Chapter 2
I feel the powers leaving me – expect a short hiatus sometime soon. Especially because classes are starting in, like three weeks and I’m simultaneously working on two papers.
Still! – here you are, an update:)
She makes a Big Deal out of team 7’s graduation.
It makes Naruto nervous, she knows, and – terrible as it is – Hisana is counting on that. As much as she needs and wants him on the team, she also needs him to know about the Kyuubi. It’s an integral part of who he is and the knowledge of it will shape him into the person that will one day defeat Akatsuki. If Mizuki doesn’t tell him, in a more or less controlled environment and with Iruka-sensei ready to step in, who knows how or if he’s ever going to find out. Also, if they can get rid of that traitor, all the better; Hisana shudders to think what sort of damage Mizuki could inflict on Konoha and its Academy students if nobody outs him as the crazy person he has become.
“It’ll be fine,” she repeats for the hundredth time today as she rubs Naruto’s back comfortingly. He’s having a bit of a panic attack next to her, shoulders hunched and breathing hard. She watches him in exasperation and fondness, hoping that he’ll get a hold of himself soon. A few feet away Sakura is keeping Sasuke from running his mouth while Hisana tries to calm down the blonde and she doesn’t know how much longer he will let her. The very last thing Naruto needs right now is her idiot cousin calling him a loser.
“It’s just an exam,” she tells him calmly, vaguely recalling Iruka-sensei’s words from long ago. “You’ve had them every year.”
“Yes,” he whines, “And they went terrible every year!” Which … true.
“And yet, here you are,” she reminds him, careful to keep her voice low and even. “Ready to take your last exam. You passed every time – barely, yes, but that’s what we’re aiming for anyway, right?”
He nods, still a little green around the gills. Sakura ambles over with a serious expression.
“We practiced so hard,” she reminds him, casting Sasuke wary looks over her shoulder, “You’ll do ok! Your theoretical scores will be pretty bad over all, but you know stuff about the Hokages. And your taijutsu has gotten loads better.”
His ninjutsu is still pretty shaky, but that’s not his fault after all. Until Jiraya comes to correct his seal they’ll have to work around it. Sasuke, wisely, keeps mum.
“Sakura, how’re things on your end?”
The girl flashes her a thumbs-up very reminiscent of Konoha’s Green Beast.
“Great theory, terrible practice! I’ll ruin it completely.” She sounds so enthusiastic that Hisana has to laugh. The girl has really grown into herself. She still has a long way to go, compared to who she became during Shippuden, but the way she is now Sakura has the potential to become someone even more frightening. Regular eating and continued practice have completely transformed her. She’s pretty, Hisana thinks, just like everyone always insisted she were. Lovely hair, of course, and a sweet looking face, but the thing that stands out most about her are her strong limbs. She looks … capable. Somewhat surprisingly she’s also grown taller than she probably should be, towering over Naruto by almost an entire head. Funnily enough she’s also taller than Sasuke.
Hisana knows it irks her cousin that he has to look up to his female teammate, but Sakura obviously gets some sort of strange kick out of it.
Naruto is still as short as ever. He’s also grown a bit, but next to Sakura and even Sasuke, who isn’t short for his age at all, he looks like a midget. Hisana knows that he’ll get his growth spurt later, but she pities the boy anyway; he’s already catching a lot of flak as it is for his boisterous personality. If only his arms weren’t so stick thin.
“It’ll be great,” Hisana reaffirms to the whole team, trying not to wince at how bony his shoulder feels under her hand. “Just this little bit and you’re good for a few more years.” More like ‘months’, but she isn’t going to tell them that.
On the walk back home Sasuke looks thoughtful. It’s a face Hisana still recognizes, because it hasn’t changed since he was little: face carefully blank, except for the unconscious pout.
“What is,” he finally starts, a little hesitantly, “if the dobe does mess up?” Hisana lets him stew for a minute before she answers, trying to gauge what prompted the question. Is he … worried about Naruto? Or is he just trying to assess how it would impact him personally?
“Then you will be in separate teams. That’s just how things go. But you know that doesn’t mean that you won’t see each other anymore. Just look at me and the girls.” It’s true that she still sees Shizuha and Shiki more often than Haru and Sora, whom she meets a few times a week for training. “But, you know, things have a way of working out. Especially around Naruto.”
Sasuke nods agreeably, easily taking her word for it. He’s not so easy to read anymore, but honestly, Hisana isn’t as worried about it anymore. Sasuke’s temper has evened out considerably and nowadays he’s more reserved than broody. According to Shiki he even exchanged a few words with Ino, who came home laughing and sobbing about it. He apparently told her, very firmly, that he appreciates his quiet time and that he’d like her to stop trying to talk to him during class.
Ino was ecstatic that he would deign to talk to her in any manner, but also obviously hurt by the rejection. Nevertheless she stopped trying to engage him in conversations and has settled back into admiring him from afar. Encouraged by the small success Sasuke has started Using His Words – sparsely but to great effect: When her cousin talks, people listen. She’s unreasonably proud of him.
Minutes pass in silence. It’s not late yet, but Hisana estimates there are at most forty more minutes of sunlight left. Winter time brings short days, even in Konoha. Honestly, she thought the conversation done, thoughts already on dinner, but then, out of nowhere Sasuke says, “Hisa-nee, why do you want us to stay a team so badly?”
She very nearly stumbles over her own feet. Sasuke is watching her closely; it’s not an accusation, but rather a genuine question. He doesn’t get her motivation but he guessed at its existence anyway.
“Well, isn’t that what you want too?” Because at this point she really does think he wants them around. No matter how put upon he sometimes acts, Sasuke is attached to his team. Not in a way that will have him buying friendship bracelets or even birthday presents anytime soon, but she thinks he appreciates the camaraderie and connection that only those two can provide. They are extraordinarily compatible for three such completely different characters.
“Yes,” he says slowly, as if bracing for an argument – or maybe already expecting her to deflect. “But you picked them. And I know it was you who talked to Sakura about keeping us together.”
Ahh, so she had told them. It’s not entirely unexpected, but it makes the situation no less uncomfortable. She can’t tell Sasuke the truth, but he has developed an uncanny knack for knowing when she’s lying to him. Half-truths then.
“I trust them. We both know a new team would bring its own set of difficulties. You’d have to get to know them, build up the same sort of teamwork as with Naruto and Sakura. And there’s no guarantee that it’ll work. They might be idiots. They might just hate you for no reason.” Because Sasuke is still a little jerk.
She scratches her neck, aware that he has probably thought even more extensively about this than her. He knows all this. “Naruto and Sakura know you so well, there’s no way they’ll accidently mess up – and they like you, so they won’t mess up on purpose. We’re both a rare commodity, Sasuke and people outside of Konoha want us for about a million different reasons – none of which you’ll like, I can promise you that.”
He grimaces like he always does when she brings up this particular subject. The massacre left deep-seated scars on him. The pain has faded into background noise, but it’ll never go away.
“I can’t let you leave the village, off to who-knows-where doing who-knows-what, with a sketchy team at your back,” she says quietly, bringing the conversation back to more personal territory. “What would I do if you just didn’t come home one day because one of your teammates messed up?”
Her cousin heaves a sigh so deep that Hisana almost thinks she might have annoyed him. But Sasuke’s expression has morphed into something unexpectedly soft and worried.
“You don’t need to protect me at every turn,” he finally says, voice grim. “I’ll be a genin – that means weeding gardens and painting fences. It’ll be months before I can leave the village. And then I’ll be able to protect myself.”
She hesitates to correct him. Against Zabuza or Orochimaru? Not even she can defend herself against them. But there’s no use listing all the dangerous people out there who’d love to get their hands on him.
“One day I’m going to leave the village by myself,” he insists, stopping abruptly in the street to catch her gaze head on. “I’ll do missions by myself. I’ll be a chuunin at some point. I will be a jounin. How am I ever going to get there if you won’t let me try?”
“I’m letting you try,” she says, quietly, defensively. It sounds like a lie to her own ears. “It’s just … I know you know what it’s like out there. But knowing and seeing are different things. Witnessing one night of blood-shed isn’t the same as living it, participating in it.”
He hisses at her, stung by the callous remark. It’s the truth, but Hisana realizes how it sounds as soon as the words are out of her mouth. Sasuke turns on his heels and stalks off without a further word; Hisana suppresses the urge to call after him. They both need to cool off. He hasn’t yelled at her, she should consider that a victory.
He’s right of course, she thinks later, sitting on the couch and watching the light fade outside. Sasuke will be really, really badass one day. It’s just so hard to remember when he’s only twelve, complaining about silly things and she’s so proud of every stupid thing he does because he’s still so young. The truth is that she’s always been this protective. But as long as he was safely locked inside Konoha she’d never had a reason to let him know that. All the worrying and the crying over what’s coming – Sasuke doesn’t know about any of that. She keeps forgetting that.
To him there’s no enemy waiting outside the gates. Just courier missions and bandits.
A noise from the bedroom jerks her out of her thoughts. For a moment Hisana thinks it might be Sasuke trying to avoid her, but her cousin is nothing if not brazen; he’d walk right past Hisana without sparing her a look. No, there are just a hand full of people who’d break into her apartment without bothering to knock at the front door first – none of which would have made that much noise though. Hisana sniffs discreetly, before abruptly standing up and walking towards the bedroom.
“Anko,” she says flatly, watching the older woman unashamedly looking through her closet.
“Hey,” the other woman greets absentmindedly, as if she isn’t nosing through Hisana’s personal items. “Your things are all so drab,” she bemoans, throwing a training outfit onto her and Sasuke’s bed. “Not a single bit of fishnet – are you even a proper ninja?”
“What are you doing here?” Hisana forces out, bewildered and not just a little scandalized. “And what do you think you’re doing with my clothes?”
Anko flashes a toothy grin at her before wriggling her finger forbiddingly in Hisana’s direction.
“Be nice, I bring good news! The Hokage okayed me for the Exams – and I told him that I want you as my lackey.”
“A-and he agreed?” If he did it would take a huge load off her shoulders.
“I believe,” Anko drawls, “his exact words were ‘Do whatever you want’. Granted, by that point I already made two of his pitiful desk ninja cry, but eh.”
Hisana resists the wild urge to hug the crazy woman. With Anko she’d be a fixed part of the second task.
“Yess!” she hisses instead, unable to contain the glee and relief. Of course that would mean she’d have to work closely with the snake lady, as well as probably Ibiki and that sickly ninja who did the preliminaries. But even the thought of regularly seeing Ibiki’s ugly mug doesn’t quite dampen the giddy throb of her pulse.
“You do realize,” Anko adds, as if eager to squash all Hisana’s enthusiasm, “that I can’t be seen with you as long as you look like that?”
Hisana looks down herself, cataloguing her regulation outfit. Boots, pants, shirt – all in black.
“I look fine,” she insists. The outfit is as simple as it is useful and she doesn’t get attached enough to get depressed if it inevitably bites the dust. No matter how mild he may be, on the field Tenzo is a bulldozer and it shows by the number of Hisana’s outfits that found their way into the trash by now. It’s a Team Kakashi thing, she thinks wryly. But Anko is already waving a dismissive hand at her, eyes gleaming with enthusiasm.
“No way! You look boring – my flunkey’s not going to be a boring ass regulation ninja. If you wanna be dangerous, you gotta look the part.” She makes a grand gesture towards her own outfit. “Fear is mostly in the head,” she imparts wisely striking a few poses in front of the mirror, Hisana’s clothes held against her chest, before dismissing them all. “You talk to the lizard part of their brain and they’ll shit their pants all on their own.”
It does make sense, but in no way corresponds to the look on Anko’s face as she cheerfully throws one dark shirt after another into the growing pile on the floor. Somewhat mutedly Hisana remembers that Anko doesn’t have very many friends. She must be what now – twenty-four? Orochimaru’s defection left her ostracized since she was barely a teenager. People respect her, yes, because they give her no choice. But she’s neither accepted nor trusted in the least. Hisana strongly suspects that if Anko were anybody else but Orochimaru’s former students she would have made jounin long ago – maybe even with a genin team of her own.
No matter how loony she seems, that sort of rejection must have left some pretty harsh scars. No wonder she’s so taken with the idea of having someone around.
“Fine, fine,” Hisana agrees warily. “So, great master, tell me how to be scary.”