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She stares up at the stars as the flesh of her bare arms is cooled by the chill metal of the crashed supply wagon.
The girl is a Sand genin, thirteen-year-old Sabure Karura, and the war has been going on for as long as she can remember.
The battle was long and bloody that day, and she is glad it's over. She's finally gotten big enough and strong enough to wield her iron fan appropriately, and the Leaf nin figured out the hard way why the Sand nin were beginning to call her the Wind Mistress.
She usually wears a dark brown shirt with long, flowing embroidered sleeves and a scarf over her cream-colored skirt, but the shirt's soaked with sweat, stinking of gore and steel, so she's discarded it for the night; she is clad only in shoes, skirt, all the iron netting and her loose sleeveless dark brown undershirt. The chill is pleasant on her skin, coated as it is by stale sweat; Karura, like all those who live in the desert and are not of the highest social class, does not bathe regularly and so is not overly perturbed by the sickly smell of perspiration in her hair.
The battle was hard-won, but it was a victory for the Sand and her comrades are celebrating as they should. Behind the wreckage of the supply wagon she leans against, there is a fire crackling and the men and women, a dozen or so, laugh and talk and eat. One has brought a fiddle with him from Suna, and the strains fly to the moon. Sasori is eating; Karura shudders, because she will never understand how her younger teammate can eat after battle.
They nearly lost; if not for the arrival of the Sandaime, they almost certainly would have. He came marching in over the horizon just like he always did, and the Leaf didn't have time to scream before their lives were scoured away and bled out onto the dunes by iron sand.
Karura's not sure why, but the Sandaime seems to have taken a liking to her and Sasori. Her especially. She once overheard him telling one of his jonin, "Those two are the future. I can see it in the way the enemy balk when they come near." That might have something to do with it.
As the fiddle notes jump, the flames leap high. The straining, slightly reedy notes hold a strange power over the night; the fire is casting everything in an amber glow.
She can see the lights in the distance, trembling like wavering wax candles isolated by night's black satin caul, burning holes in the night sky. Their smoke goes unseen; the only sign is how the stars seem to dance over the small pinpricks of light on the sand.
Karura knows that there are men attached to those fires, Leaf nin who shiver in the cold desert nights. They are not used to cold of this nature, the cold that slips straight to the bones and holds there with a ferocious tenacity. She can not see them; the night's cloak extends over them, rendering them out of the sight of the eagle-eyed Sand shinobi.
They do not attack; they merely huddle by their fires, licking their wounds while Karura's compatriots make merry. She does not know if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
The cold, hard truth of the matter is that sometimes at the end of the day Karura can not tell the good from the bad. She's just too tired to sort it out, to worry about the complicated matters.
After the fighting has passed, Karura always gets this feeling, deep in the pit of her gut. She gets the feeling that danger still lurks around, and that it's not over yet. It's not a matter of being an optimist or a pessimist. Karura just hopes that the worst has already passed, because she wants to enjoy the thrumming night.
And despite everything, the stars still shine.