1Me no own, you no sue

Chapter One: Battle and Masks

The battlefield was quiet.

After ten days of nonstop fighting and killing the field was finally quiet and the few survivors from the side that could be considered "victorious" were walking around as if in a daze. All except one. Hikari, the field general of the Yakusha Line, watched her few remaining men with something akin to pity. These men were conscripts, but they had had lives before being conscripted. Not like her. She'd been forced into the military at the age of eight and had been on and off battlefields since then, but these men had been fathers. Workers. Husbands and any number of other things before the inter-system government that ruled this part of the galaxy had decided that they needed to be used as cannon fodder instead. The new conscripts had been put under her command while she was a sergeant major, not six months ago. She was still technically a sergeant major, as evidenced by the tattoo on her face denoting her name, rank and serial number, but the general that she was fighting under knew her well, so when he needed a field general she was promoted on the spot and then demoted again when the battle was over. It was an odd system, but it worked.

Hikari was tired. This battle had taken a lot out of her, she'd killed more than her fair share of soldiers, well over one thousand, but it almost hadn't been enough. If the men under her command had been as skilled as she then the odds would have been only 100 to one in the enemy's favor, not bad odds. But the soldiers she had were no where near as skilled as she herself was; that was a fact. She'd been training since she was eight and had been in and survived more battles than any other conscript in history. With the unskilled fighters she had the odds were more along the lines of 250 to one, closer to the actual difference in numbers.

"Sergeant Major."

Hikari turned and a wan smile crawled onto her face beneath her mask. Jocobo was one of the few she would consider a friend. He was an intimidating man, standing at nearly seven feet with muscle to spare. Regardless of his intimidating look he had a heart of gold and treated Hikari like the sister he'd never had. He loved Hikari and made no effort to hide the fact from anyone, not even their commanding officers. Simply put: where Hikari went so too did Jocobo.

"Jocobo, how many times have I told you not to call me that brother?"

The fierce man smiled warmly at the little sister who vastly outranked him.

"Always one more Kari. We've finished the counts."

"How many?"

"On our side there were 9,542 casualties; approximately 3,000 killed, 6,046 injured and the rest we haven't found yet."

"Approximately?"

"Yeah. Some of the bodies are torn to shreds. There's no way to know how many actually died until we can separate out the parts and count them."

Hikari shuddered and put a hand to her own torn arm before nodding at Jocobo to continue.

"And on the other side there were 100 casualties. No one got off this field."

Hikari nodded happily, her hand clenching slightly around her injured biceps. She had been fighting one of the enemy's more experienced warriors, a warrior that she had met once before with dire consequences. She'd lost her right arm in that battle, and her right eye. In this battle she'd returned the favor before cutting off his head and slicing his body into six equal pieces. It was gruesome, but had made her happy, so she had gone back into battle with a fervor that belied her exhaustion. She hadn't eaten or slept in ten days, not an extremely long amount of time, but too long to be ignored. She would collapse later. Right now she had to get the rest of the survivors off the field and into their tents for some serious sleep. Jocobo must have seen her exhaustion and tsked.

"Kari, you're exhausted. Go to sleep. I'll make sure everyone gets in alright."

"Are you certain 'Cobo? You've been awake almost as long as I have."

"I'm certain sister. Go."

Hikari smiled and nodded before limping slowly back toward the tents that they had set up the day they'd arrived at the field. Her tent was at the back of the mile long line of tents, so she slowly limped her way to it and when she finally got there, exhausted beyond anything she'd been in a long time she immediately collapsed and fell into dreams, not even bothering to take off her armor first.

Maito Gai was a proud man.

He was the kind of man that, once you got past his quirks and rants about the 'flames of youth', you would consider the most loyal and kind friend to have. But there was another side of Maito Gai that no one really saw.

Maito Gai was a lonely man.

The only people who knew this were his 'eternal rival' Hatake Kakashi and the scary snake woman Mitarashi Anko, both of whom he had cultivated close friendships with. Kakashi and Gai had an odd sort of friendship, one that was based in rivalry. When Kakashi had lost his team he had also lost himself. He had allowed himself to fall into the darkness that being a member of the ANBU squad can open up beneath a nin and there was no hope of the copy-nin getting out of the hole by himself. Gai had watched him go to the memorial stone day after day to stare at the names of his teammates and lose himself in his grief, but after two years of this Gai had decided that enough was enough. He'd entered the clearing around the memorial stone with his usual exuberance and proceeded to irritate and prod and poke Kakashi into a challenge. Their first challenge had been to see who could run the most laps around Konoha in three hours. Gai had won and hadn't let Kakashi forget it...until he'd initiated their next challenge. From there the two had proceeded with challenge after challenge and Kakashi had gradually begun coming out of the darkness. He'd begun enjoying life again and Gai had been happy for his friend/rival.

Anko was another story altogether.

Anko was having a bad day, not that she actually had any good ones anymore. She had been at the dango stand when some villager had called her 'snake whore' and riled up some of the other villagers. She was used to it by now, but that didn't mean it didn't hurt. She'd been just as betrayed by her sensei as Konoha had, why couldn't anyone understand that? The hokage had accepted her back and made her a special jounin, why couldn't she make any friends? Why wouldn't people let her get on with her life? She was blocking stones that some of the villagers had decided to throw at her, not wanting to use her snakes lest she prove the villagers right, when one struck her in the cheek hard enough to cut it. She'd fallen back a step and the crowd had smelled blood. She tensed, ready for anything...except what happened.

A man in bright green spandex had placed himself between the snake user and the people trying to hurt her. He'd given her an unnaturally bright smile over his shoulder before turning again to the antagonists and beginning to rant about how they were trying to diminish her flames of youth and that their 'unyouthfulness' would be their downfall. He guarded the young woman until the crowd had dispersed, and then he had invited her for dango. She'd accepted with tears in her eyes, happy that someone had accepted her, even if he was a bit strange. Gai had dropped his mask for the first time in a long time and the two had become very good friends, and had been ever since.

Despite having two very good, if violent and perverted friends, Gai was lonely for someone to truly understand him. Kakashi was his best friend and Anko was like a sister, but there was no one that he could really be...himself with. No one would understand that sometimes he wanted to give in to bloodlust and kill all his opponents with a smile on his face. No one would understand that he wanted to cry and rage sometimes. No one would understand that sometimes the 'flames of youth' inside him would dull and darken almost to mere embers and he felt like he was alone in the world. He'd just gotten back from a particularly grueling mission in Rei no kuni, he ended up fighting kumo-nins when the mission wasn't supposed to involve nins at all and two of his teammates had been injured. He'd taken them to the hospital after carrying them for nearly two days straight and was exhausted when he finally arrived home. He quickly changed into his sleeping clothes, black sweats and a white tee shirt, and fell into his bed, sighing happily as he fell into sleep.