoko gave him a very ‘what the fuck’ stare and deadpanned, “Looks like you’re still crazy.  I don’t dance.”  At least not in public.  With the teammate she was trying to avoid because it reminded her of how guilty and incompetent she felt.

Katsurou laughed briefly, then sobered up.  “Don’t be a bitch.  Yes you do.”  He grabbed her arm and jerked her up, ignoring her snarled protests and dodging a thrashing tree branch as he pulled her across the street toward the park.

“Fucker, you will not make it past those trees; I will rip you to shreds.  I will eat my own hair before I let you convince me to dance with your idiot self.”

He did, though.

Fin.