"I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all."
— Kurt Vonnegut

Ino wakes up in a cold sweat. Stagnant remains of a dream linger in the back of her mind, the bulk of it hidden by her own subconscious - by exactly where it came from in the first place. The fucking nightmares...

They were killing her.

It doesn't happen the way it does in movies, she realizes. She isn't panting nor did she jolt out of bed. Still, the faint memories are enough to leave her frozen, so much so that she takes pains to shallow out her own breathing, as if her own movement were something she'd naturally detest so thoroughly. It's uncomfortable and she realizes that, but all she can do is squeeze her eyes shut. She doesn't even want to roll around and look at the alarm clock. It was one of those kinds of nightmares. One of the tangible ones that she can feel in the very core of her being, like it was gripping her from the inside and pulling her deeper into a sinkhole of demented thought that she desperately doesn't want to travel and there's literally nothing she could do about it. Not in the slightest.

She does that to herself sometimes.

It's ironic, she realizes. She could hop into other people's minds at her own whim, but she can't even control her own thoughts.

She opens her eyes. Takes a deep breath. Steps out of bed.

The lights turn on.

Hinata winces, forced out of sleep by the blinding brightness. Rest is a rare thing these days and the unadulterated irritation of being ripped from it hits her immediately.

"Hinata."

Ino's voice. For a split second the Hyuuga almost feels bad for getting all pissy about losing a little bit of sleep. Ino never used to come around like this, especially not before daybreak. They never really even socialized.

"Hinata, wake up."

"I am up."

Kunoichi, remember? Hinata wasn't perfect, but there was no way she'd let someone sneak into her room in the middle of the night and not realize it. That was how people got killed. She wouldn't be one of them. And Ino was never as stealthy as she thought she was.

Hinata forces herself to sit, blankets sliding off and pooling in her lap and around her legs. She rubs at her eyes, blinks hard, yawns. She's one of those girls that takes her time in the morning. Usually she could lay in bed for fifteen minutes before she even opens her eyes. A morning like this had potential to ruin her whole day. Not that it was all that hard to ruin her day anymore.

And she can't help but feel like she knows exactly where this conversation is going to go.

"I think maybe we should change our mission reports before we turn them in tomorrow", Ino says, "Once they're handed over we're screwed."

They'd be screwed either way.

Still, Hinata agrees, "I do, too."

Ino runs a hand through her loose hair. She's a wreck - no make up on her pretty face, deep circles under her eyes and the hand brushing through her hair is trembling. For a girl like Ino Yamanaka to step out of her house without so much as foundation... She was obviously stressing hard.

Not that she was alone in it.

Hinata pulls her knees to her chest, making space for the other girl to take a seat at the foot of her bed. Ino takes the seat with a sigh.

"Actually, I'm not so sure about that." She claims, "There's no point in it now, just..."

She sighs again, long and loud and frustrated. She bends forward, pressing her face into her hands.

The clock on the wall ticks audibly. Makes them feel like fucking insomniacs.

"I just wish I could time travel, you know?" Ino finally says, looking over at Hinata. Meeting her pale eyes dead on.

That's a great way to put it, Hinata thinks. Take it all back with some impossibly perfect time traveling jutsu. "I do know", she agrees.

She feels the uneasiness settle over her as she thinks back, a slow crawl deep in the pit of her stomach. It almost makes her nauseous. This is why grieving alone tends to be easier, especially in their chosen profession. When Hinata is by herself she doesn't have to think about it so much, but here with Ino she's exposed. She has to listen to everything coming out of her mouth and feel the same things replicated in herself - sometimes they're revelations she hadn't even come to yet.

"We got someone killed." Ino nearly whispers it, like it was something new to her or something forbidden to say.

"That was nobody's first kill." Hinata says, her words coming out far more blunt than she meant, "This is our job."

Ino's reply is immediate and harsh.

"Oh, shut up with that bullshit, Hinata. You know it's never supposed to happen like that."

It makes Hinata wince. She was never one for conflict or confrontation and Ino is a hard person to help. So she decides not to say anything at all. She averts her eyes, lets her forehead fall against her knees.

They shouldn't have had this conversation anyway.

The bed dips as Ino gets up.

"I don't even know why I came here." She mumbles, more to herself than to Hinata.

And in all honesty, Hinata doesn't know either. She could have just as easily went to Sakura. It probably would have made more sense. Sakura knew Ino better. Sakura was there with them. So, why couldn't Ino have just went to her instead?

With that she leaves, shutting the lights off as she goes, but not before Hinata takes a peek at the ridiculously loud wall clock. It was just going on three o'clock. The sun wouldn't be coming up for a while and their meeting with Tsunade wasn't for several hours.

She tries to just be passive - because why should one mission make it so hard to feel like herself again - and tell herself that Ino was grieving and that's all. The only reason she'd act like that. Still, she can't help but be ever so slightly angry, which only served to agitate her more. It makes one hell of a vicious circle.

She falls back in bed and pulls the covers up over her face and tries to think of something else.

"Fuck!"

Sakura was already out the door when she realized she forgot it - her hastily written report probably still sitting on her desk next to her empty cup of coffee and mess of post-it notes. She turns, unlocks the door to her apartment, and runs for it.

That was what she got for being so late, she supposed. She couldn't even sympathize with herself. She was up late last night, so what? Lots of other people were too and they still made it to work on time. Plus Ino and Hinata would be waiting at the bridge for her right about now, probably impatiently.

She frowns at the folded up piece of paper in her hands. It is easily the worst report she's ever written in her entire life. Bits and pieces were omitted, the whole thing was generalized... It was out of order. Just a complete mess. Her instructors would be disappointed in her.

Except for maybe Kakashi, who had a penchant for handing in one sentence mission reports. One long run on sentence, too. She would have assumed with all the reading he did he'd be good at something so petty as a mission report. He'd been writing them since he was six years old. They just seemed to deterioriate with age.

And she was late like him too. Look at that. He'd approve.

She rolls her eyes at the thought.

Not even halfway down the street she runs into them.

"What the hell, Sakura? We're supposed to be there in like fifteen minutes." Ino practically yells, hands on her hips and all. Typical attitude from her.

"I had a late shift at the hospital." Sakura lies.

"Yeah, whatever. Hinata and I had a late night, but we still managed to get here on time."

Hinata bites her lip and looks down, ignoring the conversation at hand. It was always awkward when she found herself dragged into the conversation like that, especially considering she wasn't mad at Sakura at all. She could have waited all day. It wasn't like she was in a hurry to hand in the reports. She opens her mouth to say so and then quickly decides against it. She can't find it in herself to speak out of turn and instead opts for her regular default - to let it lapse into an uncomfortable silence and await the end of the argument. These trivial little things always solved themselves, anyway.

"Well, what do you want from me, Ino? It's not like I can travel through time, you know. Just go back and restart my damn morning to make it more convenient for you."

That time traveling thing again - it made Hinata reflect. If this was a perfect world...

"Hey, maybe we should just get going?" The quieter of the three finally interjects.

Ino and Sakura agree with silence. As soon as the statement is put out, they're walking.

And that's when the depth set in.

Nobody says anything about changing reports again. They'll just be handed in as they are.

It only takes a minute. Hinata spent hours freaking out about it and it only ended up taking a minute. Tsunade asked them to drop off the reports and leave, simple as that.

She would have figured a mission like that would require a debriefing.

But she figures that maybe she just got lucky.

Being out of that stuffy office and back outside in the cool breeze was a relief any day, one that she particularily needed right now. As much as it felt like an enormous weight had been lifted off her shoulders from simply getting the whole bureaucratic process complete, she would never be able to wash this mission from her hands entirely.

Just now she doesn't have to stare her own words down. She could avoid it. Things like this always got better with time, anyway. She smiles at the irony. This wait-it-out mentality was probably going to end up the death of her.

Either way, that was one rough mission down. There would be more coming in the future.

She hits her street and turns, deciding to instead spend some free time away from the city and all the noise. The outskirts of Konoha were always nice and some time alone was long overdue. Only a couple blocks away the scenery begins to change from complex apartment buildings and little stores to spaced out houses and dense trees. Lots of littler creatures running around.

A lot quieter.

In her mind, Hinata can almost hear the clock ticking and Ino's voice telling her that things weren't supposed to happen this way. She can almost hear a crackling fire. Loud gusts of wind. A total collapse.

She shakes her head, shudders.

Instead she concentrates on the sound of her feet on the ground.

And then she feels a hand on her arm. She tugs back, summoning chakra to her free left hand.

"Whoa, hey, don't freak out on me or anything now."

She realizes the hand on her sleeve is glove-clad.

"Kakashi?" She asks, confused, looking up to see a masked face and one dull black eye. The chakra she'd summonded fades out into nothing. How could she let herself get so distracted?

He lets go of her and slides his hand in his pocket instead, "I must have called you half a million times, Hinata. You're awful distracted. Don't ever let Kurenai catch you like that or she'll have a few choice words for you."

Kakashi intimidates her, not only because he's a living legend, but because she's seen him in combat personally. She's seen him around his team and she knows what he's like. He isn't the most social person around and they'd never had a single conversation in all the years she'd known him as an instructor. He's just slightly unapproachable.

But Naruto seems to like him, still.

Must just be a student-teacher thing. Hinata much perfers Kurenai.

"I... um..." She feels herself doing it, looking around for anything else to focus on while struggling to avoid the inescapable truth that she was making it bluntly obvious that she was far out of her safty zone. She does not want to meet his gaze.

Kakashi brushes off her unfulfilled explanation with a lazy wave of his hand, "I was wondering something."

Just the way he says it makes her uncomfortable. She knows it's going to be something she doesn't want to hear. And then, so suddenly, she realizes that Sakura is still his student, techincally. She wouldn't have said something to him, would she? She isn't stupid. There's no way...

"Since I am Sakura's team leader and everything, at least until she takes the Jonin exam and passes it, could you possibly fill me in on what's going on with her? She's been a little - how should I put it... Off?"

The Hyuuga feels the hot flush spreading across her face and the corners of her mouth turn, her expression shifting toward something like dismay. They were caught. He knew. He was Hatake fucking Kakashi, one hell of a perceptive man, and he knew.

"Um... I-I don't know. She hasn't said anything to me." She tells him, looking up toward that confident glance of his. It feels like he's staring her down. Judging her. She shifts on her left foot.

It's hard to meet his eyes and even harder to get the words out. Lying to a Jonin instructor can get her in a lot of trouble, and just the possibility of getting into that kind of trouble is enough to make her want to break down, especially when combined with the plethora of other stressors this mission threw at her. Kakashi isn't the type to push these things though, so unless he absolutely knew what happened...

"Really?" The Jonin asks, voice impossible to read, " So it doesn't have anything to do with my S-rank you three were mistakenly assigned instead of the A-rank you were supposed to get?"

She feels her heart drop in her chest and her stomach churn as her eyes widen ever so slightly. Her breath stills in her chest. She feels like she's falling. Like she's going to be sick.

"S-Rank?" She asks, and the words just fall clumsily past her lips, she hears them and they sound foreign. They don't even sound like her own words in her head. She can't connect them to anything. They're just there.

Kakashi crosses his arms over his chest. She's still painfully aware of his eyes on her.

"See, there was this little mix-up." He explains, "Whatever dumbass they had on duty must have handed the wrong scrolls out. In case you weren't privy, which you probably aren't considering you guys are a bunch of eighteen year old Chunin, before you take any S-class assignment you're given a brief from the Hokage. I was assigned an assassination of one Akiko Matsuda and I wasn't given much information other than some coordinates. That's usually how they work. It's kind of like those little goody bags you get as a child, you know? Every one's a surprise."

He pauses, uncrosses his arms.

Hinata takes a deep breath. She was beginning to feel dizzy, like she might pass out.

"So then I go get my orders. Some escourt job for a rich asshole that didn't even deserve the grade he was paying for. I could have done it in my sleep. You could have done it in your sleep. Alone. So I knew that couldn't be right. I already got the briefing from Tsunade. So, I wondered, who could have gotten my mission? I figured it was probably someone more of my own caliber, someone experienced. S-ranks usually go to ANBU and the like. So, I thought, whoever got it should be fine with it. I took my orders and left. Nothing I can really do about it, right?"

She really just doesn't want to hear it.

"So, I get back to the village in like six hours and hook up with some of the guys I used to work with in ANBU. It turns out that half of them were all trying to get at this mission because not only does this Akiko figure have a kekkei genkai, but she's an infant. That's some Black Ops shit and that's exactly the kind of job you'd want to take to get into Black Ops. Those missions make me cringe. They're the whole reason why I left ANBU - killing children and civilians, all these helpless individuals... It's just sick, you know?"

He pauses, as if he's waiting for her to say something. Hinata knows he is. But, at this point, Hinata can't even find words anymore. She does know, all too well.

"I just thought that since this was her first time murdering someone that can't fight back and then burning its body for cold, technical reasons that maybe that might have jarred her a little. She just doesn't seem like the kind of person to let something like that roll off her shoulders."

They already handed the mission reports in and they weren't even supposed to be on that mission? Ino said it herself - things like this weren't supposed to happen. And Kakashi knows about it. They might all go down for this one.

At this point Hinata feels damn near ready to just throw in the towel. It was all for nothing?

She feels tears beginning to well up in her eyes. The familiar ache in her chest. Her breath coming back in uneven hitches.

As if he read her mind, Kakashi tells her, "Don't worry about the reports, I wrote one up in place of your mission. Everything's documented. Besides, Tsunade would rather just get black out drunk than read those reports anyway. And look at it this way - so, you saw some things you're not legally allowed to see. That's unimportant. Nobody has to find out. At least now you know ANBU isn't a place you want to be. I had to learn it the hard way."

Of course. The silver lining of this entire conversation. Hatake Kakashi and his infinite wisdom. Right now Hinata doesn't care too much about personal values, she just wants to curl up in bed and cry. She just wants it to stop.

"There's a darker side to this job, Hinata." Kakashi tells her, "You think that's as bad as it gets?"

She wants to say yes simply because she can't imagine it, she doesn't want to imagine it. She can't perceive feeling any worse than she already is. It'd drive her insane.

"It's not. It's nowhere near it."

She feels the first tear slide down her cheek and she reaches up to brush it away, all the while fighting the sobs that have her entire body trembling. She doesn't need to feel quite that pathetic right now. Standing here in front of Kakashi, listening to him tell her about all the things she was a part of - nothing in her entire life has ever made her feel so guilty.

"Just so we all know. Pass the word on, will you?"

With that, he turned and walked away. Finally, Hinata took her chance to really look at him and she wondered - how the hell does a man like that just walk away like everything's fine?

And when will she be able to do that again?

Notes! Kind of like an AAR...

1. Many thanks to for beta reading my shit. The rough draft was a piece of crap and I'm still not one hundred percent happy with this, but... Eh. I only have so much time on my hands and if I keep changing it the way I do I'll never stop.

2. Don't expect regular updates. They will be slightly erratic. Not in a godawful way, but just so you know... I've almost got a chapter two done already. It may or may not be up by Friday.

3. The way I have this fic plotted out so far, there isn't quite an end yet, but... We're probably looking at less than fifteen chapters.

4. Make sure to drop a review! Any constructive criticism is appreciated, but be tactful. I don't take too kindly to flamers :p Or just d-bags in general.

5. And, last thing - I'm open to new ideas for new stories right now. Don't put those in a review, but if you want to make a request (like, any kind of request save for straight up smut) send me a PM. I'll see what I can do for you.