Fandom Squad Shithead: A Naruto AU

[Pine]

Before Haruki had the chance to be disappointed that Mizu didn't know any ghost stories, Katsuro surprised him by offering his own. He had meant to just have the conversation between him and Mizu, but now when he thought about it, a man as tough as Katsuro was the perfect orator for a ghost story.

Tetsuo had finished laying out the thin, time-worn sleeping roll he had when he noticed, in Haruki's careless way of dumping out his bag, there was something belonging to the other boy that had rolled out of the shelter of their rock-shielded camp. Unable to ignore it, he stepped around everyone to crouch down and grab whatever it was. It turned out to be a can that he picked up, and he rolled the can on his side to see the gourmet appearance of pale, fluffy omelettes displayed. He was certain that whatever was in the can would taste much, much worse than how it advertised on the label, but it still wasn't something to waste.

Tetsuo walked back to where Haruki had set his stuff down and returned the can. As he did so, he levied a critical stare in the other boy's direction. "Aren't you too old to be telling ghost stories?"

Haruki, in response, waved his hand at Tetsuo emphatically and shushed him, repeatedly. He was not going to let Tetsuo ruin this now that he had Katsuro volunteering to share some real ghost stories.

Tetsuo rolled his eyes and walked back to his spot. He was across from where Mizu and Haruki sat with Katsuro wedged between them. The stench of Katsuro's cigarettes was only negated by the smoky smell of the campfire. The smell of burning firewood was much more pleasant, Tetsuo thought, and he tried to focus on that scent with every breath he drew.

"No," Haruki said to Katsuro. "Where even is that, sensei?"

It seemed to Tetsuo the inevitable road to pointless storytelling had begun. He had first set himself sitting cross-logged on his sleeping roll while keeping close to the fire. Now, he laid down his back on the roll with his arms crossing behind his head. Tetsuo didn't believe for a second that Katsuro was being genuine when he said this was going to be a real story. People always said that about their horror stories.

In spite of his objections, Tetsuo recalled that Soto was very much not too old for stories like these. He imagined that excited spark she got in her eye when she asked to hear one. It was easy to keep that fire alive in her, because once she heard a story she really liked, she would ask for it to be told again at least two more times consecutively. Tetsuo thought to himself that perhaps she would enjoy this one if he could retell it. He just might have to tweak some age-inappropriate details, which he expected there to be coming from Katsuro. And so, he closed his eyes and he, too, listened to Katsuro's tale.

 

[Gilzar]

"No." Katsuro replied simply to Tetsuo.

"It's in the Northeastern region of the Land of Fire, just 50 miles away from the Land of Hot Water border" He answered for Haruki.

"It's kind of an old story, so I'm surprised none of you have heard it. Everyone knew it when I was your age." Katsuro said, eyes still closed while he relaxed.

"Well, it goes something like this... A jonin from the leaf village wanted to get some survival training in for his students before the chunin exams. So, he takes the three of em' to densest, most rugged, unforgiving patch of forest in the land of fire: Matsumoto Ridge. This place is so hard to navigate with its dense pine forests, ravines filled with rapid flowing rivers, and immense cave systems that it still hasn't been completely charted..."

"But anyway..." Katsuro focused on getting back to the story. "The team gets out there and everything seems to be going fine. They get onto the ridge, get their camp set up, and start training on how to survive off of the land. A day into training, one of the genin named Kida Ayo tells her sensei she's been noticing strange things. Kida says she's been hearing things in the woods...seeing things like shadows watching her from behind trees. She swears they're being watched...but none of her teammates or her instructor can find what she's talking about. They all went to sleep that night thinking she was just being paranoid. But when they woke up early next morning, Kida Ayo was gone. Vanished into thin air."

"They combed the woods the best they could, but they couldn't find her. After that they figured she just fled to the village, but when they got back home she wasn't there. Then the village launched a manhunt, sending their best search and rescue teams to find her...but all they found were some scraps of clothing and strange notes that might have belonged to her. Even to this day she's never been found, and her name is still listed on the leaf's MIA list."

"Some think that she wandered off and fell into a cave or one of the rivers. Others think she may have been kidnapped by Land of Lightning shinobi...this was during pre-war tensions after all. Or maybe some nut-job killed her, as a few convicted criminals escaped the Land of Fire's shinobi prison just a week earlier. Regardless, the story doesn't end there. Many people claimed to have seen Kida in the forest of Matsumoto Ridge, even decades since she went missing. Some say they see her watching them, poking her head out from behind the cover of a tree as they travel some of the few roads that go through the ridge. Others who have gotten lost in the forest swear they've seen her wandering through the woods, or sometimes pointing them back to the nearest road. They say if you listen in the woods at night, you can hear Kida crying, longing for the day that someone finds her body and finally puts her to rest."

Katsuro took a long whiff of his cigarette and exhaled, then opened his eyes and exhaled the smoke from his lungs.

"I used to think it was just a story. A cautionary tale about a real missing girl that the Jonin told their students so they wouldn't wander off at night."

He paused for a bit, staring off into the dancing flashes of the fire.

"Then the war happened."

"Three years into the war, and we were starting to push the Land of Lightning back to the border. We were at Matsumoto Ridge in the dead of winter. A bunch of Hidden Cloud shinobi were holed up somewhere in the cliffs and were using the area to stage ambushes on us. I was a part of three teams sent up there to wipe the bastards out: Search and destroy. That entire week we skirmished with the fuckers through that entire forest in a game of cat and mouse. Every time we almost got em' they got the slip on us through the caves, cliffs, or ravines. Then one night the tables turned and we were ambushed. It was a nasty scrap...we all got away but were split up in the process. All of us rendezvoused back at basecamp... except for a chunin under my command named Teshima."

"Teshima was either missing or dead, but I don't leave anyone behind. We went back out there immediately to find him. I even summoned Toshio. We were hot on his trail...but then things turned for the worse."

Katsuro's green eyes stared into the fire as he recalled what happened next.

"Without any warning the weather shifted, and we were caught in the worst blizzard I've ever been in. The cliffs funneled gale-force winds at us like an air vent. It was a complete white-out. We were lucky to have Toshio there to guide us back to the cave we were using as a hideout. There was no way we were going to find Teshima out there, and there was no way he was going to survive out there. But then, just as all three of our teams had completely given up hope, Teshima stumbled out of the darkness into the cave. He was badly injured, hypothermic, on the brink of death."

"When we put him by the fire to warm him up he just kept looking around all confused. We kept trying to ask him how the hell he found his way back, but he just kept looking for something. I asked him what his deal was and he only responded by asking where the backup squad was. All of us just stared at him. 'What backup squad?' I finally asked. Nobody had given us any reinforcements. Then Teshima asks us, 'Where the hell did the girl go that brought me back here?!'. Every one of us in the cave just looked at each other, no clue what the hell he was talking about."

"After about five minutes of back and forth confusion, we finally get him to tell us what happened. Teshima explains to us that he got separated after the ambush. He tried to get back to base but his injuries slowed him down and he wound up stuck in the middle of the storm. Alone, cold, and losing blood he thought he was done for. But then, through the storm he saw a young leaf shinobi. She kept waving him to follow. As he trailed behind her, he kept calling out to her, but she'd never respond. All she would do was just wave for him to keep following. Just when the light of our fire was visible through the storm, she vanished. The guy figured she just went into the cave."

"When he told us what she looked like, we were all speechless. The girl he described almost perfectly matched the stories we all had heard about Kida Ayo."

He took another whiff of his cigarette, before exhaling a plume of smoke out of his nostrils once again.

"To this day I haven't made up my mind about how the hell Teshima found his way back. Maybe he really did see her...or maybe the blood loss and hypothermia gave him hallucinations. But that still doesn't explain how he found us through a whiteout blizzard."

 

[Pine]

As Katsuro began his story, Tetsuo thought it now may have rung a dull bell of familiarity. Matsumoto Ridge, at least, he recalled hearing about in his geography lessons. He snorted a little when Katsuro brought up its use for survival training, and the convenient parallel between their squad, there in the rainforest then, and that the topic of the chuunin exams had just been brought up that morning. He figured from that alone, he was going to somehow tie a ghost story into a lesson about how they all needed to treat each other better.

Haruki, not having grown up in the Land of Fire, must have missed hearing about this folk tale. He listened with wide eyes and rapt attention. He could picture everything clearly. Turbulant waters twisting through pine trees so close together that their branches intersected. The thought of a girl out there, the only one to feel that they were watched sent goosebumps rippling up his skin, and he drew in a sharp breath to learn that she disappeared from their group in no less than a day. As he listened, he wondered if one of them felt like they were being watched by some shadowy figures, but they just weren't speaking up about it. The thought alone that one of them might not make it to the morning gave him a thrilling chill.

As the story progressed, no longer just a known folk tale, but instead taking a turn into Katsuro's own experience during the war, Tetsuo was no longer thinking about adapting this story for Soto to hear, nor was he thinking about Katsuro making the whole thing up just to try to teach them a lesson. It made him think about his dad.

Steadily, he slipped his arms back to prop himself up on his elbows. He looked at Katsuro directly, his mouth feeling heavy with a frown and his eyes looking and feeling very, very tired.

He did not like the story. A man split up from the group, no one knowing whether that person was missing or dead. It felt too on the nose for him, and yet he could not stop listening. It felt like a personal investment to him, whether this man made it back to the safety of his squadron. He wanted Katsuro to hurry up and get on with the conclusion, but he remained silent, his heart beating fast and unable to find the words that he wanted to speak from his drying mouth.

Katsuro mercifully did not drag it out for too long. The man had found them, but as Katsuro said, it was under nearly impossible circumstances, when their search party had been forced to shelter.

Tetsuo, also, felt uncertain about what he believed. He thought that he believed in yokai and yurei, but every time he heard a tale of one of them, or someone claiming they had encountered one, Tetsuo never believed them. This story planted a doubt in his mind, though. Hallucinations from being on the brink of death seemed likely. Under those circumstances, there was no way the man had been able to keep all of his faculties. Yet with as incoherent as he should have been, he just so happened to find not only a cave, but the right one. More than any part of the story, though, Katsuro's claim that he never left anyone behind gave him chills, no matter how close he laid by the fire.

By the end of it, Haruki's jaw was left hanging slack. He had been hoping for a more slasher-adjacent story, thinking that would give him a proper scare, but the tie-in with Katsuro's own lived experience made up for it, because he did not have to convince himself to believe in it anymore. A thrill of excitement shot through him when he guessed right that the man had seen the spirit of Kida Ayo's ghost. It was the only way he felt that the chuunin could have incidentally described her exact profile. This story was real, and this poor girl wandering out in those ridges really did save that man.

After a pause, while he let the story sink in, a thought struck him like a bolt of lightning. "What ever happened to Teshima?" he blurted. "I mean, he still lives in the village, right?" The thought that there was a man with a real life encounter with a real ghost living in the very same village as him built an excitement within him. He might even be able to find this man, hear from his own personal account what exactly happened.

 

[Gilzar]

"Yeah, he still lives in the village." Katsuro said, leaning his body over onto his right arm to tap the ashes off his cigarette onto the ground below.

"Last time I heard he was pushing pencils for the logistics corps. Doesn't really do missions anymore."

Like the others, this was the first time Mizu had heard the tale of the Phantom of Matsumoto Ridge. It was a dark, creepy story that sent chills down Mizu's spine all while fascinating her. Just what had happened to Kida Ayo? Oblivious to the others emotions, Mizu stared into the light of the fire. Watching the shifting tendrils of the fire, her imagination ran wild going through all the possibilities. In her mind she had a clear picture of Kida Ayo, hiding behind a tree from the world around her. The thought of dying alone in the woods to some unknown force was harrowing to Mizu. However, the paranormal aspect of the story had no impact on Mizu. She was always skeptical of anything regarding spirits, cultural or not.

But when Katsuro shifted the tale to a personal war story, Mizu's eyes shifted away from the fire and immediately locked onto him. Her interest in the topic has skyrocketed beyond the original part of the story if that was even possible. Katsuro was actually going to tell a war story. Her eyes shifted around the campfire, gauging her teammates see if they had the strange excitement she had. All throughout her time at the academy she had been told of Katsuro's deeds, and now they were about to hear it from the man himself. But this time there wouldn't be any exaggerations or details held back. They were about to get a real story, but she wondered what exactly it would have to do with the ghost of Kida Ayo.

Mizu's curiosity would soon be answered, and in the aftermath of the tale she would be filled with just as much surprise as her teammates. Even as someone skeptical toward the paranormal, she was left feeling uncertain. How did Teshima find his way back to that cave? It just didn't seem possible. For the first time, Mizu actually found herself believing a paranormal story.

In the wake of Katsuro's story there was silence. Just the soft crackling of the fire, and its orange glow. It felt peaceful to Mizu. She would have almost been satisfied with just leaving the silence, but she was still keen to pick their sensei's brain. Mizu eyed the others, waiting to see if any of them would say anything to break the silence.

 

[Pine]

Haruki drew in a shallow, excited breath at the news. How many times would he have the chance to meet someone from an actual ghost story that he had heard? And Katsuro had given him a lead on where exactly he could find this man, no less. He wondered at how Teshima wasn't taking on missions anymore. It sounded exactly like the kind of thing someone haunted by ghosts would do—get some low stake, boring office job where nothing would really go too wrong if he happened to have a mental breakdown while at work. He didn't know exactly where to find the logistics corp was or what they did, but he figured that was something he'd be able to find out when he got back to the village and could get directions to the place more easily.

In the relative silence of the forest, Tetsuo remained quiet for a beat. Only a sliver of the sun's rays stretched out over the horizon now, and as the rain around them came down as a heavier steady, beating drum, much of what he saw in Katsuro's scarred, naked face he only saw in flashes in the campfire's wayward flickers.

He knew what he wanted to say, rather, needed to ask. But as he tried to speak it, he felt his heart somehow beating in his stomach, and it felt like if he tried, his words would only come out as vomit. Still, he did it anyway.

"Katsuro," Tetsuo began. When he spoke his name, he did not throw up as he feared. He only became aware of how thick his tongue felt in his mouth, heavy as lead and taking up way too much space. He wished, more than anything, that the others were not here right now, but he knew that if he didn't ask now, he may never speak of it again. It was a topic that had somehow begun to feel like a curse to him. He had not spoken verbally of it since that day.

After a long pause, his eyes that had begun to slip away returned back to his sensei and he asked, "During the war, were you ever in the same unit as my dad?"

 

[Gilzar]

Mizu's attention suddenly shifted over to Tetsuo. His father was in the war? In all the time that she had known Tetsuo, not once had he ever mentioned his father was a veteran of the war. Come to think of it, she couldn't recall a time he ever spoke about his father. Curiously she looked back over to their sensei, eager to see what his response would be.

A sudden influx of memories about Hiroto rushed through Katsuro's head and almost none of them were positive. Growing up the two rarely interacted. Yet when they did cross paths the outcome was never positive. Back when he was a genin Hiroto seemed all too keen to criticize Katsuro for his temper. He'd go on and on about how Katsuro's short fuse would get him in trouble, going even as far as to criticize his sensei for not disciplining him. But Katsuro always thought Hiroto's issue with him had nothing to do with his temper. Rather, he was convinced Hiroto looked down on him for being born into a wealthy family with a name that carried weight in the village. It drove him insane, that someone who barely knew him had so openly judged and taunted both him. And thanks to his rank there was nothing Katsuro could do about Hiroto's insults. Until of course, he outranked the bastard.

Once Katsuro was promoted to Jonin and the tables on turned on old Hiroto. By the time he was in his early 20's Katsuro had eclipsed the rotten chunin's entire career and he never let him forget it. Throughout the war, every time Hiroto and him were together he'd go out of his way to taunt the man on any mistake he made. Looking back on it now, the ways he verbally insulted Tetsuo was tame compared to the shit he used to talk to his father.

Even though the two occasionally were in the same unit, Hiroto was never directly under Katsuro's command. But the Jonin still had to work with him, and if there was anything he remembered about Tetsuo's father, other than his unpleasantness, was how reluctant he was. Hiroto never took any risks even when the objective of the mission was at stake. At first it seemed like just a small inconvenience to Katsuro. Hiroto wasn't under his control, so it wasn't his problem. But he'd come to regret that attitude. Midway through the war Hiroto refused to move in on an objective, purely for self-preservation. In order to complete the mission Katsuro's childhood friend and old teammate Kaori would volunteer in his place. Just minutes later he'd witness the explosive jutsu that resulted in her death...and the face of the cloud shinobi fleeing from the scene.

Katsuro didn't just hate Hiroto. Hate was far too light of a word to describe the coward. He detested the man's entire existence. Because of his cowardice Kaori was dead. She was brave, honorable, and above all else she was kind. Kaori saw the good in people when nobody else did, Katsuro himself included. He stared aimlessly in the fire. The inescapable feeling of guilt was once again stabbing into his stomach, just like it did every day. If anyone should have died in the war it should have been him, or at the very least that fucking coward Hiroto. Had Katsuro not been so ignorant to Hiroto's spinelessness things could have been different. Maybe if he had volunteered instead, Kaori would still be alive. Perhaps the others would have made it through the war as well...

He reached into his vest and pulled out his flask. Katsuro slowly unscrewed the lid and started drinking away at his whiskey as he tried to numb his thoughts. The man he despised so much own son was inquiring about his time in the war with him. Immediately he thought back to the conversation with Tetsuo's old sensei Takashi. His view of his father was greatly distorted from how he actually was. The extent of which was still unknown to Katsuro. Every part of him wanted to verbally curse Hiroto's name, let Tetsuo know what he actually was.

His eyes looked up to Tetsuo, and he was taken back by what he saw. Tetsuo was keenly looking at him, a face visibly desperate for answers. Immediately all thoughts Katsuro had of insulting Hiroto left his mind. It wasn't the right thing to do. Takashi had told him as much, and deep down he knew it himself. It wasn't Tetsuo's fault he was born to a lousy father that lied to him.

Katsuro took yet another small drink of his whiskey. He dried his lips against his arm, then finally spoke.

"Yeah. I was. We weren't always together, but when we were it was always the worst parts of the war. When the fighting was the hardest. Front lines; nothing between us and the land of lightning. They threw everything they had at us, and we had to hold the line."

 

[Pine]

It had been a simple question, one that Tetsuo had expected he would get a simple answer to. He didn't once take his eyes off of Katsuro. He saw the shift in his jounin-sensei's gaze, what had just before been engaged becoming unfocused. It made a greater worry build on top of an already anxious state of mind. What was it that he could be hesitating about? When Haruki had asked about Teshima, Katsuro's reply had been immediate. For his own father, however, there was something holding him back from sharing whatever it was he knew.

Within the gaps of the silence between them, a thousand theories surfaced in his mind, the most innocuous of which was that he and Katsuro did not work together often, so he was having difficulty remembering who he was. The vacancy in Katsuro's stare did not suggest insignificance, however. It looked like something painful to remember. What could it have been, to come up under the topic of his father? Was it just that Katsuro hadn't gotten along with him, and now he had survivor's guilt over it? Tetsuo had a hard time picturing anyone disliking his father. His father had told him about people in the village treating him unfairly, but Katsuro would have been his peer, not someone who could have been responsible for holding him back. Was there something he knew that Tetsuo didn't about his father's last assignment? When his mother had still been getting updates regarding his father's and the search party's status, she had been told that the party was unable to find anyone else that had gone on the mission with him. It had been a mission of utmost secrecy, though, so had they just left out details from what they had been told in the reports?

Tetsuo's mind was racing as he watched Katsuro unscrew the cap to his flask and take long, deep swigs from it. The sick feeling in his stomach did not go away, only compound into a greater anxiety as the seconds dragged by like hours. He wondered if he needed to say something else, or whether he should regret having said anything, but finally Katsuro looked at him, and something changed in his expression that made him give his answer quicker.

As soon as Katsuro confirmed they had spent time in the same unit together, Katsuro had his undivided attention. Tetsuo listened with an apostle's focus, parsing together what he could to complete the greater story of his lost messiah. His heart thrummed in him as he took each word in, etched them deliberately in his memory.

His father had been in the front line. He had been active in arguably the most important part of their military. Tetsuo knew this, but it felt different when he heard it from his very own jounin-sensei, someone who had become reputable within the village for his own actions during the war.

It was enough to make him hear and feel that rush in his head, that tell that his body wanted to cry if only he would allow it. He wouldn't. Instead, he would give a slight nod to Katsuro before letting himself lie back down on his sleep roll again.

Tetsuo let the words sink into him. His father did not come out of the war as a known hero, but he died the only way he would have wanted to: in service to his country. The hesitance he had seen in Katsuro before, Tetsuo felt certain now, was just because of the painful memories of the harsh realities of combat. It was nothing personal to his father, more so the general hardships he had endured, apparently, alongside his father. A part of him wondered why Katsuro had never mentioned this connection between them before. Tetsuo quickly moved past that thought, though. Katsuro had given him a gift. However vague it was, these were snippets from a part of his father's story that he otherwise never would have been able to know about. These were words for him to treasure, and he made a silent promise to himself to hold them close to his heart.

Haruki had listened quietly, allowing the other two in his squad the silence needed to talk to each other. It drug on long enough he had to stifle a yawn behind the back of his hand. It was a much more boring topic, talking about the war itself, which usually didn't involve supernatural beings, or scary things in the fun way that ghost stories were meant to thrill. Moreover, this was about Tetsuo, who was an unrepentant jerk at the best of times, and he couldn't care less about any of this.

Still, not having an idea on what else to say for the time being, he feigned interest to pick the flow of conversation back up. "Your dad's some kind of war hero, Tetsuo?"

Tetsuo had been turning over Katsuro's words in his head, trying to immortalize them, when Haruki spoke up. Almost immediately, a pit of anger dropped in his stomach. He remembered distinctly how callously he had spoken about Mizu's father when Haruki had learned he'd been the Hokage, while on the topic of his death. His body had not even had the time to cool, and Haruki had gotten giddy to talk about frivolous things about her dead father, his village leader. The very idea of Haruki speaking in that same disrespectful way about his own father made his blood boil and damn near set his teeth on edge. "He was," Tetsuo confirmed, then added testily, "and I don't want to talk about it."

Haruki stared across the fire to where Tetsuo was lying, an annoyed look crossing his face and he threw his hands up shoulder-height in an equally annoyed gesture. This was what he got for even trying to be nice to the jerk. He hadn't needed to ask him that, and frankly, he wasn't all that interested. He should have known better that Tetsuo wouldn't show any gratitude for the rare occasions someone tried to include him in some greater conversation.

For the moment, he stewed in his agitation, allowing a chance for someone else to say something if they so wished.

 

[Gilzar]

Tetsuo's father a war hero? Mizu looked at Tetsuo, eyes widened by the surprise of such an admission. However, once Tetsuo started in on Haruki, she quickly remembered to turn her gaze to the fire to avoid any unwanted conflict. The somber tone and wording of Tetsuo's conversation hinted at something unspoken. Something must have happened to his father just before the war ended...

A cold feeling jolted through her body, and the breath left her body as the realization hit her. The pain locked behind Tetsuo's eyes. The sadness in the tone of his voice. The odd sincerity he had when he gave Mizu his condolences for her father's death back in the Land of Birds. Suddenly it all made sense to her. Just like herself, he didn't have a father either. Mizu stared into the fire in disbelief that for the first time she truly understood her estranged comrade. What was even more shocking to her was that she actually felt sorry for him.

She debated about saying something to ease things between him and Haruki. It was clear the socialite of the team hadn't quite picked up on the hint yet. But to do so would go against Tetsuo's wishes to end the topic. For now she would respect his wishes, and just let the subject sit as it was.

Now the fireside conversation was officially dead. With silence brewing over them, once again Mizu shifted her attention back over to their sensei. Katsuro was laying on his side, flask resting in his hand at the ready. Since the start of the conversation something had changed about his demeanor. At first he seemed relaxed, almost in a good mood if that was possible for him. But ever since the topic of Tetsuo's father was brought up he seemed more...on edge. Ever since their one-on-one discussion in the land of birds Mizu had noticed Katsuro had a habit of taking the flask out when discussing stressful topics. So what was stressing him out?

Mizu originally planned to ask him questions about the war. Topics such as famous battles, other famous war heroes, etc. Yet their sensei's shift in mood made her hesitate to pursue the question further. In the heat of the moment, she would opt for a different question.

"What's wrong sensei?" Mizu asked quietly.

Katsuro raised a brow to Mizu, once again visibly taken back. It was an odd question not many people had ever asked him, let alone one of his students. He looked back into the fire, debating how to best answer. There were many things on his mind: His hatred for Hiroto, his regrets from the war, and all the things he never got to say to his old team. In order to keep the peace he would obviously leave the part about Tetsuo's dad out of his response.

"Oh...nothing." Katsuro said with a sigh, once again taking an all too casual drink from his flask.

"Just thinking about my team when I was your age, and all the times we sat around a fire like this one." Katsuro added on after an awkwardly long stretch of silence.

"What was your old team like?" Mizu asked, curious about the topic. Outside from their conversation over the bridge and fromwhat Matsuda had told them over tea she admittedly didn't know much about their sensei's childhood.

"Well..." Katsuro let out another puff of his now dwindling cigarette. He awkwardly scratched the back of his mohawk.

"My two teammates were Kaori Nyoko and Jiro Fakumi. Kaori was kind and compassionate individual. Jiro was brave and incredibly outgoing..."

"I didn't get along with either of em' at first. But my sensei was Hanae Atsuko, and she wouldn't have that. She was as fierce and as proud as they came. The other jonin called her the Lioness."

A sad chuckle escaped from under his breath.

"You three might think I'm a hard ass, but I'm easy-going compared to my sensei. Hanae didn't ever say much, but she'd whoop your ass just for looking at her funny...especially if she caught you staring at her eyepatch. Didn't take her long to whip us into proper shinobi."

 

[Pine]

The shift in demeanor had gone over the boys' heads. For Tetsuo's part, after he was sure that Haruki wouldn't say anything else to get on his nerves, he allowed himself to space out from the present, let memories of the past take over his thoughts. He was barely tuned into the fireside conversation anymore. For Haruki, Katsuro's sudden unsociability was just the norm for him. He assumed Mizu had only reactively asked that because she was reading too much into their jounin-sensei being socially awkward, and Haruki took Katsuro's answer at face value.

As Katsuro recounted his teammates, Haruki recalled the many times Katsuro had admitted to having a poor dynamic with his old squad in the beginning. What caught his attention was the topic of his sensei being brought up. Haruki blew a low whistle. She sounded terrifying, but in a wicked cool way. It was hard for him to imagine someone being more strict than Katsuro at first, but as soon as he mentioned that she had an eyepatch—which Haruki gasped a little when he learned about it—it all made sense to him. She was basically a pirate.

He might have asked Katsuro a series of questions to try to confirm this in some kind of way, but that train of thought derailed when he remembered something else. This wasn't the first time he had heard about Katsuro's old sensei, nor how, in so many words, how strict she was.

A wicked smile crossed Haruki's face, and his voice took on a mischievous, teasing tone. "Hey, sensei," he said. "Miss Matsuda told us—"

Tetsuo hissed quietly at the kunoichi's name.

"—about what happened when you became a chuunin."

Haruki watched his sensei's expression gleefully to see his reaction and to see whether he would know what he was referring to from that alone.

 

[Gilzar]

An annoyed glare shot up from Katsuro's eyes to Haruki. Just from that small statement alone, he knew exactly what his student was referring to. It was the most embarrassing moment of his career as a youth, after all. And of course, Matsuda was the one that told them about it. He gritted his teeth together behind his closed lips, staring off into the distance for a moment to keep his composure. That damn woman just didn't seem capable of leaving anything alone. She always had to be stirring things up one way or another. First she was antagonizing Tetsuo just to piss him off at the interrogation core, and now she was gossiping with her own students about him. Not to mention she was spending more time with Mizu.

From the way Mizu now dressed, to how highly Haruki spoke of her, it was clear that the darling of the Uchiha clan was beginning to have an influence over most the team. It was a turn of events Katsuro hadn't pictured happening when he first organized the team. He always knew that Matsuda would have some involvement because of Mizu, just not to this extent. He almost debated about trying to draw a line somewhere, but those thoughts didn't go far. Katsuro wouldn't do that a friend, knowing what these little interactions meant to Matsuda, no matter how annoying they were.

He sighed. At least Tetsuo saw through all of her bullshit.

"Oh yeah?" Katsuro replied condescendingly. "I'm betting she left out the part about how her and I put each other in the hospital earlier that day."

He enjoyed one final draw of his cigarette, now down to its end, and smothered what remained of it into the ground with his fingers. Katsuro then exhaled the smoke, and finally brought his gaze back over to his students. It wasn't hard to notice Haruki and Mizu were both watching him intently.

"Let me tell you the full story, and not just the shit Matsuda told you." Katsuro said, adjusting himself to sit up against the back of his bag.

"If you asked anyone in the village, I wasn't supposed to make it far in the chunin exams." Katsuro admitted to his students. There was a hint of bitterness in his voice. "They all would have said I was just a spoiled rich brat who didn't even want to be there."

"Matsuda though...everyone expected her to make it through and win the final round. She was 'The Prodigy' after all." He explained.

"So when I ended up being the one to fight her in the final round, let's just say a lot of people were surprised. And the entire goddamn week before our match all I heard about was how Matsuda was going to wipe the floor with me"

"I hated her back then, and she hated me. The pressure of the match only made it worse. We gave everything we had in that fight. Looking back now we could have killed each other."

Even now, fifteen years later, Katsuro could still remember his fight with Matsuda clear as day. The sheer intensity of the battle, the raw emotions, neither side willing to give an inch to the other all for the sake of pride. Every strike thrown, every jutsu, and every word still played out in his mind. It was the defining moment of his shinobi career: When his grit and determination showed the world that he wasn't some spoiled brat, but rather a shinobi.

"She almost had me in that match." Katsuro confessed. "But right before she could finish me off, I threw the hardest punch I'd ever thrown in my life up to that point."

"Even though the proctor said I won by knockout, nobody really lost that match. We were both promoted to chunin, and promptly sent to the hospital."

"Now that you have some context I'll tell you what Matsuda already told you: That evening, Kaori and Jiro snuck me out of the hospital to celebrate at a nearby restaurant. We get there, get our seats and are enjoying ourselves. Then these assholes at the bar behind us start talking about the tournament. One of them, this short prick with a mustache, starts bitching about all the money he lost betting against me every round! He goes on and on. 'Oh that little punk got lucky!', 'He wouldn't have made it through last year's tournament!', 'That Uchiha just had a bad day!'"

Katsuro sneered just recalling the man, going as far to mock the man's tone of voice.

"So, when this drunk asshole stumbles off his stool and dumps his fucking drink on me, do you see why I took it personally? All of the exams I had been dealing with assholes like these, for all I knew he did it on purpose!"

He sighed and casually shrugged. "And I'm sure Matsuda told you this already, but I got up and kicked this guys ass in front of everyone. Then I tossed his ass out into the mud just outside the door just to rub it in. Then went back to having a good time with my teammates..."

He paused awkwardly.

"Until my sensei came in with a bunch of Hidden Sound Jonin an hour later and dragged my ass to the Hokage office. And of course, she chewed me out the entire way. Almost became the first chunin in Konoha's history to get promoted and demoted the same day."

 

[Pine]

It had not been Tetsuo’s intention pay any attention to Haruki’s gossip, especially when it pertained to someone as obnoxious as that Uchiha woman, but just like the alleged ghost story before this, he found himself once again propping himself up on his elbows to hear the story, drawn in by elements of what Katsuro was saying.

He had heard Katsuro talk a little bit of how he was as a child previously in the Land of Birds. It was difficult to picture that he had that sort of upbringing. Rich. Spoiled. He had seen him in a rich person’s mansion twice now, and both times the scarred jounin could not look like he belonged in a place any less. He had no reason to think he was lying, but Tetsuo thought he would never be able to associate that kind of persona with Katsuro.

The point he made of Matsuda’s prodigal status caught his attention. Between that, her apparent omission of the match in whatever storytelling she had done for Haruki and possibly Mizu, and the way people had been assured of her victory, it only stirred a deeper resentment within him. Tetsuo found himself rooting for an older version of Katsuro, wanting him to come out as the decisive victor in their match. Luckily, this came in the form of a knockout punch. Even though, for reasons he did not understand, Katsuro tried to humble himself about the match’s outcome, in his heart, Tetsuo felt it was a well-deserved win.

Unlike the rest of his teammates though, this was the first time he had heard about what had happened at the restaurant. The result of his encounter with the drunken man raised his eyebrows.

“You did what?” he asked, and there was humor in his voice.

It sounded exactly like the kind of thing Katsuro would be chewing his ass out for, but the way the jounin-sensei explained it, giving his students the entire pretext for why exactly this guy had gotten on his last nerves, mimicking the man’s words in a mocking tone, it seemed to him like Katsuro was still convinced he was in the right. Tetsuo didn’t disagree, thinking it would have been very satisfying to see, but the irony was not lost on him, and it made a small, sly grin cross his face.

Haruki, also, found himself entertained by the story. He was grateful that none of Katsuro’s crabbiness seemed to be directed at him for bringing it up, and he was glad that their typically strict, disciplinary sensei was willing to talk more about it. For as much as he was fond of Matsuda, he didn’t mind Katsuro’s addendum about how the match of their final round actually went. Many good stories comprised of an underdog, and the fact that Katsuro seemed as petty as he was over what Matsuda had left out of the story made it feel like he had stepped into a lover’s quarrel of the best kind. Haruki couldn’t be certain until he actually tried it, but a part of him suspected that if he went to Matsuda sharing what he had learned about her round with Katsuro in the chuunin exams, she would come back with yet another thing Katsuro would rather they not know about.

By the end of it, with even Tetsuo pitching in his disbelief, Haruki’s face had broken out into one of his wide, toothy grins. “I don’t think any of that makes it any better, sensei,” he said, a near-laughter bubbling in his tone.

“Why the Sound shinobi?” Tetsuo asked. He felt like he had missed something in the story that everyone else already knew, and he was willing to look to anyone willing to answer him.

 

[Gilzar]

Mizu was just as entertained by their sensei's story as her teammates. She couldn't help but smile at the tale, quietly laughing under her breath at their sensei's petty attempts to justify his actions. It was definitely different than the story Matsuda had spun, up to the point where they got to the restaurant. There seemed to be a great deal she had omitted from it...but Katsuro had left out the most important piece of the story: the identity of the drunk he beat up that day. For a moment she contemplated calling Katsuro out for it, but Tetsuo beat her to it. This was his first time hearing the story after all, he had no idea why Katsuro was trying to rationalize his actions.

"Well..." Katsuro rubbed the back of his head. In his haste to explain his side of the story, he had forgotten to mention an important detail that Tetsuo wasn't apparently aware of. Now all three of his students were eying him down, eager to hear his response.

He couldn't help but let out an embarrassed laugh. "Turned out that asshole I chucked into the gutter was a diplomat from the Sound Village."

Katsuro just shrugged, and a grin formed across his face. Even he saw the humor in his story.

"Doesn't look too good when the winner of the chunin exams beats up a foreign emissary. Got hauled straight to the Hokage's office. I'd never seen that old man so mad."

"Looking back, I probably took a few years off of his life." Katsuro joked sarcastically.

Once again Katsuro took another casual sip of his alcohol, but this time it was just to enjoy the moment. His eyes traveled around the impromptu circle they had around the fire. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. Both Mizu and Haruki had smiles across their face accompanied by hints of laughter, and even Tetsuo wasn't in his normal pissy mood. It was enough to let Katsuro finally just relax like he would of if he was at home. That was a first for this squad, the most challenging group of students he had ever taught so far.

 

[Pine]

The answer Katsuro gave, the identity of the man at the restaurant, brought a sharp, breathy laugh out of Tetsuo. Without even knowing the state of diplomacy between their villages during whatever time it was Katsuro would've been promoted, he knew it was the kind of fight you did not want to pick if you valued your career as a shinobi at all. "You fucked up," he said, already starting to chuckle before he could finish speaking.

Haruki had also begun to peel into his own mischievous laughter. He'd already known the big reveal of the story from when Matsuda had told it, but Katsuro's almost shy confession and the laughter from everyone else in their squad was infectious. He couldn't help but join in.

It did not take long for Tetsuo to sober up. It happened almost abruptly, the small smile he'd shown suddenly becoming strained as a distressing realization came upon him: he could not remember the last time he had laughed. Real, genuine laughter. Not the off-handed chortles he forced out sometimes to bolster Soto's growing ego when she tried to tell jokes, usually too childish or nonsensical for him to revel in the same way that she did. He tried to recall the last, or even one instance of him laughing, but it felt like wading through murky depths that at some point had become his mind.

The smile he'd had steadily, unintentionally morphed into something of a grimace, his eyes hardening as he stared into the fire. There was a vague sense of wrong when he thought of himself laughing, or expressing an authentic joy in any sort of way, like it was something he was not supposed to do. It occurred to him as something odd to feel, and he could not parse the semantics of why it was that he felt this instinctive wrong, or when he must have imposed this statute upon himself, that he must appear stoic at all times. It made a chill pass through him, even though the rain outside their makeshift shelter did very little to dispel the warm air of the forest.

Something was wrong with him. It was something he knew, but usually was too busy to reflect on, and the reflection now made him hyperaware of where the pulse of his heart could be felt in his chest and throat. He wished to no longer think about it.

By now, the sun had been swallowed by the inky blackness of the of the sky. Any stars visible to them came in quick winks, obscured by rock overhang and the density of the forest's canopy. When their laughter quieted, it seemed as if the last of the birds had stopped singing. There was only the drumming of rain, pattering against the already-damp undergrowth.

After thinking to himself for a little while, Haruki's hand shot in the air. "I've got a story!" he said. He looked to Katsuro first, though, making sure he had the jounin's permission to continue, even with as late as he thought it might be getting.

 

[Gilzar]

The mood around the camp seemed as bright and as lively as the fire sitting between all of them. It a pleasant change for Mizu. For a good minute or so it seemed like everyone was in good spirits. She even caught Tetsuo of all people smiling and laughing, something she didn't even think that he was capable of doing. All of the quiet laughter and smiling was contagious, and the smile on Mizu's face only grew, and her laughter became louder. in a quiet disbelief, she had to look around to gauge the expressions on everyone's face to check if it was real. This must have been what it felt like. What Hisoka and all of her academy instructors had described so much growing up: Being on a team. No drama or conflict, just comradery. Unfortunately, it wouldn't last long.

Tetsuo's demeanor slowly reverted back to his usual reserved self. Both Mizu and Katsuro would notice this at different times around the fire, but neither would make any comment on the sudden change of mood. For Mizu it just wasn't worth the risk of setting their teammate off, especially now that she was committed to working with him for the sake of the chunin exams. Meanwhile, Katsuro just figured it was typical hormonal behavior and nothing more. They both just relaxed in silence until Haruki offered up the story.

Katsuro gave Haruki a subtle nod, and Mizu sat in attention. Both waiting to hear what it was Haruki had to say.

 

[Pine]

Haruki broke out in a grin. “Mine’s a true story too that none of you have probably ever heard.” Any time he had told it to any of his classmates back at the academy, anyway, none of them ever heard it. It made sense, too, because it was one that was very specific to the Land of Lightning. The Land of Fire had nowhere near as many mountains as his homeland. “I heard it all the time as a kid, because it happened in a mining town like the one I grew up in, although now the place is nothing more than a ghost town.

“They called it Yagi Village, because it was named after the Yagi Mountain that the town was built around.” He was telling the truth here. This was a real mountain that he was referring to. It was not the biggest one that was in the Land of Lightning by far, but almost any map that showed the westernmost point of the country would be able to see it marked. “The company that set up this town, like in my home village when the war started, was directly under the control of the Raikage, only instead of mining for iron, they were coal miners.

“The… I forget what they’re called. The guy who was in charge of the mining company—”Tetsuo opened his mouth to interject with the name of the position, but he shut it again soon after he realized he also could not remember the name“—his name was Heiou Ukumori. Heiou was said to be kind of a nervous man. The Raikage at the time had been gearing up for war, as the Cloud Village had been doing for a long time. They needed coal to work the forges that were making weapons for Kumogakure, so every month that passed, the Raikage would demand more and more coal from them.

“It had gotten to the point where the workers were tunneling deep into the Yagi Mountain, and they’d had to double the amount of miners they’d started out with just so that they could come close to meeting the Raikage’s demands. All of this made Heiou very, very nervous.

“So one night, the miners were working on getting the last bit of coal that they could before the Raikage’s men showed up the next morning to collect it. They were running behind, because again, like I said, the Raikage’s demands were getting more and more ridiculous. Heiou had come up with a plan. He ordered the miners to work late into the night, because from what he could tell, if they worked seven extra hours that night, not only would they get enough coal to make the Raikage happy, they would also get a head start on taking care of getting the extra coal he was sure the Raikage’s men would demand for next month. Even as tired as the miners were and as dangerous as they know it can be to work at night, they kept going.”

Haruki paused for a moment to give a natural break in the pacing of the story. It was less than a minute, the amount of time he gave everyone to digest what he’d said so far, before continuing.

“There was a knock on Heiou’s door at the fifth hour. When he answered it, he found someone the miners sent to run and tell him that they had gotten enough coal for tomorrow, but someone had started smelling a weird smell in the mine. He was hoping he would let them off easy and just let them make up for the extra work another day. Heiou, who had been sleeping in his own bed at his own home, just told them to keep working, and that they were almost done.”

He paused, again, to try to give space for the story to ramp up the drama. “At the sixth hour, another man knocked at Heiou’s door. This time they said other workers could smell it too, and it was getting stronger, like rotten eggs. Again, even though the man was basically begging for them to stop, Heiou told them to keep working. If they pushed through these last two hours, he promised they would only have to work a half day the next day.

“Heiou was never able to keep his promise, though, because at the seventh hour, just before they had met their time to call it a night, the mine exploded.”

Haruki stopped, letting everything sink in for as long as he could, before he started the next part of the story.

“It turned out the smell they’d been smelling the whole time wasn’t someone’s lunch that someone had just left out too long. It had been methane gas, which had been building up inside the mountain. It took one lantern with a fire, and the entire thing went—” Haruki imitated the harsh sound of an explosion, then spread his hands out from each other to give an extra visual to go with the story.

“Some of them had been close enough that the explosion had killed them when it happened. Others had been crushed when part of the tunnel collapsed. It turns out, it didn’t matter how close or far away the miners were from the explosion itself. Every. Single. One. Of them died.

“Heiou was the only one left alive in that company after that night, and it was only because he hadn’t been there with them, and he hadn’t listened to his worker’s warnings. He was crushed by an extreme guilt. Every single one of those deaths had been his fault, and he had to see every mom and kid without a dad every time he went into town.”

Another, short pause.

“But when the Raikage’s men showed up the next morning, they didn’t care. Accidents happened in the mines all the time, and the Cloud Village still needed their coal. Heiou had come up short this month, because what they’d been collecting overnight had gotten lost in the tunnels, and so he would have to make up for what coal he didn’t have the next month plus some.

“It took a little while, but eventually, they were able to find enough desperate people to begin working the mines again. This time, Heiou had decided to work the mines with them.

“Part of this was an excuse for him to get out of town, away from all the broken families that would glare at him every single time he walked by. The other part was that he didn’t want any of these new workers to know that it was him that had gotten the last group of workers killed. He was worried at first that he wouldn’t be able to blend it, but it turns out, it was the first time a lot of them were working in a mine. So, after they had cleared out the bodies and the fallen rock and whatever else that had filled the mine after the collapse, they were able to start digging for coal again.

“For the first four days, everything seemed to be going okay for Heiou. They were behind in how much coal they needed, but he found that when he was working in the mines, he was kind of able to get his mind off of it, because the work he was doing was directly helping the miners dig out more of the coal that he needed.

“But on the fifth day, though, he saw something strange. At the end of the tunnel, where they hadn’t started digging yet, he saw a light on the rocks.”

On cue, Haruki brought out his phone, quickly flipping on the flashlight so he could cast its light on the rock overhang above.

”It wasn’t very big, just a small ring of light, but it was moving in this special kind of way that he didn’t want to take his eyes off of it.” He began to bounce the light, slowly, in short movements as a demonstration. “At first, he just thought he might have been seeing things, or maybe it was just a light from someone’s headlamp, but every time he looked over, it was still there, moving left to right then back in this little hopping motion. Heiou eventually asked one of the miners nearby if they were seeing that strange light too, but apparently, the guy didn’t see it, and figured that he might’ve just been seeing a glare off of something. Heiou continued to work and did his best to ignore the light. By the time the day had ended, he was able to sleep and forget all about that light.

“On the sixth day, Heiou went in to work with all the other miners. By the time he got to his spot near the end of the tunnel, he could see that light again. Only this time, it was bigger, about the size of his fist, and it was going even faster this time.” To match this, Haruki sped up how quickly he bounced the light from his phone. “Heiou asked around again if anyone else was seeing it, because if they didn’t notice it the day before, there was no way they’d be able to miss it now. Except when he asked someone else, several people this time, none of them saw the light that he was talking about.”

Haruki turned off the light on his phone at this point. His arm was starting to get sore from holding his arm up, and he felt they got the picture from what he had already done.

“At this point, he thought maybe there was just something weird going on with his eyes, but that didn’t explain why he saw this light only moving in this one spot. Heiou tried to get to working again, but by now he was completely obsessed with that light. He couldn’t stop turning his head to stare at it, and he had to be nudged several times by the other workers to keep moving. Heiou worked until the end of that shift, but it seemed obvious that the other miners were not too happy about having to pick up after his slack. This time, when he tried to go to sleep, he had not forgotten about the light. In fact, it kept him up late at night, wondering. What did it mean? Why couldn’t anyone else see it? Eventually, though, he did get to sleep, and he would not have to show up to work the next day without any rest.

“On the seventh day, Heiou could not have missed the light if he wanted to. As soon as he faced the tunnel, there was a big, bright light that consumed the entire wall at the end of the tunnel. Without any warning, Heiou ran into the tunnel as fast as he could. It took the workers by surprise when he did this. At first they didn’t know what to do, but eventually they ran in after him.

“By the time Heiou got to the end of the tunnel, he could think about nothing but the light.”

Haruki turned the flashlight on his phone again, bringing it up under his chin for it to remain affixed, illuminating his face for the rest of the story.

“For reasons even he did not know, he began scratching and scratching at the end of the tunnel. It was not a want, but a need for him to keep scratching. This was how the other miners found him when they caught up to him. He had been scratching at the rock wall of the tunnel so fast and so furiously that his nails began to bleed. When they tried talking to him, yelling at him to stop, he did not. He just kept scratching.

He paused, again for the dramatics.

“It took three men to pull Heiou off, but once they did, he stopped struggling. When they asked him what was wrong, he didn’t answer them, but he began chanting something under his breath.

“'The light, it wants me. The fire, it will eat me. My bones, they will always smolder, but never rest.'

“He would say those phrases over and over and over again to himself.

“The miners forced him to go home and rest for the day. Something had clearly driven him out of his mind, and he was just going to get in the way if he stayed.

“That was the last time anyone had ever seen Heiou Ukumori.”

Haruki gave one final pause, watching the faces of everyone around the campfire intently to see any big reactions from anyone. It was hard to see entirely, with the way he was flashing his own light in his eyes.

“They looked for him the next day when he didn’t show up at the mine, but when they checked his house, there was nothing there to show any signs that he had any plans of leaving. Nothing had seemed packed, the house was full of food, and there was no note left anywhere. He had no relatives, no wife, no one he seemed close enough to that they could ask to see if he might have told them something. One girl said that she had seen a man go into the tunnel late at night, after the workers had all left their stations at the mine, but she hadn’t been able to shine a light on him quick enough to see who it was. When they went into the tunnel, there was no sign of him being there, either. Everything was exactly as they had left it, except for one thing…”

The story, as he had been told it, stopped after Heiou’s disappearance, and the girl that had witnessed the man who was likely him heading into the tunnel. However, Haruki had started adding his own spin on the very end of the story, feeling that it helped in making it into an actually scary story.

“On the rock face of the tunnel, there ran these deep, deep scratches in the wall, so much that it looked like they couldn’t have possibly been made by any human. And the other thing they found… was that in every single one of these scratches, they were covered in blood!”

Tetsuo, who had returned to lying down on his back again, started, not because anything about the story was scary at all, but just because Haruki had kept the same medium-soft volume throughout all of his storytelling up until that very last word, which for some fucking reason he felt it was necessary to shout. Tetsuo propped himself up on his elbows again to shoot a glare across the fire at Haruki. He considered throwing something at him, but the only things in reaching distance was the stuff he had organized in his bag and his shinobi tools. He huffed an annoyed scoff, but instead of saying anything, he just flattened himself down on his back and rolled his eyes up to the rock above him.

Inwardly, Tetsuo inwardly grumbled about how Haruki’s narrative choices didn’t even make sense at the very end, where he had said there was one more thing they had discovered, but then he listed two. Unlike Katsuro’s story, Tetsuo didn’t believe Haruki’s for a second.

 

[Gilzar]

Mizu did find Haruki's story entertaining, even haunting at times. What sent chills through Mizu wasn't the paranormal side of the story. Rather, it was the conditions the miners of the village were forced to live through. Forced to go back down in the coal mines time and time again, even though they knew all too well there was a gas leak. All just to meet a quota set by the Hidden Cloud. The cruelty of such a system disturbed her, which made it all the more compelling to Mizu that Haruki actually lived through it.

For the rest of the story Mizu didn't pay too much attention. Paranormal things rarely captured her interest. Instead, her thoughts were occupied recalling anything else Haruki might have mentioned about living in the Land of Lightning. She could remember bits and pieces across the time they knew each other, but the most she could remember him speaking about it was in the Land of Birds when Tetsuo wasn't around. After a month some parts of the conversation were vague, but she did recall one detail: Haruki's sister being tortured. Mizu couldn't remember why but cloud shinobi kidnapped his sister and all he said was she was never the same. It didn't require a lot of thinking for Mizu to figure out what had happened to her.

The paranormal aspect of the story also had little impact on Katsuro. He was far too distracted by his inner turmoil towards the Land of Lightning to give anything ghost-related much thought. Stories about Kumogakure's cruelty towards its own people were a common topic of conversation during the war. Throughout his time on the front lines, rumors about extreme rationing and work quotas being forced on villages festered through the regiments, especially towards the end of the war. Katsuro wasn't sure what was true and what was propaganda in the Land of Lightning. But he did see the conditions of the people in the Sound and the Land of Hot Water once they liberated them, and it was horrendous. Famine and disease ran rampant through the villages. It made him wonder what things could have been like on the home front.

"Haruki. What was it like in the Land of Lightning? How long were you there?" Katsuro asked.

 

[Pine]

The delighted, mischievous grin on Haruki's face settled as he did not get the reaction to the end of the story that he had been wanting. He did see Tetsuo jump a little, but while Katsuro and Mizu had seemed attentive, neither of them seemed too freaked out by anything that he had said. Maybe he should have picked a different story, one that he'd known had made his friends squeal and say they were scared to sleep for the rest of the night. Before he could feel too disappointed though, Katsuro asked two questions he did not expect.

"Hm?" he hummed briefly at him, looking at him inquisitively. Haruki paused for just a moment, long enough for the auditory feedback loop of Katsuro's questions to play in his head again. When he was certain that he'd heard correctly what his jounin-sensei had said, Haruki's face lit back up. "Oh! It was very different from how it is in the Leaf Village. I moved to Konoha when I was"—Haruki held up one hand to count on his fingers, but ultimately remembered not from any math, but the memories of his first classmates asking him how old he was when he'd first enrolled in the academy, and how many years he would say until he hit the milestone of being a double digit number—"eight?" He said it with uncertainty, although he was fairly sure of himself now.

"Where I grew up, you knew everyone, but when you're in Konoha, most of the people you see every day are strangers. I even knew all the soldiers' faces, and some of their names, when they got stationed in our town right before the war started, even though I wasn't supposed to talk to them."

Tetsuo had, once again, returned to lying down after rolling his eyes at the other boy, and hopefully for the last time in a while. A stubborn part of him wanted to ignore everything that Haruki was saying, but he found himself curious about this different way of life the other boy led in spite of himself, and this last bit about Cloud shinobi moving in caught his attention. Tetsuo's mind drifted to the man he'd met at the hospital, who he'd removed the shrapnel from. Now, out of the heat of the moment, the pressure of emergency, he felt an even stronger sense of uncertainty over whether he had done the right thing treating that man. Ginji had even claimed he had a direct hand in saving that man's life. If nothing else, should he have accosted that man about what it was that he might have done during the war? A thought struck him like a bolt of lightning, making his stomach hurt and his lips feel weak—what if he'd helped a man directly responsible for the disappearance, or death, of his own father? The very idea of it made him sick. He did not know whether he should regret what he'd done, and likely he never would know. It was just as Haruki had said: there were a lot of unfamiliar faces when you were living in Konoha, especially now after the peace treaty had been signed and shinobi were regularly exchanged.

Oblivious to the effects his stories had on any of the others, Haruki continued. "We lived pretty close to the Cloud Village, actually. It'd have to be a whole day trip, but you could walk there... but you had to have permission from the Cloud shinobi to leave, and I guess it was kind of complicated, so we didn't go there a lot, and if we did, it was usually my mom or my sister and her boyfriend who would go there." Her sister's fiancée was more accurate, as they'd been engaged for several years now, but Haruki had never gotten out of the habit of just calling him her boyfriend. "My dad was always too busy working to go, and I only kind of remember going there myself once. It was the only place we could go if we wanted to get something new, because we'd always be given the same food and the only games you could get were the same ones that our grandparents' had for decades. Honestly, I'm really surprised me and my friends weren't bored out of our minds most of the time."

He paused for a moment, thinking about what kind of thing Katsuro, specifically, might want to know. "So, I only really kind of stayed in the same spot. I didn't really see a lot of the rest of the Land of Lightning." Haruki hummed quietly to himself, thinking again before continuing, "To be honest, in a weird way, I don't think I even really understood what a war really was until I moved here. In a lot of ways, it felt safer living there than it did here, so I was really confused about why we ever moved here in the first place. People would talk about there being fighting, but I never actually saw any of it. I might not have even believed that there was any fighting at all, except that there was a lot of stress about making sure the miners like my dad were working enough, and there were a lot of secret meetings that would happen in my house or someone else's house in the middle of the night. So like, I never really entirely got what exactly they were doing, but I got the picture that they didn't want any of the soldiers to hear, you know?"

Haruki paused, thinking, long enough to make it seem like he might have been done talking, before he remembered one other thing and blurted, "Oh! And wherever you were, you could always see a mountain somewhere, not just the one the miners worked in. In the Land of Fire, there's too many trees, so I can't ever really see any mountains if there even are any to see anyway. Like, I'm not talking about the cliff they have the Hokages' faces on. I'm talking about real mountains. It's really weird whenever I think about it."

 

[Gilzar]

It was interesting to Mizu to hear Haruki's perspective on what life was like in the Land of Lightning. The topic had crossed her mind a few times during the times that she knew him, but she never got around to asking about it. From what he described life under Kumogakure seemed much stricter that what is was like in Konoha. Yet the life Haruki described didn't seem nearly as bad as she had pictured. Sure, it may have been a bit oppressive, but she imagined things would have been much worse than what he was describing. In fact, Haruki almost made it sound like he was sheltered living the Land of Lightning. Then there was his descriptions of secret meetings...just what was that about?

In a similar fashion to Tetsuo, Mizu eased herself onto her back and relaxed her head against her backpack. Her eyes stared above her at the rock ceiling of the overhang looming over them. With the dim cover of night surrounding them, the bright orange hue of the fire now flickered over the rock above them, trickling between dim and bright glows of orange. As she stared above her, her mind went to what the Hidden Leaf was like during the war. At least for Mizu, life in the village wasn't so isolated from the war. As a young child she would hear about the battles raging across the Land of Fire. Their instructors would tell them about it in the academy, and her uncle would talk about it whenever someone came over to visit. They would even have drills in the academy on how to evacuate should the Village ever come under attack. Everyone was on edge during those first years of the war, from the instructors at the academy to the people on the street. Hell, even her uncle Hisoka seemed bothered by it all, and he rarely showed emotion.

"That's..." Mizu went quiet, trying to find the right words. "Just so strange. If things weren't that bad, then why did you leave? Was it because of your sister?"

 

[Pine]

Haruki had taken to sitting, his knees drawn up with the rest of his sleeping bag, and he wrapped his arms around to hug his legs. Now, as Mizu asked carefully formulated the words she wanted to say, he idly rocked himself back and forth.

When she did ask about his family moving, Haruki answered quickly. "Oh, my parents hate Kumogakure. They said it was wrong that they had started the war in the first place. My dad said the work he used to do in the mines used to be to help people. You know, make the weapons for missions shinobi use to help people, but the war wasn't a mission, and nothing they were doing was meant to help anyone. A lot of people in the town felt that way. But when we lived there, they didn't have any choice but to keep working for them. So, it wasn't because we had any bad neighbors or anything."

Haruki reached up to scratch the side of his chin for a second. "We left... kind of because of my sister. Or, I guess, we were able to move because of her. My parents would have wanted to move either way, but they said she had been doing work that had made the Leaf Village let us move here. I don't know what exactly she was doing, but she had stayed behind with her boyfriend. We only ever knew that she had gone missing because he had written that to us. Apparently, after we left, things got a lot worse there."

Tetsuo shut his eyes, easing the turbulence in his stomach to quell. He had heard enough for tonight. Between Katsuro's story of a man that had gone missing in action, to Haruki's vague hints about the occupation of Kumogakure shinobi, the war, he was feeling entirely too many emotions. He did not want to feel this much on an average day, and he certainly did not want to be feeling this way in present company. He didn't know what direction the conversation would go if it continued on as it was, and he didn't want to find out.

Tetsuo sat up to look at Katsuro. "Are we setting up watches tonight?"

 

[Gilzar]

Having read Haruki's file, Katsuro was somewhat familiar with Haruki's family history. The specifics of what exactly Haruki's family did to arrange their move to the Leaf was left out of the boy's file. All that it really mentioned was that something had been arranged. Katsuro was curious about the details, but it seemed even Haruki didn't know all of the details. Perhaps he'd have to inquire with Katio, or just visit Haruki's household and ask them himself. If he had to guess, based off of what Haruki had told them so far, his sister must have given up some form of intelligence, Quid pro quo as some would label it. A bold thing to do considering most Hidden Villages would brutally punish such a crime.

Before any other conversation could continue around the fire, it seemed Tetsuo was ready to call it for the night. He asked about whether or not someone should stand watch tonight.

Katsuro dragged his fingers through his goatee, thinking over the question.

"Yeah, we might as well. Don't want an animal or something sneaking into camp and getting into our supplies."

"We'll do a two-hour shift each, that way everyone gets about six hours of sleep. Whoever is on watch needs to keep the fire going and wake me up if anything happens. And whatever you do, don't wander off."

"I'll take first shift. Then Tetsuo takes second, Mizu third, and Haruki last. We've got a lot of ground to cover tomorrow so we're leaving at the crack of dawn."

Katsuro sat himself up and fed a few more sticks into the fire. Leaning back against his bag, he crossed his arms and stared into the fire. He was tired but wouldn't have any issues staying up for a few more hours.

Taking the hint that it was time for them to get some shut eye, Mizu slipped under the thin blanket wrapped around her sleeping pad and rolled to her side. This wouldn't be her first time sleeping outside. After long days of training her uncle and her used to camp like this at the training grounds just on the outskirts of the village near the river. It was one of the few ways she had of bonding with her uncle. They both had an appreciation for the forest, even though they were still technically in the village. So, it didn't take long for Mizu to fall asleep in their current conditions. Once she carefully slipped her headband off and set it next to her, she was out like a rock.

 

[Pine]

Tetsuo gave a short nod of acknowledgment. He doubted that there was really any need to keep watch. A rainforest didn't seem like the kind of place he would expect bandits to stay in, and he assumed that the rain would keep any wild animals from straying too far from their own shelter. However, they didn't know when the rain would stop, and more than that, he had just wanted the fireside chat to stop. Asking about shifts was the best way he could think of to do so without admitting that he was tired.

Haruki gave a disappointed, "Aw," and pouted his lips. Even though his legs were tired from the long trek of the day, his mind was racing from a want to talk and do something. He also didn't want to get woken up early just to keep watch. They'd been in the forest all day and hadn't seen a single animal. It seemed like an unnecessary precaution, one that Katsuro wasn't even originally going to take, and all it meant was he was going to spend two hours bored out of his mind staring into nothing while everyone else got to sleep. He doubted he'd have the signal to text any one of his friends, even if they were going to be awake as early as he would be. But when Haruki looked over to Mizu, hoping that she might be able to back him up that they wanted to stay awake a little while longer, she had already rolled over, obediently, away from him.

Haruki let out a small sigh. The only solace he could give himself then was if he went ahead and slept, it would be almost like time traveling, and the sooner they got the flowers and headed back to the mansion, the sooner he would be able to see Jun again. Maybe, he thought, he might even be able to sneak in a nap during the time he was supposed to be keeping watch. Mizu would be right before him, and he doubted she would try to double check and nag him like Tetsuo or Katsuro might. With that, Haruki stretched his legs out and laid himself on the ground, pulling the thin, padded pillow built into the sleeping bag under his head. Idly, he rubbed his feet against each other under the bag, making a quiet swishing sound beneath the crackling of fire and the thrumming of rain.

Tetsuo looked across the fire as, instead of returning to the spot Haruki had dumped all of his things beside him, Haruki had decided to stretch himself out down next to Mizu.

Tetsuo's brow furrowed in a stern look. "Haruki, you left all your shit here."

Haruki craned his neck to look up at the other boy, his own brow furrowing in confusion. "Huh?"

"All of your shit," Tetsuo repeated, gesturing to the unopened cans, packaged snacks, water canteen, rain poncho and whatever else he'd left lying on the ground, right in his space. "You left a mess. You need to pick it up."

Haruki was no longer looking at him with confusion, but rather taking on an irked expression. What was he, his mom? "So what? I'll take care of it in the morning."

Agitation rose in him. Lazy. Inconsiderate. It wouldn't have been a mess to take care of in the first place if he had just taken his sleeping bag out more carefully, and Haruki didn't have to deal with it because he was on the complete opposite side of the rock overhang now. "It's in my way," Tetsuo said.

"It's not even touching you," Haruki said with some exasperated disbelief. "If it bothers you so much, you can move over."

Tetsuo's lips pursed, twitching as he tried to keep some semblance of control over his expression. In the amount of time that Haruki was arguing with him over it, he probably could have taken care of it by then. It was maddening, but for some reason now was the time Haruki had decided to be he wanted to be damn stubborn about something. As annoying as it was, the turbulence of the day had taken the fight out of him, and he didn't want to keep arguing over these small points he knew Haruki was being deliberately obtuse about. He huffed an annoyed, angry sigh before he laid himself down and rolled over to his side, facing away from everyone. "Fucking, whatever. Asshole," he grumbled, just loud enough for anyone still awake to hear.

When Tetsuo relented, Haruki finally laid his head back down from the uncomfortable way he'd been holding his neck. He was annoyed. It had been a few hours since he'd had to hear Tetsuo's patronizing jabs, but that didn't make them any less bothersome any time he heard them.

In spite of that, it didn't take long for his irritation to roll off of him, and soon he was back to the gentle, soothing repetition of rubbing his feet against each other. Haruki had slept over in his friends' yards before, simulating camping as he had really been now. The ground here he thought felt a little smoother to lay on. Maybe the plant matter gave some extra cushioning. Even though the sleeping bag was thin and he felt everything a little more than he would if he was in a bed, he didn't even think about how uncomfortable it might have been. There was always something thrilling about sleeping in a bed or place that wasn't officially his. It took a little while for his mind to quiet down, feeling both comforted and excited in almost some kind of primitive way to be sleeping so close to a fire, but after it did, he fell asleep.

Tetsuo shut his eyes, willing sleep to come to him. He was angry with Haruki, that someone so irresponsible and incompetent had slipped through the academy's graduation exams and that he had to be on the same squad with him. It didn't take long for him to start thinking about other things, though. After a little while, he pulled out his phone to check the time and, just as he had expected from being in a forest and not hearing any notifications all day, no missed called or messages. He replaced the phone in his bag and closed his eyes again, tucking his arm beneath the bag. He wondered if Soto had brushed her teeth that night, or if she had gotten away with lying to their mom about doing so. Or if their mom had even remembered to check in the first place. He reviewed in his head whether he had prepared enough food for them to have for dinner, and reconsidered whether the portions would have been big enough for the both of them to eat. His mom had taken to skipping meals over the past couple of years or so, so by the time she did eat her appetite either seemed too great or too small for what it should have been. Tetsuo had calculated this all in his head a dozen times already though, well before he had left the village. He had done everything he could to avoid repeating what had happened when they had been in the Land of Birds. This time, they knew exactly how long they were to be away from the village, and he had done everything he could to prep something both hearty and easy to make while he was away.

He never exactly was able to reassure himself the way that he would've hoped reminding himself of the actions he'd taken to plan ahead would. His mind only naturally shifted back to the present by the sporadic fidgeting he heard from across the fire. Haruki had been doing something to make his bag make a swishing sound for a while now, probably just to be annoying, but it had stopped, and now was replaced by his body taking to some restless fit of rolling over and flailing his arms about, or whatever it was that he was doing.

Tetsuo had never really camped in any way. It was something his dad had said they would do someday, some father and son bonding, and talked about teaching him to hunt, but it had never happened. The war happened instead, dragging whatever precious time he'd had that he could've spent with his dad away. None of the missions he'd gone on with his last team had ever been these multi-day stretches that had made him leave the village like the ones he'd done with this team, and when he was at home in the village, it was unthinkable to him to try to sleep anywhere else during the night. It made him ache, painfully, thinking about how his first experience with this should have been with his father. He hated how much he was thinking about it now, but after the small exchange with Katsuro he'd had, the talk of ghosts, he couldn't put it out of his mind. If there was a such thing as ghosts, would there have been something that would have tethered his own father's soul down to the earth? And if so, would he stay close by, watching over him should something like what happened to Teshima ever happen to him?

Tetsuo gave it a little while longer before he stirred, sitting up with a sigh. He looked over to where Mizu and Haruki were. Haruki was laid flat on his stomach, his cheek tucked into the crook of his arm in a way that looked like it was going to give him neck pain. Mizu, by comparison, was very still, and looked like she had barely moved since Katsuro had called it for the night. She almost looked normal girl laying there, the shadows cast from the overhang obscuring the whiskers and the scar that marred her face, only revealed in flashes from the churning campfire and his general knowing that it was there. It was strange to him just how not strange it seemed to see her so at peace. If he hadn't been from their village, hadn't known the things his father had told him, he might not have even guessed that there was a monster in her. Rather, that she was supposed to be one at all. She looked normal.

Tetsuo once again slipped his phone from his bag and flipped it open to check the time. Almost half an hour had passed.

He pressed his thumb and forefinger into his closed eyes and rubbed, putting his phone away. After another moment, he slipped out of his sleeping bag and said to Katsuro, quietly, "I'll take over watch. You can go ahead and sleep."

Tetsuo stepped around the fire, which seemed to still be going strong for the time being, to take point under the overhang. He sank down onto the ground, crossing his legs and propping his cheek up with his closed fist as he stared out into the dark vacancy of the forest ahead.

 

[Gilzar]

As Katsuro looked outward beyond the fire, things seemed to be calming down...for the most part. Tetsuo and Haruki argued a bit over the state of the camp, but Katsuro didn't intervene. In his eyes it was best just to let the two of them sort it out. If he jumped into every argument the two would never find a way to get along. The two eventually quit bickering, and the camp fell to silence. All of his students were at least attempting to sleep, leaving Katsuro alone at last to watch over the camp.

Katsuro's eyes patrolled the area as sat near the fire, looking for anything out of the ordinary. The darkness, coupled with the rain, made it difficult to see beyond the darkness. But so far everything seemed normal. It was a relief, given current events. His students undoubtedly thought he was doing this because he was just a paranoid war veteran. However, they didn't know what he did. None of them were aware of the Akatsuki and the threat they posed. If they were to come under attack by any individuals dawning the insignia of the infamous red clouds, Katsuro had a specific plan he'd have to follow to ensure everyone's safety, especially Mizu.

Quietly he took another sip of his flask to ease his paranoia. So far the Leaf Village's intelligence had kept them safe. If Kaito believed they were being tracked, he would have told him. Plus there was an entire network of shinobi that would report any nearby sightings back to the village. They also had the good fortune of being in an isolated area, away from prying eyes. The only people who knew they were out here was their employer and the upper administration of Konoha.

Before his thoughts could stew any further on the matter, Katsuro had an unexpected interruption. Tetsuo had gotten out of his sleeping bag, ready to start his watch far earlier than Katsuro had told him to. His eyes gave his student a strange look for a moment or so. They had a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. He was hoping Tetsuo would take this time to rest, but it appeared the boy had other plans.

"If you want to take guard early that's fine, but I'm not sleeping until my two hours are up." Katsuro quietly explained.

 

[Pine]

Tetsuo looked over his shoulder to give Katsuro an annoyed glance. There was no point in the two of them staying up. Why was the old goat being stubborn about this? Was he trying to punish him for, what—assuming his duties sooner than he'd been told to?

He didn't want to stay up with Katsuro. He wanted the time alone. He would eventually get that, once his own shift started and Katsuro's end, but he would have to wait until that time came. If Katsuro was unwilling to end his watch early, the most logical thing for him to do would be to try to go to sleep himself, but in his eyes, that would be the same as giving up on an argument. Even if neither of them were actually bickering at the moment, he couldn't have that.

The irony was lost on Tetsuo, that he felt critical of Katsuro's stubbornness while he, himself, was just being stubborn.

He nevertheless turned his head back and shrugged. "Yeah, well." They were just filler words, something to give some sort of acknowledgment to Katsuro's assertion. He didn't really have anything he could say to follow up with.

Time dragged by as some amorphous thing. In the absence of the birds' chorus, the only auditory input they could hear was the popping of sap in their campfire, the rain tromping atop the overhang and across the undergrowth, or the occasional rustling of some shrubbery, though it always seemed too distant to be of any real concern. With the sun down, they existed within a vacuum. The glow of the fire radiated out just past the first line of trees, then was sealed away behind an inky blackness. If either of them craned their head out from under the overhang, they might be able to make out between the cracks in the canopy the decorum of stars lighting up the night sky, but otherwise they were obscured by the forest's trees and their limited vantage point.

Katsuro's shift would pass without incident, and when it was time for his to end and for Tetsuo to take over, the same could be said of it. No man, beast or otherwise seemed to stir anywhere near them. The most they would get was a beetle dragging its abdomen across the ground, or a moth that got curious about the fire they had lit.

It was only once Katsuro had submitted to sleep that Tetsuo's own weariness began to overtake him. What before had been a relentless urgency of need to do something for the family he was too far away from, and the discomfort of the pointless stake he had made to stay up while Katsuro did the same for his designated shift, now became a pressure in his head that told him he needed rest, and an inability to see one coherent thought through to the end of his line of thinking. He knew that if he laid down right in that moment, suddenly he would be able to sleep with no problem at all. He had brought up the topic of establishing a watch in the first place, though, and even though he felt certain there was nothing in the forest that would want to draw near to them while their fire went, his sense of duty would not allow for him to abandon his post.

After the first hour had passed, Tetsuo caught himself on several occasions jolting his body back to a state of awakeness and awareness. After the fourth time, he took to standing and stretching his arms and twisting his torso. He paced a little from side to side, just enough to keep his body awake, and tried to remain as quiet as he could.

For the last ten minutes, he checked his phone almost obsessively for the time. Each time he checked, it seemed as though less and less time had somehow passed. Finally, just before it was time to end his shift, Tetsuo rekindled the fire. It had dimmed and shrank to where it barely covered the stretch of their overhang shelter, but with the propagation of the sticks he and Katsuro had gathered before and rotation of lumber to create new breathing spaces, the fire came back to life.

Tetsuo carefully palmed the screen of his phone to shut it silently. Two minutes past the end of his shift had gone by during the time he had tried to correct the fire, but Tetsuo was just relieved to be done with it. He needed, desperately, to be unconscious.

Tetsuo made his way over to Mizu's presumably sleeping form, and for a moment, he was uncertain of his actions he should, or would be willing, to take. He had woken his sister dozens upon dozens of times, and his own mom several times, but never someone of his own age, let alone her. He was not concerned about his ability to do so. It was the fact of her being the Kyuubi jinchuuriki. He wouldn't yell—he wasn't going to wake everyone else just to avoid her, but he didn't want to touch her either. While not fully conscious of it, there was some primal fear in him of something that he might see for the moment he woke her up.

There was no use in hesitating anymore, though. It was something that needed to be done.

Tetsuo decided on lowering himself to a crouch, spaced not too close to her, but still within reaching distance. "Mizu," he whispered. He would wait a few moments to see if that would be enough to wake her, and if it wasn't, he would gently, but firmly, prod her arm and say her name again.

 

[Gilzar]

Time awkwardly dragged on as Katsuro and Tetsuo sat in silence by the fire. Katsuro was hoping that Tetsuo would have tried to get some sleep, but the boy was insistent upon staying awake. He debated about telling Tetsuo to go back to sleep until it was time for his shift, but he was just too tired to have yet another argument with his troubled student. If Tetsuo didn't want to sleep then so be it. He just better not complain about being exhausted tomorrow.

For the rest of his shift Katsuro would casually lean back into his bag, shifting his gaze between the fire and his surroundings. The alcohol in his system had drained whatever of his energy was left, but the memories of his old squad stirred enough emotion in him to keep him awake for the remainder of the time. Some memories were sweet, others were bitter. But these feelings were nothing new. They were always there, just like the scars on his body. He would spend the remainder of his shift reminiscing in his head over better days in his head, occasionally sipping on his whiskey. Once it was time to sleep, he simply laid on the baren ground and used his backpack on a pillow. He would remain silent the rest of the night with drunk snores escaping his nostrils every now and then.

-----------

Mizu walked through the haze of a strange place that vividly resembled the Konoha train station. The lighting in the building was eerie, with a hazy orange sun shining through every window, illuminating the entire station with a smoky orange haze. Anything that wasn't directly illuminated by the light passing through the windows was veiled in pure darkness. A cloud of shifting patrons surrounded her, going about their business with the trains shifting through the station. It was a busy sight, yet everything around her was eerily quiet.

She would begin to walk through the station as she would on any normal day. Each step she took echoed through the room, like an empty hallway. Mizu took one more look at her surroundings, and suddenly halted to a stop. Through the static of people passing by her, she caught a glimpse of someone she recognized just a few feet away. His steel blue hair and well-dressed outfit stood out from the crowd in a way that almost illuminated him from everyone else. Immediately the eyes of Taro locked onto Mizu's, and once again she found herself staring down that same easy smile she had encountered earlier in the morning. Her blood boiled at his arrogance, as if he assumed she would be delighted to see him again. His entire demeanor felt like an insult. Taro opened his mouth to say something, but whatever it was escaped her.

Mizu lunged at him, throwing a hard straight punch right toward his cocky smile. But just as she was about to connect her arm just drifted to a halt, as if it were powerless. She'd follow up again with a right hook, but it was no use. Nothing she threw had any impact on Taro. Immediately she backed up, frustrated by her inability to cause harm to someone she so bitterly despised. Despite her best effort to inflict pain on him, Taro just calmly stood there with the same indifferent look he had given her the last time they spoke.

Once again, he was gently laughing at her. And once again, she looked like a fool.

The faceless crowd around them slowly stopped moving, and they all just stared. Now focusing on the group surrounding her, Mizu came to the chilling realization that the people around her weren't faceless strangers. They were all face she personally knew. Katsuro-sensei, Matsuda, Ginji, Haruki, Tetsuo, and others. The weight of their disapproving gazes hunched Mizu over to the floor. Her arms trembled in embarrassment, and she tried to lift herself back up. But it was to no avail. All she could manage was to lift her head up from the floor. From the corner of her eyesight, two young genin boys came into view. She instantly recognized them; the ones who gave her the scar on her face so long ago.

"Monster!" One of them shouted.

Before she could react, her face was once again pelted by a sharp rock. She cried out in pain, but the shouting of the crowd around them muffled out any noise she made. Mizu buried her face in her hands, fighting the urge to fall to the ground in pain. Her vision began to flash red at random intervals. From side her chest, her heartbeat pounded like it were on the brink of a catastrophic explosion. Slowly her fingernails, digging her fingernails into her forehead. It hurt, but it was the only thing she could feel as her body trembled from a primal, volatile rage; the terrifying likes of which had never been felt by her before. All she desired was to hurt them, to make them feel the same pain she felt.

A small dark red fire burned from the corners of her vision. It steadily began to consume the room around them. Her hands slammed into the ground and Mizu screamed in fury. She could feel her teeth changing, like she was growing fangs. The dark red flames consumed the entire room until the only thing she saw was an evil glowing red hue. In the distance she heard the colossal roar of a ferocious sounding beast.

--------------------------------------------------------

Mizu gasped as Tetsuo's arm prodded into her and called her name. She jumped at the shock of being brought back into reality so suddenly, quickly sitting up to rest on just one arm. For a split second the girl froze, until the realization finally hit her of where she was and why Tetsuo had woken her up. It was just a dream. Tetsuo's shift was over and now it would be her turn to stand guard for two hours.

She let out a sigh of relief.

"Oh...right." She said, her voice trailing off at the end.

Her eyes stared quietly at the ground. In her mind, she came to terms with what she witnessed in her dreams. The disturbing imagery, the raw emotions...it haunted her.

Mizu looked back up to Tetsuo.

"You can go back to sleep." She whispered. "I'm awake now."

Mizu sat tall and faced the fire. Her squinted while they slowly adjusted to the rapid influx of light.

 

[Pine]

Tetsuo flinched sharply. The sound of Mizu's gasp raked against his senses, registering as louder and higher in pitch than it should have. After sitting for hours with only white noise for company, her gasp and the swish of her sleeping roll's fabric skittered across his sinuses in the form of aggravated static. Every muscle in his body tensed. He stared back at her, mirroring some version of the same alarm she carried, suspended by the uncertainty that she might hit him, or do something even worse.

He began to relax only after she seemed to come to some realization of her own and sighed.

As her eyes dropped to the ground, his shoulder did as well, but he kept his gaze lingering on her, his thin lips heavy with a frown. He thought about saying something, but he wasn't sure what it was that he would say. Was he wanting to ask her a question? And if so, was it one meant for her sake, or his?

Before he could parse this out, she looked back at him, reminding him of why he had woken her up in the first place. He was tired.

Tetsuo hesitated for only a moment more, then nodded. He rose from his crouch to round the campfire and head to where his own sleeping roll lay. He bent down to test the sleeping roll for dampness, squeezing its edge to see if any of the rain had somehow found a way to soak into it, before crawling in. He felt a little awkward, knowing Mizu was the only other one awake. He kept his eyes intentionally down, avoiding looking at her, and he could only hope that she was doing the same.

As he turned to his side and tucked his arm beneath his head, Tetsuo felt the strange notion that, had this been hours ago and he had been better rested, he may have been able to come to some profound realization in that brief interaction with Mizu, their village's jinchuuriki. As it stood, he had no way of knowing this may have been, and not long after he closed his eyes did he fall into a still, and quiet slumber.

- - - - -

The first hour of her watch would pass without disturbance. There came an ebb and flow of the rain, at times pelting against the ground with violent ferocity, then ease again into a softer patter.

It was during one of these times, where the rain fell at its heaviest, that something moved outside the camp. The shade from the canopy suffocated the view of anything outside of their overhang, and the illumination from their campfire only served to make the contrasting light of their camp and darkness of the forest more difficult to peer through. Any noise this thing made was snuffed out by the pounding rain. It was only if Mizu happened to look across the camp and slightly to her right, closest to where Katsuro and Tetsuo lay, that she would be able to see a shadow within the shadows—a blob moving uncertainly in a thin zig-zag across the forest floor, only slightly longer than the length of an adult cat, and seeming to have about twice or three times the density.