Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
"So if you are too tired to speak, sit next to me, because I, too, am fluent in silence."
-R. Arnold
She's nervous, somewhat. They are about to meet the Senju party, close to the center of Fire Country, and it's the first time she's been to another country before. Chin up, Uzumaki Mito, you're the one who requested this job from Chichi-ue after Anya caught a fever a week ago.
She's an aspiring seal master, not a medic in training, but she's heard that the war is going badly, and that their Senju allies need all the help that they can get. She's heard the stories of war from Chichi-ue, and in those moments, he always seems more haunted than his forty-some years.
So she's here, in the middle of the medic squad, smoothing down the immaculate silk of her short kimono and adjusting her battle grieves. "Remember not to tell them that I'm...Mito-hime."
It won't do to have her identity get out in the middle of hostile territory. There are always problems, always possibilities. She could be kidnapped and held for ransom against Chichi-ue, and that would hurt him deeply, so no one is supposed to slip up about this. For extra assurance, Chichi-ue has even sent Naosu-jisan to lead the party. Still, she's nervous, so she checks. "I'm just like everyone else."
Not true. She'd been born the eldest daughter of a king, so she's always been taught to be graceful, to never say too much, to always weigh her options. She is supposed to make a good match, one that will help Uzu in the future.
She is supposed to maintain the image of Uzu while she represents Uzu, and she always represents Uzu.
She is Uzumaki Mito, daughter of Uzumaki Ashina and Chigusa Naokano, so she will never be just like everyone else.
Still, she has to pretend.
"Of course," Sayuri whispers back. "You look just like everyone else."
Well, everyone else does have red hair, and she's wearing the plain cream kimono of a medic in training. So she supposes that this is true. She looks like everyone else.
No one will be able to tell that Chichi-ue had sent his daughter with the medic squad.
She relaxes slightly and pushes her chakra sense outwards.
The Senju are here.
At their head is a tall man wearing a white headband knotted on the side in red armor with a sword slung over his back. He must be important then.
At his side is a young man of about eighteen with long straight brown hair and tanned skin. "You must be the Uzu party then." He flashes them a grin. "We were waiting for you." There are others appearing out of the trees behind them.
Naosu-jisan steps forward and bows politely. "We have been sent by Ashina-sama to aid your efforts. I am Chigusa Naosu, and these are core members of our medical team in Uzu."
"Senju Butsuma." So this is the Senju Clan head, Chichi-ue's often mentioned friend.
"Senju Hashirama!" It's the young man who gestures for them all to follow, and chatters on excitedly as he does so. "We're so fortunate to have you here."
Butsuma-dono lets him do so, but his eyes pass over their group and pause on her for longer than necessary. She averts her eyes.
As one, the medic squad moves forward, and Mito follows them, shuffled into the crowd.
Just like everyone else.
They are hunkered down, all eight of them together around a low fire in the middle of camp. It isn't cold per se, here, in the Land of Fire, but the evening is chilly and they require a fire to cook food. As it is not a wood fire, it does not give off smoke for an enemy to detect. Naosu-jisan has gone to speak with Butsuma-dono regarding their work for the morning.
"Mito-chan?" Naosu-jisan sets a hand on her shoulder and gestures to the tent that he'd just returned from. "Butsuma-dono wants to see you."
So he had noticed something about her, because she doesn't look different from everyone else, but he had still asked for her. She smooths her sweaty hands over the bottom of her kimono and walks forward. "Thank you for telling me, Naosu-jisan." Naosu-jisan is the head of the Medic Corps and one of the few people in the world who calls her Mito-chan daily. He is Haha-ue's elder brother, and her dearest uncle.
She suspects that Chichi-ue sent him specifically to watch over her. She does not find this covert display of care to be displeasing. Chichi-ue will worry, as is his nature, and she will do her best to make sure that he has no real cause to, as is her nature.
Best get this over with now. To wait is to waste.
She pushes the cloth aside and bows. "Senju-dono? Naosu-sensei said that you wanted to speak to me?" She is unused to bowing so low.
"Naosu-san said your name is Mito." Butsuma-dono stands with his back to her, so she cannot read his mood from his face. Instead, she watches how he stands, his clasped hands, the line of his shoulders.
"Yes." There is no harm in telling him that. She is Mito. She has always been Mito. Being Mito is not special in the slightest. Chichi-ue had chosen strong names for his sons-Kyoya, Skylark; Korui, Rising Sun; Masato, Exalted Leader; Ashiro, Standing Generation; Aruta, Iron Tower-but Mito merely means beautiful person.
It is a common name, the most common of her siblings' names. Kanae is graceful crow, but Kanae is a name that means much to us.
She is never more grateful for how common her name is than at this moment.
He turns around to glare in her direction, but it is not at her, per se. It is about her, but it is not at her. "What possessed your father to send you here?"
She blinks. "Senju-dono?" He has guessed then. She is not certain why or how, because she has not met him, from what she remembers, but he has guessed, and she will not lie, not to Chichi-ue's friend.
"What possessed Uzumaki Ashina to lose the mountain of sense I know he owns to send you here?" Butsuma-dono does not seem to be pleased with Chichi-ue, but this is hardly Chichi-ue's fault.
"I volunteered after one of the medics fell ill last week. There was no time to find someone else." Mito raises her chin precisely three degrees and looks Butsuma-dono in the eye. "Chichi-ue wishes to aid you to the best of Uzu's abilities, and to be short a pair of hands is a terrible thing." She'd seen the camp, seen briefly, what little medical equipment they had here in these temporary shelters, and wondered how anyone survived treatment.
"A battlefield is no place for a princess." It's the first time that either of them has acknowledged that she is different. She doesn't like it. Butsuma-dono sighs heavily. "You should go home, Mito-chan."
"I will not go home, Butsuma-dono." She folds her hands together and tilts her head to the side ten degrees. "For here, I am just like everyone else. No princess exists in your camp, and one more medic can save a great deal."
"And if you are hurt somehow?" He sits, his hands on his temples, the lines about his mouth creasing sharply as he frowns. "What should I tell your father then?"
There is such tension in his shoulders, in his spine. He is younger than Chichi-ue. She realizes with a jolt. And yet he looks so much older. War ages men before their time.
She raises a glowing green hand and touches his shoulder, pulling the headache away. "You will tell him that Uzumaki Mito did the best she could to save lives, and she did not die purposelessly." She says. "He will understand."
Chichi-ue would not blame the Senju for losing her. He has seen war and horror more than she can comprehend or wants to and still when she had volunteered, he had looked at her long and hard and let her go anyway. He would grieve; everyone would, but they will survive.
There are many things that can kill: war is one; the sea is another. She has survived the sea for sixteen years. She will survive half a year of war if that is what the gods so desire.
"And you, Mito-chan?" Butsuma-dono asks her. "Are you not afraid of death?"
"I have lived by the sea all my life." She swallows hard. "When I was seven, one of the fishing expeditions did not make it back to harbor before the storm. A hundred lives were lost that night as the sea ripped the ship hull open from prow to stern. We found bodies washing up on the rocks for days afterward." She'd found one of the corpses as a child diving for pearls. The slack mouth and bulging, swollen, waxy face had stayed with her nightmares for a long time. "To live by the sea is to live with death." She shakes her head. "I am not afraid to die, Butsuma-dono."
When she was nine, the riptide pulled her under.
She had stared up at the lights dancing on the surface for long moments as bubbles floated up from her mouth wondering if this is the moment when she dies until Masato-nii's strong hands had pulled her out of the water.
He had been only eleven at the time, but he had dived out of his little fishing boat for her.
She would not like to die, but if she dies here in this foreign land, she will still not regret coming.
In the days afterwards, they sweep through the camp, curing the illnesses that have arisen in this wet winter weather to the best of their abilities. There are some things that not even medical chakra can heal, but what cannot be healed can be soothed.
That is what brings her to the dwelling of Butsuma-dono's sons this weak winter morning.
"Hashirama-san and Tobirama-san?" She asks, waiting for an affirmative sound before entering. "Naosu-jisan asked me to check on you two. Everyone else has been looked over at least once already."
They are sons of the clan head, so their tent is a little more spacious than most. Where five or six might sleep at night, it is only the two of them here.
"We're fine." Tobirama-san snaps at her. He is perhaps, about her age with white hair and angry red eyes.
"We're not fine." Hashirama-san says at the same time. "Tobi is running a fever. I'm sure of it."
Tobirama-san snaps around to glare at his elder brother. "Niisan, be quiet." So he is running a fever.
He shouldn't be this pale even if pallor is his natural look.
"The quicker I check on both of you, the earlier I can leave." She offers. He doesn't seem like the type of person to appreciate strangers, even friendly ones, and she doesn't know either of them well.
It is the right incentive to offer. He thrusts a hand in her direction, and she settles two green fingers over his pulse. He hisses, and she draws back.
Her chakra had barely brushed him at all. "Tobirama-san?"
He shakes his wrist impatiently. "Get on with it."
"He's a chakra sensor." Hashirama-san comes to watch from behind her, peering over her shoulder. "Did you use a lot of chakra? That bothers him sometimes."
"Niisan!" Tobirama-san hisses in his elder brother's general direction. "Don't go around randomly telling other people damaging information."
"I did use more chakra than was recommended for a sensor." She meets Tobirama-san's angry gaze evenly. "A medic has to know these sorts of things, Tobirama-san. It could be potentially damaging to your chakra coils if I didn't."
He nods once, curtly, and doesn't say anything. She takes his hand once more.
She resolves his fever easily, spreading her chakra thin through his lungs and erases the infection from a small cut on his hand, and the sickness from the rest of him, purged in the space of two breaths.
It is a common sickness. She's gotten used to the motions of it during her time here in the Senju Camp.
He nods to her again in acknowledgement. Surely he can think more clearly now that he is well, but he doesn't say much more, just hovers around the edges of the tent, unwilling to leave his brother alone with her.
He is distrustful, but she means no harm, so it does not matter. He will find no fault with her.
Mito moves onto Hashirama-san.
He offers her his arm with a cheery smile. "I don't think I caught the illness, and I'm unlikely to notice if you hit me over the head with a wagon load of chakra so it shouldn't matter much." She's met bright smiles before, but Hashirama-san positively glows. It is unusual.
She takes his wrist and probes deeper.
His chakra comes up to greet her, bright, bubbly, sick. There is an infection in his blood that has settled into his lungs. She hasn't seen it in this camp before, but Naosu-jisan does treat several cases of it every year as the sailors returned from whaling.
The wasting disease. It is generally brought on by wet, chilly weather, contact with someone else who has it-it is easy for a sailor to contract it in an unfamiliar harbor-but here? Hashirama-san is the only case of it that she, or any one of the medical team has come across. How did he contract such a disease? Are there entire mainland villages wasting with this disease?
She sits down. "This may take a moment." She withdraws her hand. She has only aided Naosu-jisan in the recovery process before, but Naosu-jisan is busy with recent injuries, and it is unlikely that she can run out to ask him to come help. "Have you been coughing more lately?"
Hashirama-san blinks at her. "No?"
"No chest pains? No fatigue?"
He shakes his head.
"You've been eating regularly?"
From behind her, Tobirama-san laughs, a harsh, barking sound. "No one eats regularly around here. We eat when we can get it."
Alright. The infection is likely still latent. She hasn't detected it in his blood. It's stayed in small pockets in his lungs. "It hasn't spread yet and become infectious." She whispers to herself. Louder, to Hashirama-san, "Would you mind sitting down?"
She needs to burn out the infection, bit by bit, comb the dips and ridges of the insides of his lungs to make sure that all of it has been dealt with.
It will take longer than she has planned, but hopefully, someone will come to help her, though she doubts it. There is much to do here.
"What's going on?" Tobirama-san paces in and out of the edges of her vision. "Why did you ask Niisan all those questions?"
"He has a latent infection in his lungs." She observes and centers herself, pulling more chakra to her fingers from the meridian at her core. "It will become active should it be left without treatment and then it will cause the symptoms that I asked about."
Tobirama-san stops his pacing and comes to sit on Hashirama-san's other side. "But it will be cured? You can cure it?"
"Our sailors that come back with it after whaling for months do not die of it." She tells him. "But the infection must be cleaned bit by bit. Leaving the slightest amount of it will cause a resurgence."
That is why normally such a job is handled by at least two medics, one for each lung, and a fresh chakra sense to catch the little mistakes made by the other.
But she has been taught by the best, and Mito is nothing if not thorough. She is confident that there will be no resurgence.
"It's alright, Tobi." Hashirama-san raises his free hand and tries to ruffle his brother's hair, but Tobirama-san ducks away. "I think Mito-san's perfectly trustworthy." He turns to her then, with eyes wide and dark like the earth here in the Land of Fire and smiles. "Your chakra is very warm."
She concludes then, as her heart twists in her chest, that Senju Hashirama is an idiot. She has just told him that he has a rather difficult infection in his lungs, and the first thing he thinks to say to her is that her chakra is warm.
Still, there is something nice about being told that she is warm. It gives her the fortitude to go forward.
Hashirama-Mito has taken to calling him just Hashirama because he is only four months older than her, and it is silly to continue to refer to him as Hashirama-san when he quite openly calls her Mito-chan and slings an arm around her shoulder as if he's known her all his life-is an idiot of the worst order, the type that doesn't know it and shows rare flashes of brilliance so that other people can't quite believe it.
Butsuma-dono had sent him out on a mission to guard a nearby village against Uchiha raiders, and he had gone, willingly, gladly. That isn't the problem.
The problem is that he comes back successful but angry, unwilling, unbending, and buts heads with Butsuma-dono over something that she has no way of understanding without any context. The argument had been almost violent despite its brief nature, and Hashirama has stormed off while dragging her along with him a little ways out of camp to a fork of the Nakano river.
"Mito-chan," he begins, while picking up a clump of snow, and flinging it at the ice. It skitters across and shatters across the opposite bank. "Do you ever feel that your Chichi-ue doesn't see things the same way you do?"
Why is he asking her this? There are men and women in this camp that he's known all his life. Why must he ask her when she has only been here for a few weeks?
Still, it is beneath her to lie to him. "Chichi-ue and I are very different." She says at last. "So of course he doesn't see this world like I do."
Chichi-ue despises war and suffering. She knows nothing of it. Still knows little of fighting even now. She might have experimented with battle seals, might spare with her friends, but it is not the same as fighting. She's never killed anyone before. Chichi-ue slaughtered children the last time Uzu marched to war.
Her serious middle-aged Chichi-ue is a grown man. Mito is nothing more than an old child at the age of sixteen.
"It doesn't bother you?" He's stopped throwing snow at least.
"No." And because he looks quizzical, she adds, "Chichi-ue lets me do what I need to." He'd agreed to let her come, even if he had then all but ordered Naosu-jisan to keep an eye on her.
He sighs. "I suppose it's different then." He picks up a stick and doodles in the snow. "Chichi-ue will never let me do what I want in this case. Is peace such an impossible dream?"
"I don't think so." Uzu has been at peace for her entire life. For the entirety of its existence, it has never been breached by a mainland foe. Uzu's peaceful. Is it so hard to imagine that other places can be peaceful as well?
They sit in silence for a long moment. She doesn't want to think badly of Butsuma-dono for he is Chichi-ue's dear friend, and Chichi-ue is not friends with bad men, but it is hard to think that Hashirama would ask for so very much.
Hashirama is nothing if not guilelessly giving.
"Mito-chan?" He asks after he's stopped doodling. "What is Uzu like?"
Uzu? "It is colder now, than it is here." She says slowly. "The winter storms will have sealed the harbor closed to the ships, but that just means that it is more likely that school is in session then." The market would be small; the days would be shorter, the nights longer. "Back at home preparations for the winter festival will be starting." Tanaka-san would come up from his thatched hut by the sea and spend the day with Kanae-chan up in the square. He has grown more surly in the years since she was a small child, but for Kanae-chan, he can still conjure up a smile and even a few chuckles. "My little brothers will try to run away to sea in a ship once more, but Chichi-ue will catch them at it." She smiles despite herself.
The Twins are really very terrible, and are the cause of at least a half of Chichi-ue's gray hair, but they are loveable all the same.
"You have siblings?" Hashirama blinks. "You've never mentioned them before."
"I am the fourth child of seven." Mito responds before she can catch herself. "I have three elder brothers, two younger brothers and a little sister." Kyoya-niisama would be at home now as well, and in the cramped quarters, he and Masato-nii would snipe at each other until Kanae-chan can come between them to calm the ripples they've thrown up in their wake.
"Oh." Hashirama smiles, but it doesn't reach his eyes. "I have Tobi." And then, in a whisper that she almost doesn't catch. "And I had Itama and Kawarama."
Had.
Past tense.
She takes his hand despite herself-it must be hard-and squeezes.
"You must miss them." He whispers. "It will be the winter festival soon, and they are all there while you are here."
Mito folds her hands together in her lap. "They will still be there when I return. I am needed here now."
"Mmm." Hashirama hums and fiddles with his hands. "Thank you." He holds a golden hothouse flower in his hands. So it is true that he has the Mokuton.
She takes it and marvels at the beauty of it, the perfectly formed stem, the curling petals. "You like flowers?" She asks.
And for the first time today, he smiles, small and shy. "I like gardening, and flowers are pretty, and so…" He trails off, looking away.
And so are you. Her mind supplies for her. Senju Hashirama does look like he belongs among flowers, and he is pretty in a very forest and earth sort of way that she has not seen before coming to the mainland.
Her friends at home fall to pieces over Kyoya-niisama's sharply chiseled features and clawed hands, but Mito rather thinks that Hashirama looks prettier, warmer. Her fingers curl a little tighter around the stem of this perfect golden flower. "Thank you very much." She rises to go back.
She has met plenty of suitors since the age of fifteen, boys and men who want to marry the Pearl of Uzu, the eldest daughter of a well-loved king, but she rather suspects that Senju Hashirama is not a suitor.
He'd offered her a flower as thanks because he likes flowers, because he is guileless and giving.
He doesn't even know that she's a princess.
He is unlike another man she's met before.
"Hashirama!" A young woman stomps towards them, a hand on her hip. "You know you shouldn't be out here, and god forbid, why on earth would you ever drag one of the Uzushio medics out here? It's hardly safe."
She has dark brown hair like most of her clan, but hazel eyes that tended towards green. Toka? Her name is Toka right?
Sayuri had checked up on her, so Mito is not entirely certain of her name.
"It is alright." She brushes the snow from her kimono. "I am not defenseless, and Hashirama isn't careless." They haven't gone far.
Toka casts a searing glare in Hashirama's direction. "My baby cousin can sense enemies about as much as a smushed brick. Don't trust him on it."
Hashirama slumps comically. "You could have been nicer about that, Toka…" So Mito was right. Her name is Toka.
She shrugs and loops an arm through Mito's and marches back toward camp. "I'm Senju Toka, Hashirama's my cousin."
"Mito." She offers, still holding the golden flower in her other hand.
Toka raises one finely arched brow at her. "No clan name?"
Mito smiles, slow and wide. "What's the most common clan name in Uzu?" She has two hundred cousins. Her clan is large. She is Uzumaki Mito.
Toka nods. "Don't read too much into Hashirama's presents." She waves a hand airily behind them in Hashirama's direction. "He's hopeless when it comes to good ones, why I remember that the year I turned seventeen he found me the ugliest fish hairpin that he could find in all of Kakunodate and…"
It is good to have someone else to talk to again, someone who doesn't care that she is a princess, and in fact, doesn't even know that she is one.
The good days were not built to last. The camp had been safe from Uchiha raiding parties, but she has only been on the mainland for two months when they come with smoke, and fire, and blood.
She wakes quickly and starts shaking Sayuri beside her. "Wake up, Sayu. We have to move." It will not do to have the Uchiha discover them, and while she is no sensor, she does not sleep heavily these days.
Enka-kun gathers up the others, and they make for the treeline through the pandemonium. They are not fighters, not any of them besides Mito. They are healers by profession and specialty and while they aren't defenseless by any means, they know only basic battle sealing and only keep up with sparring as a way to stay fit.
Their vows say that they do not kill.
Mito has no such vows. She is an aspiring sealing master with battle seals as her specialty.
With Naosu-jisan gone, it is her job to protect their group of eight to the best of her ability.
"Help me with the defensive seals." She whispers to Enka-kun and Sayuri as Maiko-chan quiets the others behind them. They haven't been sighted by the Uchiha yet, and the Senju have surged onto the defensive, beating them back, matching them measure for measure.
Together, with shaking hands, they form the hand signs and raise the triangle. Should any of them be disrupted the seal will come unravelled, come undone, leaving the rest of their friends to the mercies of the Uchiha, but the triangle is the strongest shape, and with their combined chakra, it should keep the others fresh to tend to the wounds after this battle.
The only unlucky thing is that this keeps them on the outside of the barrier, easily able to be seen, and confined to a small square of two feet by two feet. A foot must remain on the point of the triangle at all times.
Mito holds her nerve and waits.
The fire lights the camp red with burning tents, but Tobirama races through, dowsing several with a quick burst of water jutsu and then moving on back into the fray of brawling limbs.
It is wild and chaotic, filled with screams and the clash of weapons, and blood is dark in the firelight.
Mito wraps a hand around the tanto in the sleeve of her kimono that Haha-ue had pressed into her hand when she left home, and prays she doesn't have to use it.
Across from her, at the other point, she sees Sayuri do the same with one of her hairpins.
Behind her, Maiko-chan starts humming a lullaby. "Oh, won't you come with me? When the moon is made of gold, and in the morning sun, we'll be sailing."
It helps to think of home in the midst of the acrid smell of smoke, the iron scent of blood, the clash of metal and the screams. Home with the Twins playing cards and Kanae stitching patterns onto clothing, home with pearl earrings and dull gray skies and the scent of the sea.
Hashirama is there, racing through the battlefield, the forest bending to his command, lifting comrades out of the way, spearing enemies...he is fearsome like this.
They are not discovered.
They are not discovered, and the Senju repel the Uchiha raiders the best they can, and as the fighting dies down, the others rush forward to tend to the wounded.
Mito slumps for a moment, where she had been standing at the point and recenters her chakra once more. She has used a good portion of her stores powering the barrier seal. A third gone and not to be replenished without rest and food.
But there is much to be done, so she climbs to her feet and starts forward, searching among the bodies in the west for those that still live.
She finds a young man in dull red armor bleeding from a thrust to her stomach.
A kunai embeds itself in his throat before Mito's glowing hand can touch him.
Toka stands behind her, dark and grim. "Uchiha. Don't waste chakra on that one."
Uchiha? It sickens her to leave the injured behind, but this is a warzone, so this is a war, and that man had attacked a camp pitched in for the night, would have slaughtered Mito's friends if he broke past the seal, and Mito doesn't know what to to think, so she doesn't.
She nods once to Toka and rises. "Where are the wounded that have to be tended to now?"
Toka's bleeding from a gash on her leg and a small cut on her face, but she doesn't look too heavily injured. There have to be plenty more close to death.
Toka leans on her shoulder as they limp through the burned out husks of tents towards the center of a clearing. "We've tried to find as many people as we can. They're closer to a place that we can protect them better."
"Are there many?"
"Not as many as there would have been." Toka frowns darkly. "Neither of the Uchiha Brothers made an appearance tonight. I don't like it."
Mito makes a vague sound in her throat, but she doesn't ask too much. Toka must be referring to Uchiha Madara, the one they call a demon, and Uchiha Izuna, the one they call the demon's shadow. She doesn't know if she is unsettled or relieved that they were not here tonight. In the end, she doesn't have the time to care.
Toka stays with her as she stitches the bone of a clan member back together, passing her bandages and gauze and using what chakra she had left to fill a basin with water jutsu.
They work in sync til dawn.
By dawn those that were not healed and were not dead could only be soothed. Naosu-jisan sends the rest of the team back to sleep and heads into the medical tent to tend to those last shinobi himself despite the gray ring of fatigue around his mouth.
Mito is still awake, down to a fifth of her chakra, but still able to move should her uncle need her, so she and Toka sit down on a few stones near the tent, and she bandages the other woman's leg.
Toka shakes her head when Mito tries to heal the cut on her face. "It doesn't hurt much and there's worse to care for. It's fine." Mito draws her hand away, and they sit silent for a bit.
"Where did you all go during the battle?" Toka brushes the long bang away from her face, hissing as it goes over the cut. "I didn't see you until it was all over."
"A barrier seal." Mito sighs. "The medics are bound by a vow not to kill so trying to help with the battle would have been pointless."
Toka opens her mouth to say more, but at that moment, Naosu-jisan raises his voice inside the tent. "What do you mean I can't say the gods' rites for a dying man? This boy is no more than a child!"
"That's an Uchiha." Butsuma-dono growls. "I don't know how or why he got inside, but we do not harbor Uchihas here."
"I am a medic of Uzu." Naosu-jisan snaps back. "And I know a dying child when I see one. He stays until he is dead."
"We will give him a painless death and move camp immediately."
"You will move camp without us." Naosu-jisan's voice is as icy as the northern wind. "A medic doesn't abandon his job before he dies, and a proper burial, and he most certainly does not condone killing an already dying child." A medic preserves life until the last breath leaves. A medic will not deny a patient based on prejudice or past grudge. A medic does not kill.
The three central tenets to becoming a medic in Uzu. Every medic holds these vows dearer than their own life.
"You pig-headed man." Butsuma-dono ducks out of the tent. "You will lead more people to their deaths with your unyielding ways." His armor is dyed rust red with blood, and there is a trail of dried blood on his cheek from a graze on his temple, but he looks otherwise unhurt.
Mito rises, suddenly unsure of herself.
She hadn't protested when Toka killed that Uchiha man, but Naosu-jisan is willing to risk death to protect that boy inside the tent from a quicker death by Butsuma-dono's hand.
Who is in the right?
Who has the right to decide who should die and who should live?
Butsuma-dono sweeps past, snapping out orders about dismantling the camp. They are retreating back to one of the many Senju outposts in the Land of Fire roughly eight hours' march north of here. It will take them until nightfall to get there with the wounded.
He fully intends to leave Naosu-jisan and the others then. Fully intends to leave her.
Toka heads off to help her clansmen pack up what remained of camp.
Mito scrubs her face and pushes her way into the tent. "Naosu-jisan, they will truly leave without you."
He doesn't look up from where he kneels as he offers the Uchiha boy water from a flask. "Then Senju Butsuma-dono will leave without me. That is hardly my concern."
The boy on the ground shudders and groans, his eyes staring blankly up into the fabric of the tent, his mouth slack. He is unaware of her uncle's kindness, unaware of what it would cost them. She wonders what sort of heart Naosu-jisan has, that it offers such kindness even to those who will cost him his life and his comfort when they will not be appreciative.
His heart is far kinder than her own, far stronger.
"But, Jisan…" Mito trails off. She doesn't know how to say it, doesn't know what to do. "Jisan, if you're left behind then it will be dangerous."
"I think you will find that everyone else wants to stay as well." He finally raises his head, and she sees the fatigue in her uncle's eyes. "Mito-chan, you're the only one who wants to go."
"What?" She looks around. Sure enough, the rest of the team is gathered outside the tent flap when they should have been asleep. "Why?"
They are here to help the Senju. They were sent here to help the Senju. "To stand by and let another kill the defenseless is not the medic's way." Enka-kun whispers as he comes to stand by Naosu-jisan's shoulder. "The Senju have broken more than Chigusa-shishou's vows today."
She hadn't felt bound by the vows when Toka killed the Uchiha girl last night, but Enka-kun, Sayuri, Maiko-chan, the others, they were bound by their vows. The Senju hadn't respected that and vows are everything. Blood rights, promises, vows they are what this world is built on. Not even a Hoshigaki would be an oathbreaker.
If you are an oathbreaker no person would house you, no one would help you, you are cast out when you become an oathbreaker. The Senju hadn't cared that they twisted oaths last night. How different we are.
"But if you healed the Uchiha they would come back to harm the Senju." Mito whispers.
"If we offered them clemency instead of scorched earth maybe they wouldn't want to harm the Senju so badly." Maiko-chan mutters, her hands clenched to fists.
Behind her, Junko-kun nods. "When neither side gives, neither side can win."
So it is a divide then. A divide, and once again, she is standing on the other side.
"I'm not bound by vows." She whispers at last. "And I still want to help the Senju." She has made friends, Hashirama, Toka and even Tobirama had thawed, here with the Senju while the others have always stood just a little apart.
The last time she healed Tobirama after a mission of his, he hadn't even been prickly. He'd been appreciative in his own quiet way.
She doesn't know what she is supposed to do. She wants to stay, but she also wants to go. This is not her home, and the Senju are not her people, but she feels that her work isn't finished here.
Naosu-jisan steps forward and hugs her tightly. "Then go, Mito-chan, if that is what your heart demands."
She blinks back the salt pricking at the corners of her eyes. How blessed am I, with people that understand me?
Enka-kun clasps her on the shoulder. Sayu and Maiko-chan sweep her up into a fierce hug. Junko-kun nods.
"Uzu will still be there when you decide to return."
No matter what, Uzu will be unchanging and stable. She nods, and picks her pack up from by the tent flap where the others had left it.
"Thank you."
A.N. So I have about 30 thousand words of this sitting around in my drive, odds and ends, bits and pieces, especially since I'm still working through the earlier stages of Sunfall/Moonrise. And I thought, well, might as well organize it into cohesive chapters and things. Thus, this was born.
It'll cover quite a few more years than the rest of the stories in this 'verse, just because I needed to figure out the backstory between the current HashiMito dynamics. So several more chapters before we get to where Sunfall/Moonrise begins.
It's surprisingly easy to write about Mito. She's someone steady in her convictions, someone who doesn't make friends easily, calm, graceful, elegant, with a cutting tongue as she grows up more, and a little bit less of an optimist than Kanae.
Anyway, I hope you like reading this as much as I like writing this.
~Tavina
