I found this half-finished on an old USB while cleaning out, and I had to finish it. It's a bit trippy. I was listening to some weird music while reworking it... Do tell me if you catch the obscure Shakespeare reference.

I apologize in advance for my rampant metaphor.

There is a mission tomorrow.

Rin absently knocks the heels of her wooden sandals against each other, too lost in thought to take any notice. To her subconscious, the idle thock thock thock is something regular, something in order; something routine, which she has come to need so desperately. Sitting at home or in town just doesn't seem to do much anymore-too many people; too crowded together like the printed characters on a small-town paper. Everyone pressed all close together makes her nervous; reminds her of the nearly-failed mission Team Minato had undertaken just a week before.

She sighs; it was supposed to have been a simple retrieval mission, that was all. In and out; just get the scroll that had the intelligence they needed from an Iwa base located in Kusagakure, near Konoha's border. Of course, things never are as easy in real life as they are on paper; the number of shinobi currently at the base had to have been double what they had thought it to be. Team Minato had been preparing to infiltrate when they had been caught between returning and departing patrols, and the end result had been ants swarming over a dropped piece of fruit. Rin closes her eyes, hoping to clear the glazed lace of trailing gore from her mind.

Denial.

It doesn't work.

Denial.

Rin exhales sharply. This is a war, not training. She turns her head to the side, away from the sky, even though it pains her to do so. War. It hangs in her mind like a dirty word, and, the more she thinks on it, she realizes it's probably the worst word she's ever heard.

Rin rests her cheek on loamy soil and sage-scented grass and squeezes her eyes shut against the unwilled barrage of sudden morality; sudden mortality. Rin clenches the long blades of grass in her fists, little mayflies swirling up from the grass in a cloud of protest.

Rin smiles apologetically. "Sorry, little flies," she says to the sky. "Sorry, grass."

But the sky says nothing back, just stares at her with the moon.

The grass and little flies are unforgiving.

"Sorry, moon," Rin mumbles. "Sorry-" And she is about to go on and apologize to every damn living thing for having to be a living thing and having to be one here, for what people do-

"Huh? Who's that?"

-splattering blood across everything, making it so dirty-

Rin sits up quickly, startled out of her stupor. Wiping furiously at her eyes, she makes to stand, but maybe the sky is still glaring at her with its one moon-eye, because her motions stutter and she remains sitting. She settles for looking up at the newcomer instead, blinking in a bleary manner. "Oh," she says, voice small in the sky. "Hey-"

"Rin?" The intruder moves towards her. "Rin-chan?" Orange-tinted goggles flash as shifting shadows play across the landscape. Obito's voice is incredulous, and Rin has to agree with the degree of disbelief in his tone. She must look odd; unwell, to say the least.

Obito stands over her, a looming shape in the dark. For a minute she is glad, because he stands in front of the eye of the celestial sweep, but after a minute, she realizes that she misses it. "Hey, Obito," she says simply.

"Hey, Rin-chan." There is a degree of surprise in his voice, which is, in itself, unsurprising. Obito sits next to her, losing himself in the mayfly grass, bringing a new flock of displaced insects to rhapsody their displeasure, re their loss, fa their anger, until they give a whole scale of melodic displeasantries.

A heavy minute drags itself by, in which Rin stares back at the sky and Obito at the ground. Finally, as the minute's fat tail trails out of sight and trundles into its den in the hourglass stars, Obito asks what was tied onto the minute's back.

"What's wrong?" Obito is quiet, which unnerves Rin; he's usually loud, vibrant-alive. Not decibel-lost, not radio-static. Not like her.

Rin clumsily flaps a hand at him as she shudders around her words. "Nothing, nothing… Just couldn't sleep." She sniffs and wonders when she started crying in the first place, and why she is, because she doesn't remember, and why she's rubbing at her eyes the way she is, because for god's sake, she isn't crying, she is NOT.

"Aw, no… Rin-chan…" Obito swears under his breath, which makes Rin a little bit happy, because he sounds alive, just a little bit. "It was the Iwa mission, wasn't it." Not a question, and it doesn't require an answer, because it's a fact and they both know it; that now their clothes are made of a bloody weave and their bones of fragmented memories of what was.

Rin says nothing back, just thinks about the sky-eye watching her and seeing the people she helped to kill just the other day, just the other day when she killed them; she wouldn't know what to say anyway. Eventually, though, she settles. "Sorry," she mumbles, coughing on denial and self-loathing, the kind that sticks in the back of her throat and bothers her when she try to sleep. She settles on apologizing to Obito, like she has to just about everything else here. She doesn't want him to feel left out, after all. "Sorry, Obito, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to…" Rin trails off again, losing her words to the next minute that comes waddling along, eating them as they fall from her lips, and that little ball of self-loathing that has come to pull her hair and make her cry.

"What?" Obito actually starts. "You can't say that!" He explodes back to life. "You can't blame yourself for whatever happened, Rin-chan." He sits in front of her, gaze like the sky-eye's, domineering enough to make her meet his eyes. "You can't! It's-that's-" Obito too loses his words to the fat minute, and settles for akwardly patting her on the back.

Rin isn't sure what unnerves her more, Obito's manner of speaking or the tentative hand on her back.

Several more increasingly plump minutes trudge past. Tied onto the tail of the last one is another sentence, lines from a script that the moon proofread and the hour wrote.

Obito stands. "Come on, Rin-chan." He offers her a hand, something to pull her out of the mayfly summer. "You need to sleep."

Rin takes his hand and uses as the leverage it was offered as, as a way out. "Mission tomorrow, right?"

Obito grunts an affirmative. "Yeah. Something to do with the Kannabi Bridge."

They walk in silence for a quarter of an hour, outpacing the slow little minutes. They arrive at the corner of Rin's street before the hour does, and stand under the anbaric glare of the streetlight, waiting for it to catch up with them.

Fiddling haphazardly with his fluorescent goggles that are so out of place in the splash of sepia light, Obito finally pulls them off and tucks the elastic of the gear into his belt. Rin waits, because she can tell Obito is about to say something, and he does.

"Really. Are you all right?" Black eyes, boring into hers like little mole tunnels, where the minutes go to stay and the hours come to visit. Black hair, flopping across mole tunnels like mayfly grass. Complete and utter honesty. Rin wonders how many of her hours she's lost to mole tunnels and mayfly summers.

She smiles wanly, and-"I'll be fine," she says. "Thanks, Obito." She turns, walks out of the circle of anbaric light, begins to walk towards home. After all, there is a mission tomorrow, and-

Footsteps, running feet behind her, leaving the minutes of before in the dust, so far behind they must be out of sight, and she spins around. Obito practically runs into her, pulls into such a tight hug that it hurts more than the buzz of the harsh streetlight but less than the sky-eye's truth and self-loathing's teeth. It hurts good, and that makes all the difference when Obito's chapped lips crash into hers, when he backs away from her and disappears into the dark on the other side of the sharp monochrome, leaves her to walk the last few meters home alone.

Rin leans back on the fence for a minute and closes her eyes, because the mayfly summer exhausts her and the sky-eye is on her back again and the hour outran her.

Then she goes inside and tries to fall asleep.

After all, there is a mission tomorrow.