August 17th, part 2
But we survived, didn't we? That makes it an adventure. If you get killed it's a tragedy. ― Garth Nix
It had been July. Now it's August. This seems like a natural progression, one right after the other, but it is not.
Aoba wants to crawl out of his own skin. He wants to shower for days — would the hospital let him use the decontamination showers? — and he's damn lucky that when it becomes August he's alone in his apartment because he doesn't get the benefit of being asleep when it happens. No, the afternoon, he's wide awake, and it knocks him down to his knees, like a punch straight to the brain.
It had been July and he'd been in Land of Hot Springs, in Yugakure —
It had been July and he'd been on an Intel mission with Nara Shikako —
It had been July and the smell of blood had been so thick in that room —
It had been July and they'd both been dying: him, by quick inches but still impossibly slow, like time had stopped; her, on the altar, surrounded by grandstanding priests, arguing to the last —
But it's August, now. Not in the normal progression of things, forward one day at a time into the next month after July, but backwards. Eleven months. The previous summer, the previous August, because Aoba's kitchen table is overflowing with Shiranui Genma's houseplants; he and everyone else had been working double-time, that summer, because of the Sand-Sound invasion, and Aoba's position in Intelligence had made him the only viable plant-sitter Genma could find, although he and Genma had never been particularly close, for all that they'd been at the Academy at the same time.
August, and Aoba is on his knees in the kitchen, hand pressed to his throat, alive, breathing. He flares his chakra to disrupt any genjutsu, on principle, but there isn't one, of course. Insane psychopath cultists aren't going to bother to slap a genjutsu of being home on a dying sacrifice. Time travel of some kind is, frustratingly, the more logical answer.
This, Aoba supposes a little hysterically, is what he gets for going on an S-rank mission with a member of Team Seven. Maybe he should have let Shikako order him back to Konoha and continue on her own... except that, no, dying with her was so much better than sending a thirteen year old teammate to her death, alone. Aoba hadn't managed to keep her safe, but he wasn't a coward.
(And he'd joked about Tsunade-sama killing him for letting her go on alone, but really... it would have been Kakashi.)
He staggers to his feet and finally thinks: where's Shikako? She'd been his mission partner, she'd been impaled, she'd been right there with him, and he has to find her. He has to report to the Hokage, too, of course, but — Shikako first. No one would fault him that. It would be better to report in together, anyway.
First he thinks she's probably with Tonbo... but, no, eleven months back is too far back for that. Nara Shikako is a genin, still. So he checks her team's usual training ground, where he unfortunately doesn't find Shikako but does find Uchiha Sasuke. This is less than surprising; the kid is always training.
"Do you know where Nara Shikako is?" he asks Sasuke, when the kid pauses at his sudden appearance via shunshin. If he and Shikako weren't still genin he probably wouldn't have bothered even asking, but Team Seven are tight-knit and genin usually know where their teammates are, even if Sasuke can't actually leave the village anymore.
"A mission with Naruto," Sasuke says. His brow is furrowed a little, probably trying to place Aoba, and he opens his mouth, probably to ask what Aoba wants with his teammate, but Aoba leaves, straight for the mission desk, to check which mission Shikako and Uzumaki Naruto are on.
Because... Aoba doesn't have the timing of Shikako's missions memorized or anything, but it's the previous August, after the prison break but before that mess with the traps spread all over the village, and Aoba can only think of one mission Shikako took around that time. The one that everyone knows about but no one knows about.
Being with Intel has its perks; the mission desk chūnin recognize him well enough that he can breeze past them to the records room. Of course, it's only once he's in the room and looking through the first of the mission scrolls for Shikako's mission that he remembers that the mission wouldn't be kept here, even this far back — Tsunade-sama selects, distributes, and records any mission Team 7 goes on personally. There will be no record of it anywhere but in her office.
Aoba has seen the date, now, though, on several of the most recently assigned missions. It's August 17th. Shikako is on the innocuous C-rank find-the-ferret mission that had become the mysterious averted-a-foreign-invasion S-rank. The one where Shikako had (probably) died.
'Sword,' he remembers her saying in the bar during their scar-comparing contest, turning around to lift her shirt and show her back, the huge scar there. She'd been facing away from them, hadn't seen the seasoned special jōnin around the table going pale at the sight of her scar. Then she'd turned around, letting her shirt back down and told them, 'I could show you the front, but we'd all get in trouble,' revealing that it'd been a through-and-through.
(Granted, Aoba doesn't know for sure that the sword wound had happened on that mission... but it certainly hadn't happened on any other mission; he had high enough clearance to see the bare minimum of her medical billing records and there was no record of her being treated for any wound in that location or of that level of severity. It hadn't been Tsunade to heal her and it hadn't happened in or near the village. After her return from the C-turned-S-rank, she'd had "investigative surgery" performed by Tsunade, whatever that meant.)
If things go the way they did last time, Shikako will come home in three days and die again on the floor in the Hokage's office because Shimura Danzo was fucking around, trying to undermine Tsunade-sama. It might have helped Tsunade-sama protect others from that kind of abuse of authority, but this is Aoba's kohai. He won't let her die, even temporarily, for the sake of some beneficial political maneuvering.
He needs to see the Hokage immediately.
Of course, Aoba can't just burst into Tsunade-sama's office via window or past her secretary or anything. He's a tokubetsu jounin and he's certainly well-respected, but he's not the head of Intelligence or a Clan Head or Uzumaki Naruto. He has to wait like everyone else.
Her secretary — surely an ANBU in disguise, because Aoba doesn't recognize her and he makes it his business to know everyone — is decently sympathetic to Aoba's tightly-controlled panic, though. "Tsunade-sama will have time for you after this," she tells him, and procures him a cup of tea that Aoba can't bring himself to drink.
It's the longest forty-five minutes of his entire life and when Inuzuka Tsume and Tamashiro Jun exit the office bickering like schoolyard rivals Aoba wants to scream. Normally their arguments are a source of hilarious gossip, but Aoba so does not have time. No matter what it was they needed Tsunade-sama to sort out, there's no way it was as important as what Aoba needs to tell her.
The secretary waves him in; Tsunade looks just as pissed as Aoba feels, although nowhere near as panicked. She's toying with an empty sake cup.
"What's your name and what do you want?" she asks, and Aoba realizes that she's only had the hat for two months.
That may well have been the first spat between Tsume and Tamashiro that she's had to deal with. She hasn't met Aoba yet, because that Very Secret assignment to investigate the chūnin 'Sai' hasn't yet been handed off to him. Being eleven months in the past is going to come with some odd interpersonal consequences.
"Yamashiro Aoba, Tsunade-sama," he says. Because this is a post-mission report, even though she's yet to assign the mission, he stands at rest as he would for any debrief. "Reporting in for myself and my mission partner about an S-rank I've recently returned from."
There's a pause. She's not giving off any kind of Intent, and in fact she barely moves a muscle, but her entire attention is now on him and Aoba is suddenly and inexplicably afraid of Tsunade-sama. He doesn't take back anything he's said, though. It's technically true.
("It's technically true," Shikako had said to him more than once, "which, as everyone knows, is the best kind of true.")
"Very well," she says. She sets the sake cup down and touches some specific point on her desk. Nothing seems to happen, which probably meant she was sending away or summoning more ANBU. Then she touches a second point, and the room suddenly hums with activated privacy seals. So they're probably alone, which Aoba thinks is for the best.
"I know everyone who's supposed to be on an S-rank right now, and you're not one of them," Tsunade-sama says. "But, fine. Who's your mission partner and why aren't they here?"
"Nara Shikako. She's out of the village."
Tsunade-sama leans back in her chair and looks very unimpressed. "Nara Shikako is currently on a C-rank."
"Yes. To find a ferret in the Land of Rivers." And, wow, apparently he wasn't even supposed to know that much, from the way Tsunade-sama's gaze sharpens. Time to bite the bullet.
"We were assigned the mission in July of next year," Aoba says. "We went to Hidden Hot Springs for intel and got caught in... a ritual of some kind." (Here it seems best, for now, to be succinct and skip the proverbial and literal blood and guts of the mission; Aoba doesn't want to talk about dying just yet anyway.) "I woke up in my body eleven months in the past. There's possibly some connection to the mission Shikako is currently on."
"A connection... to the C-rank pet fetching mission."
Aoba nods. "Team 7's curse struck again. The details and the mission were declared S-rank when they returned, but it was generally known that the Nara twins and Uzumaki Naruto helped Suna repel an invasion from some kind of foreign military force."
"And you were read-in on the details?"
"No." Aoba shakes his head. "But I know... she took a sword through-and-through, here—" He gestures at the spot on his chest, high, corresponding to where the scar had been on her back. Draws his finger in a line across where the heart is, the eighth Gate. Where the sword might have missed her spine, but still certainly would have killed her. "—and she was... very injured during the ritual, before I was sent back. Based on the date and travel time, they finished with repelling the invasion today, which was presumably when she got caught by the sword. Around two this afternoon."
"Which is when you... came back in time."
Aoba nods.
Tsunade-sama sighs, and her gaze strays to her empty sake cup. Aoba sympathizes, although at the moment drinking would break his compartmentalization and then he'd probably never stop drinking.
She says, "Fine. I'll humor you, since you do have some information you shouldn't have." She doesn't eye him suspiciously or sound threatening or anything, but boy is the warning clear in her words. "You will tell me everything you can remember about the next few days, especially the mission Nara Shikako is on and definitely anything that might prove you really lived through this all once already. You will submit to the usage of the Holding-Door Mind Transmission as soon as someone is available to do so."
"Yes, Hokage-sama." Aoba gives a brief bow, because that sort of thing is a little more important than usual with how recently Tsunade-sama has taken up the Hat. Also, Aoba is genuinely pretty thankful; she hadn't called him crazy and he's pretty sure she means as soon as someone trustworthy is available — and that probably means Yamanaka Inoichi or Morino Ibiki, both of whom Aoba has no problem letting paw through his memories.
Not that he'd expect his personal comfort to be considered in a situation like this, but with the hijinks that had slowly become apparent to Aoba over the past year, it's very good to see that the Hokage is already aware of possible information security issues and/or internal political jockeying that she'll have to contend with.
Aoba wants his knowledge of the future (assuming it pans out, of course, it is actually possible that he's crazy, however unlikely it seems to him) to be used as a weapon, but preferably one only wielded by Tsunade-sama, for the good of the village.