She begins losing hope when her father gets sick as well. Her strong, strict, no-nonsense father. She loses hope when he gets sick, when he can't lift his head to drink or eat, when he can't properly move his body, when the tell-tale black marks start coating his pale skin. She loses hope, but she still sticks around, reclining against Kage's tall sky scraper walls, resting in the shadows.
There is nothing more for her here, in this bare, desolate wasteland.
But the Kagegakure hitai-ate is still tied proudly around her forehead, the strange mark glistening proudly against her fore-head.
Yuuki Hazumu likes to think that now they really are just a forgotten race of people.
------
"You should leave." Her father tells her one day, and Hazumu takes a second to admire the way the light makes his skin more swallow that it already was. She pushes her bangs out of her face, and wrings out the wet towel, getting rid of the cool, excess water, before running the towel over her father's face; the skin is hot, and feverish, sweaty, and sticky.
She has trained herself to not flinch and cringe away from the plagueish marks on his body.
"You're delusional. We should call a doctor; or a medic. There's still a few out there, I think." Hazumu smiles, and lies through her teeth. There are no more doctors, no more medics. Everyone who was still out and walking, healthy to the point where they can walk knew this; They kept their sick in bed, and locked their doors and shut their windows, to keep the disease from lining the heavy air even more.
(—mirror mirror on the wall, this is how the mighty fall—)
"I didn't raise a liar." Her father tells in a heated tone of voice, and turns his head away from her, still containing all the strong, courageous morals that a village leader should have, even in this decaying state.
"I know." Hazumu says softly, and tries to contain the urge to push away the dark bangs from his face; She is a shadow ninja, pushing chuunin, and the urge dies anti-climatically. He is not a child, not a weakly soft genin, and neither is she; she will not coddle him.
"Hatori has already left." Her father continues, and Hazumu sucks in a sharp breath.
"To Kumo." Hazumu tacks on after a second, thinking of clouds, and thin-shouldered dark eyed boys, and
—traitorstraitorstraitors —
the way that it seems that her sand castle is finally being washed away by the tide.
"Sakumo's willing to go with you to Konohagakure. He's willing to take care of you." This is said in a defeated tone, and she knows that he knows there's nothing left.
Her mother died in the beginning, in the first wave of the epidemic; She's not there anymore to protest her baby girl leaving, and her father being so controlled about it.
"I don't want to go." Hazumu says, and wipes her hands on her shorts, rolling her long sleeves down, and avoiding looking at the man who she used to look up so dedicatedly naive to. The world is falling in shiney, dark obsidian pieces around her, and maybe leaving before it's too late can save her, but she doesn't want to; The pieces are cutting into her skin, leaving ghastly imprints, and this is nothow shinobi are supposed to behave.
This time her father doesn't reply to her, and Hazumu takes this as a sign to leave; she takes the bowl of warm water and the towel, and makes her way out of his room. She meets up with Sakumo on the other side of the door, and he looks at her scathingly.
"We're leaving tomorrow." He tells her, and she notes that he does not have his hitai-ate on.
She almost feels like crying. Almost. "We're leaving when he dies." She responds, feeling the last piece cut painfully into her heart. She looks at her reflection in the bowl of water, and leans against her father's wooden door, all too painfully aware that he can hear them.
"He told you all that for a reason, Hazumu." Sakumo plows on, and Hazumu looks at her feet, intently ignoring him and focusing on the way her pale toes were curling and uncurling on the dark wooden floor.
"I know." And as she says so, she drops the water basin, so that he could catch it. He does, and pretends to not notice the way the tears are running down her face.
------
She wakes up the next day to find her father dead.
Hazumu isn't particularly surprised; She cries anyway, when they've already taken his body away, and all that's left is his infected sheets. She's alone and Hazumu allows herself to sob, and heave her guts out for the heavens, before composing herself, and getting ready to leave for Konoha.
There is nothing more for her here, and she grins bitterly as she grabs her hitai-ate.
Let them think what they want, Hazumu thinks, shoving old, old, old Yuuki clan jutsu scrolls, and precious memories, and the head band into her bag, knowing perfectly well that her father had told all the surviving members of Kagegakure that leaving was perfectly acceptable.
Her eyes are red-rimmed, and puffy, but Sakumo tells her nothing, only that it was going to be very bright in Konoha.
She grins that bitter grin again, and takes off running toward the village gates, Sakumo already way in front of her, even though she had the head start.
Hazumu swears that she can hear "Traitor" echo to her from the shrinking, tell-tale-notice-me-we're-right-here skyscrapers that the Village hidden in the shadows is known for.
This is not how shinobi are supposed to behave.
------
Hazumu hisses, and snarls, and whines the whole way to Konoha; Sakumo thinks it's self-anger at herself for leaving, but he makes sure to steer clear of her war-path, and feels sorry for everything else who did not have the knowledge to do so as well.
Hazumu steps forward, and grinds a flower into the ground so viciously that Sakumo wishes that they had ran the whole way to Konoha, instead of just stopping when they were out of Shadow country.
Hazumu is a very scary little twelve year old, and Sakumo finds himself frightened of her wrath.
"Your body has not developed enough yet for you to have PMS, has it?" Sakumo asks, and gets a very sharp rock thrown at the back of his head in retaliation.
He leaves her tied by the ankle upside down to a tree branch, before she knows it, and takes comfort that the sickness in Kagegakure has not affected her psyche enough to not be embarrassed, or angry. Her face is red, and he's not sure if it's because of the blood rushing to her head, or because she's embarrassed, but it's enough.
She catches up to him when he's nearly a mile away, and ignores him rather vehemently, with an angry-embarrassed-sheepish blush, and a pout on her face.
This is normal Hazumu behaviour.
Sakumo is relieved.
------
It gets brighter as they get closer to Konohagakure no Sato, and he smirks at Hazumu, who squints and clutches at his shirt sleeve to keep from falling on tree roots that she can't see properly.
"You suck. Eggs." Hazumu says, and pinches at the skin at his elbow in retaliation for having sunglasses. He gives her a fake yelp, used this chance to karate-chop the top of her head.
She yelps for real and shrieks loudly, rubbing the top of her head as she does so and does not notice the oncoming rush of Chakra that did not belong to either of them.
Sakumo does.
"Hazumu." He says, for real, and serious, and Hazumu stopped rubbing her head to glare up at him. Her pupils were contracted, and Sakumo thought 'If we survive, she'll get accustomed to the sunlight'.
"What?!" She says irritablely, and thennotices the awaiting enemy. Her kunai knife is out and ready in her small hand, and Sakumo takes this small amount of time to admire the fact that she would've made an excellent Shadow chuunin. As expected they attack her first, two of the probable platoon aiming to immobilize her, while the other two lie in wait.
Sakumo attacks both of them off her almost immedietly, kekkei genkai activated, and leaves Hazumu on the ground, tired, and beaten from the attack of the Anbu.
"When they interrogate you, tell them the truth." Sakumo tells her, as one of the other two lying-in-wait Anbu knock her out; He got his message to her in time, he thinks, as the same Anbu who knocked her out slung her over his/her shoulder, and raced to Konoha.
He was left with three Konoha Anbu, his younger cousin riding unconciously on the fourth Anbu's shoulder.
Sakumo knows he won't win, but he'll take his chances.
------
When Hazumu wakes up, she's on a very lumpy, odd smelling mattress, in a plain, white, windowless room, and her attention is focused immediately on the only door; As she sits up, her hopes are pinned on her tall, lanky, deathly pale cousin to walk in through the door, and reassure her.
'I thought you left me; I remember we got ambushed, and I'm sorry I wasn't very useful, but really, I was scared. I'll do better next time, but don't leave, or die, M'kay?!'
This is what Hazumu is going to tell Sakumo when he walks in (because of course he will), and the words are already half-way out her mouth when the door opens.
She shuts up abruptly when it's a different man.
He's tall, and strongly built, widely shouldered underneath his long coat, muscles visible even through his clothing, and she takes a second to admire the healed scars on his face. "I'm Morino Ibiki, and I'll be your interrogator for today." He tells her, and it's then that she notices the clipboard in his large gloved hands.
It makes him look even more menacing, and Hazumu backs up on the mattress, so her back is pushed against the wall; She brings up her skinny knees, and wraps her skinny arms around her skinny shins, and concentrates on making herself smaller than she already was.
Hazumu has heard of the amazing Interrogator known as Morino Ibiki, and what she has heard of him have not been good things.
He has written down every thing she's done and said so far, and Hazumu thinks that's he's nothing but a professional.
She kind of hates him.
"We should get started already. But there are a few things I would like to clarify first." Ibiki continues, and Hazumu nods, a little dumbly; He writes this down, never looking up, but catching the movement anyway. Ibiki flips and shifts through the papers clipped to his clipboard before speaking to her once again. "You were traveling with someone else, were you not? A young man roughly around the ages of eighteen and nineteen...pallid...black hair and eyes...Is this description ringing a bell?" Ibiki asks, looking at her, calculating her small, fragile frame; She's very close to breaking.
'tell them the truth' runs through her head, and the pit of her stomach clenches uncomfortably as Hazumu says "Yuuki Sakumo."
"He's dead." Ibiki says, mercilessly blunt at her, and Hazumu's head reels with this information.
'He's dead, he's dead, Sakumo's dead, dead, where's my bag, did they take it?' Hazumu thinks, mysteriously light-headed, the news settling in like something poisonously bitter.
"Dead." Hazumu repeats, and Ibiki jots down her reaction. He is nothing but a professional, and Hazumu wants to throw up because of it.
"Dead. You both have (well, had, in Yuuki Sakumo's case) the same mark on your clothing. You two were related?" Ibiki asks, thinking that Hazumu is one of the easiest prisoners that he has ever interrogated.
"He was my cousin. He's dead." She says, like she was the one giving him the bad news for the first time; 'I'm sorry to say this, but Sakumo-nii-chan is dead, and he's never coming back.'
"Where were you guys from?" Ibiki asks, pen flying across the paper, never looking up, but some how knowing her reactions without even looking.
"Kagegakure."
(—mirror mirror on the wall, this is how the mighty fall—)
"And you and he were ninja?" They were watching them, from behind the hidden unbreakable glass window; Hazumu had no idea that they were watching her, the newbies wishing for a post in the black ops unit., the veteran interrogation and torture squad ninja, the special jounin that came just to watch Ibiki work his black, heart-wrenching magic, the Anbu ready to restrain or kill her, if she were to lose control.
"We were. You can't be a ninja for a decaying village." Hazumu admits, eyes extinguished.
'Mom's dead, Dad's dead, Sakumo's dead, Hatori's gonegonegone' Is the mantra running through her head now, and Hazumu smiles a smile more bitter than the strongest of medicines. Ibiki continues writing, and Hazumu wants nothing to add another scar to his body.
"Well, that's all for today." He finally says, and Hazumu could care less. "We'll start up again tomorrow."
"Okay." Hazumu agrees, and closes her eyes, resting her forehead on her knees.
"You'll be escorted shortly to another containment chamber. Try to escape, and you will be killed." Ibiki tells her fiercely, and all Hazumu can do is give a little grunt as an acknowledgement of the information. "Welcome to Konohagakure."
He takes his leave, and once Hazumu is sure the door closed securely behind him is when she starts crying.
'Welcome to Konohagakure'
Survival hurts more than it's supposed to.
------
AN: Not so fond of this chapter. But the Second chapter might be better. Might. Reviews would be super lovely, but not manditory; only review if you have a question, or just want to review.
But ILY just for reading. 333333
:DDDDDDD