Chapter 3
I pulled back, startled at the forcefulness of his questions.
“I’m Malie.” I answer him in Japanese. “I mean you no harm but please don’t move, you have been badly injured. I am trying to get you to the hospital.”
The man sits up anyways ignoring my instructions before trying to stand. He grunts in pain and slumps back into the ground with his right arm wrapped around his torso, clutching it in pain
“Where am I?” He coughs once, before settling back down against a nearby tree.
“You are just outside of Bozeman.” At his look of incomprehension I get that sinking feeling in my gut again. ‘He CAN’T be Kakashi, he can’t.’ With his brows furrowed I expound upon my answer hoping against hope that the man will know at least the state and that he won’t be claiming to be from a fictional world because I could not be filing out emergency intake paperwork on a fictional character.
Well not to anywhere but the phych ward.
“Montana…..”
“The U.S., the United States of America……”
“Earth?” I finally throw out when his face stays blank as a last ditch effort to keep my world from collapsing around me.
“I don’t know of these places” his eyes hold a glint of suspicion in them as he stares me down.
“that, um, might be a problem,” I tell him.
“whats the last thing you remember? I mean…um where you were last?”
Still holding himself stiffly and staring up at me with suspicion he warily answers me.
“I was fighting….a great enemy….with my team as part of the 4th great shinobi war” I hum noncommittally all the while I’m whimpering inside as I think back to what I know of the Naruto story line and match it up to what he is saying. It’s all beginning to make a horrible amount of sense, as the great enemy kakashi was speaking about I had heard about from my friend Alice was capable of dimensional travel.
“Where is my team?” he asks, looking around the clearing the trail cuts through, gaze lingering on my car for just a moment.
“Oh, I put the three of them in the car.” I wave my arm in the general direction behind me where I had put the teenagers earlier.
“A car? What have you done to them?” He exclaims hoarsely, and then starts coughing violently.
“I haven’t harmed them; I simply put them in the vehicle behind me……a horseless carriage?” I wince; well that was a pretty stupid.
But Kakashi, as I was coming to realize he must be, relaxed fractionally and when he had finished with his coughing fit stumbles out “show them to me.”
So with a firm hand wrapped around his arm I help to leverage the famous copy ninja up into a standing position.
We slowly walk over to the open side door, stumbling all the way over the ground as Hatake Kakashi (as I was coming to see him as) managed to shuffle his way to the car. We finally reached it, and poking his head inside the man quickly looks over his comrades, shoulders slumping in what I assumed to be relief.
“now if you yourself could manage to get into the car I could get you some where safer than this, even get you some medical care” I tell him, trying to get this conversation back on track to where it should be, that is, getting these four some proper medical attention.
Once again the paranoid ninja threw me a look of absolute suspicion before staring me down, finally having searched my face for any sign of falsehood he slowly slid into the seat, panting all the while. I watched as he leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes, breath soon evening out.
Amazed that someone could fall asleep so quickly I stared at him for a while but when I realized what I was doing and shook my head to snap out of it. I hastily walked around the car and got into the drivers seat, put the key into the ignition before it hit me.
Oh My God!
What was I going to do? I had 4 fictional characters in my car.
4 people with injuries, some of them seveare. They needed a hospital, but I couldn’t just walk up to the front desk and say that I had Hatake Kakashi, Uzumaki Naruto, Haruno Sakura, and Uchiha Sasuke in my car.
It would be insane.
But it’s not like I could have left them lying on the ground in the middle of nowhere. I needed to get them looked at, well I could check them over for injuries, but I didn’t exactly have a safe place to stash 4 interdimensional travelers.
I placed my hands on the steering wheel, knuckles white.
My house wasn’t anywhere close to Fort Knox.
The house! Of course, with my roommate gone for the summer I could bring them there. It was big enough to house them, even if not very private, being in the middle of the suburbs.
Oh well, it would have to do, I had nowhere else to take them, no one I could trust.
Turning the key in the ignition I started the car, turning around I headed back towards the road.
I never noticed the one eye looking at me from the back seat.