When I Die Tomorrow
It is definite. The earlier attack on Hidden Leaf by Hidden Cloud was but a teaser, a test to see how much power would be needed. This night, the last night of peace before the next Great War begins, all active shinobi from Leaf, Sand, and Mist await the morning's coming battle. Stone, Sound, and Cloud aren't going to let them sleep peacefully.
They aren't at home, the active shinobi, and even those who are wounded, and formerly retired. They wait uneasily for dawn from the field camp that's been set up. This camp will serve as their resting place, both temporary and final, once the battle starts. It is their motel, it is their hospital, it is their sanctuary, and it will be their morgue.
The Mist and Sand shinobi might be comfortable in the uneasy silence that has descended over the camp, but Leaf shinobi have never liked silence. In the Konoha corner of the camp, a lone kunoichi finishes fiddling with weapon summoning scrolls she learned to use from her adoptive grandmother and moves to stand next to a young shinobi with a senbon hanging loosely from his lips. He once saw a much older cousin do the same thing, and at the time had thought it looked cool. Now chewing on that senbon is all that keeps him from trembling. Hyuga Tenshi and Shiranui Takashi are the first to start singing the traditional Konoha pre-battle dirge, 'When I Die Tomorrow'. Tenshi's voice is a sweet soprano, and Takashi sings a low baritone, and together they harmonize beautifully, slowly joined by the other shinobi around them.
When I die tomorrow
Send my blade and my tags to my beloved
And carve my name upon the stone
The tune is slow, painfully slow, and those singing are on the verge of tears from the anguish that the simple words convey. Even the shinobi from Kirigakure and Sunagakure look slightly emotional, and soon, even they join in the song.
When I die tomorrow
Spread my ashes to the West Wind
And remember who I was
This war devours children
Swallows families and friendships
Send them all my sorrow
When I die tomorrow
When I die tomorrow
Sing to me a victory suite
And let me know we've won
When I die tomorrow
Spread my ashes to the West Wind
And remember who I was
Some of the shinobi are crying now, mostly because they know it is their last chance to do so without persecution before the battle. Some weep for the sorrow of the music. Others weep for the friends and families they will leave behind.
Sing of me…
Drink to me…
Spread tales of me by the firelight's glow
When I die tomorrow
When I die tomorrow
Send my blade and my tags to my beloved
And carve my name upon the stone
When I die tomorrow
The song ends and the gathered shinobi garner what sleep they can. The next day dawns bleak and dark, the thick clouds blotting out any chance of sun to illuminate their enemies. The medics prepare themselves, bracing for the inevitable overwhelming influx of wounded. The warriors simply wave and say farewell.
Hyuga Hato watches his lover and his adopted daughter leave for the battlefield, and tries to swallow his apprehension. He watches his father limp to the front lines, and knows that this is the last time they'll see each other. His father was a prodigy, once, but he'd been retired some time due to a knee injury that hindered his performance so severely that the one-time genius had been rendered almost useless. That retirement had ended abruptly when Kumogakure had declared war. Hato, a medic, knows that he'll see his father one last time when he's brought in on a stretcher and it'll be too late to help him.
He still hears his daughter's voice as she and Takashi sing their duet. The song haunts him. He doesn't want to see either of their tags come back not swinging from living necks. All he can do now is pray, and when the wounded start piling in, lose himself in his work and hope that someone relieves him so that he does not end up on a field bed next to his patients.
Hato nearly cries when the first casualties arrive. They aren't adults lying in the gurneys awaiting surgery. They're children. Genin, at most, possibly even some of the older academy students, and the rare early-blooming chunin. He sees Umino Izumi, who will have a scar across her nose to match her father's, if she lives long enough for it to heal. She just graduated from his academy class. She's not old enough to have even given the Chunin Exam a first try.
The wounded come pouring in, and judging by how drenched they are the clouds have decided to cry over this war and it is raining. There are at least ten patients to every medic. Some will live, some will not. Most will be caught in between.
The battlefield is an ugly place. The once peaceful glade is now disfigured as powerful techniques are unleashed by several shinobi upon their enemies, whomsoever those enemies might be. Rain falls and dilutes the blood that mires the soil into mud. Corpses on both sides of the war fall like the rain from above. Courtesy of Hyuga Tenshi, a great metal dragon swoops over the carnage, adding to the number of fallen as the blades that serve as its belly scales tear into a group of Stone-nin that are unfortunate enough to be caught in the draconic puppet's path.
It seems impossible that fire can burn in such a wet place, but chakra-laced flames dominate the field, charring flesh and crackling in almost sinister glee as they put off smoke that chokes a Cloud-nin to death slowly. The Cloud-nin's companions follow in short order, but they aren't the only ones. A Mist-nin follows them into death, a casualty of 'friendly fire'.
Hato's prediction of his father's death holds true, and the proud countenance of Hyuga Neji relaxes in death as the medic who has her hands in his entrails trying to heal him gives up. She knows she's lost him. It's time to administer to the living now. In one of the morgue tents, Neji finds himself beside his one old teammate that everyone thought would never die, whose flames of youth would never be extinguished. If Tenten hadn't perished in Cloud's initial strike on Konoha, theirs could have been a team that lay in death's repose as a complete set. Now it's only Lee and Neji, and a few others from their generation. It's up to their children and grandchildren now.
It's said in other Hidden Villages that the Village Hidden in the Leaves is a village full of soft-hearted, soft-minded shinobi that are pushovers because their land is almost perpetually at peace. But Konohagakure breeds a rare crop of stubborn, and her shinobi fight for what they believe in, fight to protect what they hold dear. Combining the strength of heart of Konohagakure with the strength of body that the Sunagakure shinobi have developed surviving in a merciless desert and the strength of mind that the Kirigakure shinobi developed surviving in a world where cunning matters most is a potent mixture. It isn't that the Kumogakure, Otogakure, and Iwagakure shinobi aren't a formidable force in their own right, it's that they've underestimated their 'soft' neighbors, and that underestimation is costing them more than they can afford to lose.
In the medical tents, the medics hear the resting soldiers singing 'When I Die Tomorrow' again. They've survived their first wave, and they're resting before they go back out into the fight. Or they should be resting. But they don't stop singing.
When I die tomorrow
Send my blade and my tags to my beloved
And carve my name upon the stone
And indeed, there will be many names carved upon the Hero Memorial Stone, possibly enough new names that the calligraphy will spill over onto the stone's pedestal stand, and a new monument will have to be erected to accommodate all those latest lives sacrificed in the protection of Konoha
No one even wants to think about the growing pile of identification tags that will later have to be sorted and sent off to the next of kin of every mortal casualty.
When I die tomorrow
Spread my ashes to the West Wind
And remember who I was
All recovered bodies of fallen ninja were burned to prevent enemy villages, or indeed, just outside villages, from garnering the secrets of the fallen one. The funerary pyres for both sides will be piled high with the bodies of the fallen ones, and it will take perhaps weeks to burn them all. None of the fallen soldiers of Konoha will be forgotten by their surviving fellows, ever, but the same probably cannot be said for everyone else's.
This war devours children
Swallows families and friendships
Send them all my sorrow
When I die tomorrow
The bodies of the genin and younger chunin greatly outnumber those of the seasoned soldiers, and Uzumaki Naruto, the current Hokage, wonders how many parents that he will have to personally notify that their children are dead. How many friendships and families will be shattered here in this war? Naruto doesn't want to think about it right now. He'd rather pound his enemies into the dirt and worry about the details later. So he does, proving that Konohamaru and company are wrong at least in part when they call him a 'feeble old man'.
When I die tomorrow
Sing me a victory suite
And let me know we've won
If Konoha and its allies win the fight, they will sing of it over hefty consumption of alcohol. If they lose, they'll still drink, but they won't be singing of victory.
When I die tomorrow
Spread my ashes to the West Wind
And remember who I was
Sing of me…
Drink to me…
Spread tales of me by the firelight's glow
When I die tomorrow
When I die tomorrow
Send my blade and my tags to my beloved
And carve my name upon the stone
When I die tomorrow…
Author's Note: Who wins the battle? Use your imagination. As to the original characters in this work, Hyuga Hato is Neji and Tenten's son, and Hyuga Tenshi is the girl that Hato adopted. Shiranui Takashi is a much younger cousin to Genma, and Umino Izumi is Iruka's daughter. The draconic puppet whose name was not mentioned was built by sticking a bunch of weapons onto a wire skeleton, and it is manipulated by chakra strings. It's sort of Tenshi's way of combining the weapon skills she learned from her grandmother, Tenten, with some of the puppet techniques she's observed from several Sand shinobi. The dirge 'When I Die Tomorrow' was written by Heron, though the inspiration to write it actually came up while Heron was watching MASH, so the makers of that show deserve some credit, eh? Somewhere between Colonel Potter drinking a toast to his long-dead companions and Hawkeye lamenting that children were being sent into the war to die, 'When I Die Tomorrow' was born. If the lyrics are too similar to something someone else has written, please tell Heron. She doesn't want to ruffle anyone's feathers. Aside from that, tell Heron what you think, please.