A/N: Two chapters in one day! A miracle!
…But don't get used to it. XDDDD I dunno when I'll be posting the next one. It might be months.
But I hope not. :D
-/-
I was still hiding behind my door that morning, wishing I could escape my room through a window or something. But while I had so casually just called it my room, it was first and foremost a closet, and that meant no windows. Hell, that meant no space; I got a futon on the floor in there, and that was it.
I hated it, too. Home was, ridiculously, still the desert, and there was no such thing as confined in the open dunes. Back home¸ I could have run forever and never looked back; and stretching out my arms would reach only empty space, not damp, splintery wall. Damn wood. I still wanted stone.
But my choices consisted of the damn closet or listening to my mother's quiet, whimpering snores all night, and feeling her smiling eyes on me when she woke up at odd hours. I chose hard floor and futon over moth-eaten cushions.
And, well, the fact that I still thought of Suna as home was as idiotic as Raiyo. Ten long years in Konoha had wiped out nearly every memory of sand and stone that five short years had left me. All I still had bouncing around my head was a red-haired boy and a sense of openness.
Maybe that was enough. But, damn, a five-year-old kid isn't supposed to remember all that at fifteen. Those things were supposed to fade.
Sighing, I fumbled in the dark for myhitai-ate, not bothering to yank on the grungy lightbulb. In a room—excuse me, closet—this small, I knew where everything was, anyway. I practically slept on top of my clothes.
For a minute more, I sat cross-legged, staring through the darkness at the Konoha symbol on its metal plate. Ten damn years I'd lived here, and I still couldn't figure out if they'd given me the right headband. I'd wondered since the day they handed it to me while my mother beamed proudly—and not-quite-sickeningly, not yet—across the crowds at Graduation.
Yeah, some memories were worth keeping. And something tainted every damn one of them.
Finally, I tied the damn thing around my head, knotting it under my sandy-pale ponytail, and pushed open the door. Light filtered in, half-heartedly illuminating that only decorations I'd given the wooden walls of my room: twisting, writhing paths of my own sand, like red and gold snakes, imprinted in the oak. Maybe if I put more effort into it, I wouldn't have to use my own blood to move the stuff, but these looping garlands were the closest thing I'd had to practice in recent days.
Surprisingly, my mother still slept on her pile of oh-so-comfortable pillows. Briefly, I worried that she might have discovered sleeping pills as well as the caffeine in chocolate; having a mother addicted to both staying awake and never waking up was something I could not afford, either emotionally or financially. D-Rank missions did not pay a hell of a lot, and I was already funding her cigarettes.
The cigarettes I had conveniently forgotten to pick up yesterday, although she'd forgiven me with a hundred oozing endearments. 'It's ok, swee-tie, just get them tomorrow, pre-cious.' I didn't want to, and I knew if I didn't, she'd never get them herself; she barely moved from her spot all day and night. (I was still at a loss as to how she wasn't bored out of her damn mind—oh, wait.)
But I also knew that I would get them anyway, eventually. Not because she was my mother, as much as I hated to admit it, but because I was a shinobi. And shinobi followed orders unquestioningly.
Casting a last glance back at the sleeping mound of flesh—more than likely, she'd just been up late last night, later than Cell 14 on its damn D-Rank mission, waiting for her precious daughter to come home—I fled my stiflingly cold and cramped 'home' before she could wake up.
-/-
Maybe it was my name, I reflected moodily—and not for the first time—as I headed so enthusiastically for the training field. Sunako. Child of Sand. Child of Suna. No wonder I couldn't leave the place I barely remembered. Damn Mom and her sentiment. It was the only bit of love for her old home that she still clung to, as far as I can tell. But then, who knew what roiled around behind her puppy-dog, half-lidded eyes?
I responded to several greetings from my fellow genin with little more than sullen nods. As far as I could tell—and three years had made it clear—Uzumaki Naruto was now friends with just about everyone, but I couldn't bring myself to bond with him—or any other genin here, aside from Eiji… and Raiyo, to an extent. It was like I was leaving that part of me open, so I wouldn't have to rip bits out of it when it was time to go home.
This time, when Eiji and the field came into sight, I didn't attempt a sneak-attack approach. My arm still smarted from the day before; Raiyo's vague and useless healing ability hadn't accomplished more than almost pulling the skin back together. I'd have a scar—but then, that was nothing new. What shinobi didn't sport at least half a dozen by the time they were chūnin?
Besides, Raiyo and Aruno-sensei had already joined Eiji; today, they were just waiting on me. I'd spent too long hiding from my mother, I guess. Heh. Almost five years hiding from my mother—once I'd figured out where she'd gone.
"Don't say 'D-Rank,'" I ordered Eiji as I got close, pretending almost as skillfully as she that we were the only two there. Unfortunately, Aruno-sensei didn't join in the act.
"Not today, girls and boys! You've got a C-Rank, just for you! As practice for the Exams!"
Because a C-Rank mission was just so emblematic of the trials of the Chūnin Exams. I wished he wouldn't abuse his exclamation points so. His excitement bordered on as infuriating as my mother's smothering 'love.' My hand twitched. If Eiji had been any less controlled, her eye might have.
"We're not even leaving the damn country," I muttered, yanking open the mission scroll he tossed me. Eiji pursed her lips as she did the same. "Does this even count as C-Rank?"
"Standards are slipping," Eiji murmured with a hint of a smile. I glanced at Raiyo, and had to give him credit. He may have been an idiot, but he kept this thoughts to himself behind a wide-eyed mask. Couldn't think for himself, but as long as the orders he was given didn't lead him into a trap… As long as whoever gave those orders knew who they were dealing with and didn't try to get him to be too useful.
I didn't really get my hopes up.
-/-
The mission took all of an hour, escorting a poor dye merchant (apparently, his colors were the ugliest damn shades on the face of this earth, and when Raiyo managed to spill some on his clothes, I had to agree) to a nearby non-shinobi village. He was a twitchy, twittering thing, like an abused bird who still thought he was strong enough to fly.
With the amount of action we saw, I figured a D-Rank would have been more exciting, but at least we got out of the village for a while. We were back just in time to head over and turn in our permission slips—who were we supposed to be getting permission from, our parents? Did Aruno-sensei think we were as young as my mother did?—at the Academy building. Our sensei couldn't bring himself to let us do it on our own, apparently; he accompanied us.
I considered stabbing myself in the eye in utter mortification. As an alternative, I considered stabbing him through the eye, but that was a damn good way to get myself in a hell of a lot of trouble. I just didn't want to be blind. If I were blind, returning to Suna one day would be pointless; I wouldn't be able to look at the wide open desert and the redheaded boy. If I were only blind in one eye, I still wouldn't be able to see them both at once. (And besides, there was no guarantee that I'd be able to find a hand to pull me out. I wasn't afraid of the dark, just afraid of the shroud.)
The best thing about learning to hide my emotions, I decided as we walked through snickers at our inability to hand in our entry forms without our sensei, was that I could hold my head high and beat those morons to a bloody pulp without them being any the wiser.
Besides, I told myself firmly, biting down on my lip—seeing as my anger didn't bleed so easily, nor was it so easily cowed—they'd see when the tests started. We were two years older than most of them. (And the older genin, the ones who'd taken it before, offered nods instead, most of them. Like us, they'd been shinobi long enough to grow up. It helped that most of them had met Sensei, too; some of them had scraped away the opacity of his mask long before I had.)
As Eiji crossed her arms and looked cool, and Raiyo trailed along looking meek, Aruno-sensei beamed at every young ninja around us as if they bore us no derision whatsoever. I wasn't sure if he was naïve or just blind—or, remembering the glimpse I had seen, merely hiding.
Maybe he was a better shinobi than I thought.
-/-
This place was a mess.
I massaged my temples as the third guy—actually, this one might have been a girl, which was frankly a little disturbing, although the more disturbing part may have been that I couldn't actually tell—hit on Eiji next to me. She gave him/her the same cool glance she'd flashed the last two, and turned her back on the shinobi from a foreign village, also leaving Raiyo facing her discouraging body language.
"Don't turn your back on the enemy," I muttered, half to myself, glancing up at her without raising my head.
"Hun, the only possible way to avoid that right now is to stand with our backs to the wall, and all the wall-space is taken." She grinned at me, and I returned the expression, warmed by the 'our.' Sure, I didn't try too hard to make friends to leave that empty space ready for home, but I still loved the ones I had. And it was nice to know there wasn't anything reprimanding in her statement; she was just teasing.
I leaned back against one of the many long tables—I was guessing there would be writing involved in this test—and glanced over at Raiyo, who really had been saying even less than usual in the past few days. With a hint of worry, I wondered if his lovesickness had swollen up into his throat, masquerading as a toad nesting in his vocal cords.
My concern didn't last long, though; only until the flash of red hair danced through my peripheral vision, a little wave of greeting. My head snapped around so fast my neck threatened to quit on me, but it was only a random Kumo-nin, not the redhead from the day I left Suna.
It could have been, though. Hell, it was likely. He was probably here.
And suddenly, I was afraid.
It was easy, so easy, to miss him from afar, the boy I'd never had a chance to be friends with. He hadn't hurt me on the day I'd shown him my tenuous control over his element, proving he'd had the potential to distance himself from the label he'd been given. But that was ten years ago, and I had no way of knowing what he'd been up to since then.
Hell, I wasn't sure I wanted to. I'd been scared of him at age five, and suddenly, that fear was one more memory, one more overpowering memory, that I had of home.
Oh, hell. What was I going to do if he was here?
