Dreams were so easy to confuse with reality in the first seconds that he woke. For a moment, he swore he was lying in bed, close to someone, and the blanket above him was thick and warm. Then the cold was suddenly in his bones, and the realization that he had no wife, no family, seemed to hit harder and faster than it ever had before. Those waking moments, spaces in time that somehow erased the past few years, had grown smaller and smaller.

His breath hung suspended over him, strangely viscous and visible. He stared at it and felt the heaviness of a half forgotten dream in the back of his head. It disappeared completely as he sat up, shivering in the grey light of his tent. The clothes he pulled on were stiff and scratchy with sweat and ice, the blacks faded and the whites yellowed. His chapped hands disappeared into gloves and he wrapped his feet twice before shoving them into worn shoes. The scarf he tucked into his jacket sent a wave of stifling heat over him, a sheen of sweat over his cheeks that froze the second he stepped into the open air.

Outside the snow swept over the underbrush in small, hard flakes. He turned his back to the wind as he pulled his shelter down. Two hours away a long, squat building, ice-covered and windowless, sat waiting for him. Maybe. And it was full of people, hustling and bustling, going in and going out. Maybe. And inside he would find the children he'd been sent after so long ago. Maybe.

Already there had been five years of maybe's and Sasuke wondered if he should be getting tired of them. But at home there was nothing waiting for him and work was all he had, and however terrible it was for the children he'd been sent after – were they still alive? he wondered – every time he came to an abandoned building, realized the information he'd been given was a lie or a dead end, packed up his bag to start the search all over again, he felt a sense of relief.

The building was squat and ice-covered and windowless. But it was quiet. Half the day he sat watching, squinting through the blowing snow, and there was no one. He snuck twice around the perimeter and there were no security measures, no illusions, no trap doors or escape hatches. The ground was ice and impenetrable. He found a half open door and retreated to bury himself in the swell of snow in the west to watch again, suspicion jerking nervously through his arms.

If he saw nothing else, in the morning he would enter through that door, find the rooms empty, used syringes, open file cabinets, and nothing else. It had always been like that. He was always one step behind.

It was usually so hot when she woke. Her face would be beaded with sweat, her hair hot and heavy on her back, like a carpet. Now, though, her skin was thin and papery. She bundled herself into her robe but it was thin, too. Her breath might be visible in the dark, like a ghost. She breathed all of the air in her lungs out, staring up toward the ceiling, eyes wide, but she couldn't see it.

Once her father had told her a story, back when she was too young to have become a failure, and he still cared enough for her to talk to her. He'd traveled to a country so cold the sleeping bags froze around those inside them. Waking, you had to twist and chip yourself from the ice. The clothes you'd worn were frozen in the pile you left them, and you shook them and beat the against the ground before you could wear them. She wondered how long it would take, if she breathed this hard, to fill the room with ice.

Near her, he was weeping. She reached for his hand and could not find it. "Just one more day," she wanted to say. "If we can just hold on for one more day..." But his weeping, so weak, drowned out her even weaker voice. Her words had no power in the cold air, and it was with a twinge of hot panic that she realized they had no power over her.

It was getting harder and harder to lie to herself.

(line break)

The ice turned in the rising sun, purple in the shadows. The compound remained still in the shrieking wind, unmoving against the ice that was so like razors against Sasuke's cheek. His back was wet with sweat but the cold struck at his hands and face, his feet, the weakest parts of him. He watched the compound and his blood rushed through him but his fingers stayed stiff, unbendable, turning to ice. The sun glittered in the trees but it was far away, with no interest in the earth, and so shone little warmth upon it. When it struck weakly against the compound, he moved.

There was the door, half open, inviting in the snow and ice. Pipes and creaking when he stepped inside. That and darkness. And cold. Every door inside, open. He walked past steel tables, empty jars, sinks of something frozen. There were a few knives, syringes, bodies, like always. Cryptic papers that he used to collect until he realized they mean nothing, and that's why they were left behind. Sasuke grasped a handle, turned it, yanked at the door; there was more useless information to be found, another bread crumb in the path for him, to spur him on, to keep him going, endlessly. He would never go home, never have to turn again to face--.

The door. Locked. The handle rattled in Sasuke's hand; he shook it in disbelief. A locked door, never. Why would there be a locked door, what would they need to keep locked up, hidden, in a place they had abandoned, a place they would never come again? Sasuke rattled the door, paused to wonder, and then he heard it.

The coughing.

The boy is dead, but too young to shave. "My sister," he gasped, "my sister," and held out his fist -his fist, he could not even open his fingers – and Sasuke recognized him as easily as he might recognize his mother, or his wife, or his child (but he did not have any of those). And he pulled him close, laid a hand on his young head – to comfort, not to save, because the weak, fluttering beat beneath his fingers, he knew, couldn't last. Was it callous to leave him there, alone now, no matter the promise to return? Sasuke closed the door on him and knew it was only a body now, no boy at all but a lump of flesh fashioned to resemble one.

He'd been so long in the winter; there was ice in him. There was too much white and his eyes were filmed with it. But these were the things that he remembered were beautiful: blood in water and the red flag of his elementary school class; the lavender air of morning and a moon as yellow as the sun; the inside of a wrist and the pulse that sounded beneath his fingers.

The sister shuddered, breathed, and Sasuke realized he would be going home.

He swaddled her in every piece of cloth he owned, but her eyes didn't open. He chafed her feet and ran his palm over the crooked fingers of her left hand, the dry skin of her right. There was only a sliver of white visible between the lashes that quivered at every breath.

It was impossible to take her, unwaking, and the body over the one hundred miles that lay between him and the previous town; so he left her buried in fur and cloth to bury her brother in the ice and snow. Someone else would have to come for him. The needs of the living out weighed those of the dead, and all he could spare was a this small moment, a prayer, and a marker. When he turned from it the the black of trees was visible far on the horizon. He realized that there was no longer snow in the air.

The girl slept.

It was the next night before she woke. Sasuke held water to her lips but she wouldn't drink. Her weak hands fluttered against his wrists, she turned her head away. She tried to speak and couldn't, tried to open her eyes but gave up before anything but a sliver of white was revealed beneath the heavy lids.

"Drink something," he urged her. Her lips were chapped and white and she pressed them together. Her head shook weakly on her neck; the blood pulsed visibly through it in delicate, blue channels beneath her skin. Her eyes roved behind her lids, but she could not lift them; her fingers groped at the ground at her side.

She was looking for him, he realized, the brother, the boy whose body he'd left behind. She didn't know he was dead and buried; he could no longer drink, no longer eat, no longer accept any further sacrifice she was willing to offer. The wind shrieked outside the tent.

He laid his hand over hers, carefully as he could, and she shrank away from him, drew her shoulders against her ears as if anticipating his words. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's only you and me."

Her lips parted; she was completely still and silent as she cried.

"Who did this to you?" he asked her, but she had been silent two days, her eyes closed and her head turned from him; she spat out half of what he pressed into her mouth. "You have to eat," he told her. She held her thin wrist over her eyes and it seemed every moment he glanced at her there was a new, silvery path on her cheek. She pulled her fingers into a fist but there were two crooked ones – the little finger and medicine finger – that wouldn't curl. "Who did this to you?" he asked, but she didn't make a sound.

On the fourth day he woke and found her sitting up, leaning heavily on one hand. She shivered. Her face tilted away from him as he lifted himself from beneath his blankets.

"Where are you taking me?" Her voice was a whisper.

"Konoha," he said, and her shoulder twitched. She said nothing else, but her hand reached absently toward the tent wall, shaking. Her thin arm – he wondered how it could possibly bear her weight, no matter how slight it was.

"Will you eat?" he asked. "Are you cold?" She tucked her head further into her chest the closer he came. She shivered and he pulled another blanket over her legs. "If you eat," he said, "we can start moving. Somewhere warm. If we hurry it might still be summer in Konoha."

She bent her elbow and turned from him onto her side. Her thin arm folded beneath her like a broken twig.

"Will you eat?" he asked her.

She concealed her face in blankets and said nothing.

At night she could hear him breathing; sometimes he sounded near, sometimes far. Sometimes the wind made it too hard to hear anything. She shifted and coughed, and wondered if he would wake. She hoped he would, then hoped he wouldn't; she hoped he died in his sleep and listened desperately for the sound of silence where his breathing had been.

Konoha, he said, and she'd turned her face so he wouldn't have the satisfaction of seeing her eyes widen in that first, uncontrollable moment of joy that washed over her, painfully brief, before doubt once again consumed her thoughts. She couldn't trust him and she turned away because, she knew herself, and knew she was too easy to deceive; a kind word, soft touch, could easily sway her, and she'd been lured by the false promise of rescue before.

But to hear him breathe made her ache to believe. The earth spun beneath her in the darkness and she couldn't sleep for being so tired. It would be easier to take his word, trust him, even if there was no truth to him. How long had she hoped for a real savior? Wasn't it time to give up and give in?

She reached out before she could stop herself. Her body was as tired as her mind, had needs of its own, a will to survive even if her mind might forfeit it. She grasped something – a shoulder, an elbow, and he woke.

"What's wrong?" he whispered. She opened her eyes to search for his face but the darkness was complete. What did she want to say? Why did doubt have to wreck her even more so than hopelessness ever had? He shifted; there were fingers on her hand. Caring fingers, careful fingers; or did they belong to those hands that encircled her wrist like irons, that held her chin like a vise in place, that had taken everything of worth from her?

"Thank you," she said, cautiously. The hand covered hers, squeezed at her palm, reassuringly, she thought, and she pressed the back of her wrist to the tears in her eyes. Please, she wanted to say, please be closer to me, but instead she drew her hand from his; and even then she felt as if she were giving up, losing. Tomorrow, she knew, she would take the food and drink he offered, and the promise of a homecoming, as false as it might be; and even as she cried she felt a sense of relief knowing she wouldn't have to struggle to sort truth from lie anymore, because it didn't matter anymore.

"You should sleep," came his voice. It was familiar, but different, and memory was so strange, and her mind, she knew, wasn't what it was; and who was she to know who was who, what was what, anymore? She could confuse the touch of a killer with that of a lover.

The wind was loud again outside the tent. The ground swayed beneath her. She closed her eyes, dreamt she was on a ship, and then dreamt nothing.

In the morning he heated water and she drank, turning away from him, pressing her hand to the crown of her head as if to conceal her face and her tears. She choked at the food and said nothing when Sasuke apologized for its tastelessness. He'd grown used to it; he'd lived on powdered fat and water, and leather heated over a dying fire; the slivers of chocolate that clung to the inside of an empty pouch.

This far north he could expect nothing else, but soon they would be heading home, passing through town and villages. The thought made him breathless and he wondered if it was for happiness or for fear that his heart beat like it did. There was a letter he would need to post, and he wrote it that afternoon. Sugi Rie recovered, it read. Physical condition OK. Sugi Ryota dead of exposure and malnutrition.

He wanted to say something to her, something about her brother, something comforting, but he'd been alone too long to form words of such depth; in the night he'd squeezed her hand in hopes that it could provide more reassurance than his ineffective words. Instead of speaking he offered her more food and more water, and she bundled herself in the extra jackets he gave her and sat with the hoods and face cover pulled, still. She stared at the wall opposite him and was quiet.

"Are you hurt anywhere?" he asked. "Your fingers were broken. What else did they do?" He wondered if his words were too abrupt.

"No," she managed. Her voice was raspy, older than her 17 years. He remembered her thin face , slack with sleep and grey with sickness, and it struck him how much people could change in 5 years. The portrait of her at 12 seemed to be another person. Sasuke was tempted to raise a hand to his face, to find out how much it had changed. Would anyone recognize him? "No," the girl said again, and she shifted, buried in cloth. "Nothing." She fumbled for the water at her feet and held the flask upside down in her hands for a moment.

"The nearest village is about 170 miles away," he said. "But we can stay there for a while, and you can rest more comfortably."

"I just want to go home," he thought he heard her say, but when he asked her to say again, she was quiet.

One day he pulled his tent from beneath the scrubby trees that somehow still stood in this wasteland of ice. He filled the latrine and the fire pit in with snow and ice, kicked over the bare space left where his home had once stood.

"Rie," he said. She stood swaying and swaddled in the snow, unmoving. "Let's go."

She was still until he took her hand; then she took a couple staggering steps, her free arm outstretched as if for balance.

"I can't," she said. They'd walked a painfully small distance. Sasuke shifted his shoulders under the pack he wore.

"Will you be able to hold on if I carry you?" he asked. When she said nothing he knelt in front of her and pulled her hands over his shoulders. "Can you hold on?" he asked.

"Yes," she managed, and he could hear the tears in her thickening voice.

"What's wrong?" he asked. "What hurts?"

"Me," she said. "You have to carry me."

Sasuke took a step forward and the pack that he dragged behind scrapped noisily on the ice. "It's nothing," he said. Did he feel the bones of her legs, even through all of these layers, or was he imagining it? "You're light," he said. "It's like I'm carrying nothing."

She cried any way, almost noiselessly; but how could he help but hear her when her chin rested above his shoulder, beside ear?

"Two weeks," he said, and he hoped his voice was reassuring. "We can make it there in two weeks."