Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
Cold darkness streamed brilliant stars overhead, glittering remotely in a deep indigo sky, impassive and stark.
Shizune couldn't do much but sit and count the ridges on her kunai, bathed and made well-visible by the moonlight, as the night fell over what had been in daylight a battlefield, and at night had become a graveyard, a gory feeding ground for the wild life.
The crickets in the trees beyond the uneven, rocky field high up in the mountains behaved as though nothing has happened, and Shizune listened tensely to the hungry sound of scavenging mammals ripping into the cooling flesh of the corpses beyond where she was.
She had been injured during the fight, and now knelt at the base of a hill, rocks digging into her back. It had been little more than a border skirmish, but the wound had leaked too much black blood for her to walk steadily (that and the fact that she was pretty sure her ankle was broken didn't help), let alone keep up with the remaining members of her squad, and, in a rare move, the company had promised to come back for her in the morning when they had had time to regroup and the back-up group arrived, since there weren't enough of the original squad left alive to both help Shizune and fight off any potential pursuers. Shizune was beginning to wish she hadn't agreed.
The loss of blood combined with her exhaustion served to make her chakra control spotty at best, so Shizune couldn't heal herself. She sat back and waited for morning, hoping she wouldn't bleed to death before then.
Just as Shizune was thinking that she could afford to sleep for a few hours, her heart started to thud wildly when she realized that she could hear footsteps from somewhere nearby. There weren't any living Leaf nin around except for her, so that could only mean one thing.
Shizune's grip on the kunai tightened. I'm doomed, she thought grimly, lip twisting. Why couldn't I have just paid more attention to my surroundings during the fight? I'm supposed to be there to assist my teammates, not get injured myself.
She closed her eyes in a last-ditch attempt to play dead, in the hopes that whichever enemy nin had decided to lag behind would believe that she was dead and move on.
For a few moments, there was relative silence. Shizune didn't hear the footsteps; the crickets went on undisturbed, and the wolves tore into cadavers—Shizune didn't want to know who it was being ripped apart and devoured; she prayed she wouldn't recognize their face when the daylight came—without caring who was intruding on their domain. Then…
"Open your eyes. I know you're not dead." Her recognition of the voice not even a foot away from her nearly gave Shizune a heart attack.
She clenched her kunai until her knuckles bled white when she opened her eyes, prepared to use it despite her grim surety that she wouldn't be able to do anything before she was killed.
"And just what on earth would you do with that?" Kabuto asked coolly.
Shizune licked her dry lips, trying to slow her heartbeat knowing that a heightened pulse would only make her bleed more quickly. "My squad will be back soon." It was a lie, a desperate lie, to make him go away; the other Leaf nin wouldn't be back for at least eight hours.
He looked at her, black eyes unreadable behind his glasses. "Are you referring to the two nin dead in that forest over there?" His bland and mild tone made the question all the more chilling.
"Bastard," Shizune swore angrily, gripping the kunai and gritting her teeth in a mixture of fury and pain. She hadn't known either of them personally, had never met them before that mission, but she remembered their faces. They had both been young and green, chunin of only a few years.
An unconcerned smile greeted that remark. "If I had ten ryo for every time I've heard someone call me that…" The smile shifted to irritation. "Put the kunai down; I'm not going to hurt you."
Shizune looked at Kabuto incredulously. "You'll forgive me if I don't believe you." She was looking at the man who had been personally responsible for the deaths of most of her squad and had just killed her two remaining teammates, and he was telling her that he wasn't going to hurt her; Shizune figured she could be forgiven for extreme skepticism. She pulled the kunai into a position to where she could use it quickly if she needed to; the only reason she didn't try to kill Kabuto outright was that she didn't particularly like to kill, not when it wasn't necessary. She was afraid though, that by the time she recognized the movements that preceded attack, it would be too late.
"I just want to help; trust me." His voice had an almost sincere air of indignation to it. Shizune rolled her eyes.
"Trust…Trust you?"
Kabuto laughed humorlessly. "You may have a point. Trust is very hard to come by."
A cloud came over the moon, and the darkness deepened; Shizune could no longer see his face as well. That made her nervous; the shadows also cloaked potentially threatening movements.
"And what do you trust?" Shizune knew if she could just keep him talking, maybe she could make it to morning alive. She wasn't overly prone to unnecessary conversation, unless to draw attention away from Tsunade, but she knew well how.
A cold smile spread over his face, and strangely, Shizune felt her breathing snap again. "I trust only myself, and what my eyes can see. I draw truth only from what I observe."
Shizune almost smiled. Kabuto and emotions in the same sentence tended to produce a run-on, or, more likely, a fragment. "And by your line of thought, how can I be expected to believe that you won't try to kill me the moment I let my guard down?"
Suddenly, a harsh scream erupted from up the hill as wolves howled with unforeseen ferocity. Shizune would have jumped, but as it was, she gasped, her eyes going wide as saucers.
Kabuto shot her a critical look that she could barely catch in the inky darkness. "You are high-strung, aren't you?"
"What was that?" Shizune muttered without wanting to hear the answer.
The cold smile turned to a curiously neutral look, as he murmured, "When wolves see something that is injured, they don't wait for it to die. One of your people—or maybe one of mine—was only unconscious. They're certainly dead now."
Shizune screwed her eyes shut, her stomach roiling, sickened sensations passing through her numbing right arm. My God…What an awful way to die. It didn't occur to her to think that the dead man was just as likely to have been Sound as Leaf.
Kabuto's modulated voice interrupted her thoughts unwelcomingly, and Shizune reluctantly opened her eyes as he spoke. "As I see it, if you die tonight, it will be one of three ways. You will either die because of me, whatever wound you possess—" Kabuto paused to let the sound of wolves tearing into flesh reach her ears "—or them. Which would you prefer.
Shizune flinched. Slowly, very slowly, she let her kunai clatter to the rocky ground.
Kabuto's face and voice rearranged themselves again—she wondered if this was due to conscious effort or just an automatic reaction; he may as well have been an entirely different person when he looked at her again—to become completely serious and even a little subdued. "I know you don't trust me," he said quietly. "And I don't expect you to. But I just want to help you, Shizune."
Shizune stared at him. "Thank you," she said finally, just as quiet, just as neutral.
He nodded, and became completely business-like. "Where are you hurt?" Shizune indicated the area of her middle abdomen, and, recognizing the blood stain on her overlong right sleeve, took her pulse from her left wrist. Shizune told herself that it was discomfort that was making her skin prick.
Shizune looked up at the moon and tried not to sigh. She had no idea why Kabuto was helping her, and at the moment, she didn't care enough to ask. It was just such a strange world she lived in, and this moment proved it. She was too skeptical to think that this was entirely "out of the goodness of his heart", way too skeptical.
Then again, they may have been enemy shinobi but at the moment they were only people, breathing and bleeding and doing things for strange reasons. She supposed Kabuto could be helping her for a "strange reason".
Eventually, though, Shizune had to get curious enough to ask.
"Why are you helping me again?"
"Do I need a reason?"
"Yes."
"None. Except that you seemed to need the help."
"And you care because…"
"Now, Shizune, if I told you that I'd have to stop what I was doing and kill you."
"Of course."
Shizune looked up cynically. The gauzy haze of clouds still hovered over the shining half moon, and suddenly, she felt extremely gloomy, without really knowing why.
Uh huh, strange world we live in.