Chapter 7: Hayate
A summons to the Hokage's office on an early autumn morning did not sit well with Yugao. It wasn't that a summons necessarily meant bad news, but seeing as she had never been individually summoned for something positive, she knelt before the Hokage's desk with a bitter taste already in her mouth. His pipe sat faithfully on his lips, and his aid Raido stood faithfully by his side.
"First, I would like to thank you for your care of Uchiha Sasuke. The boy has adjusted to his new home and is attending the Academy, and I have determined that your guardianship is no longer necessary."
"Yes, Hokage-sama." She had been guarding – or rather observing – the Uchiha boy for the past two months, mostly to monitor any residual effects of the powerful genjutsu he had sustained and his overall physical health. The boy's mental health, on the other hand, was not something she could affect, even if she wanted to. She had been given strict orders to only watch from afar. She wasn't exactly sure by what definition the boy had "adjusted" to his new life, but she had to admit that part of her was relieved to be discharged of this mission.
"May I resume regular missions with Team Kakashi?" she asked, not minding how forward she might have come off. Guard duty had meant that she had missed out on some of her team's more long-term missions, and she was itching to get back to that sense of normalcy. Somehow, watching the Uchiha boy was even more mentally and physically draining than any regular weeks-long mission.
"Not quite. In fact I must also inform you that there no longer is a 'Team Kakashi'."
Before she could even fully process the words her head snapped up from its bowed position. The questioning nature of her action, even behind her mask, was not lost on the Hokage.
"I have relieved Kakashi of his duties in ANBU," he explained. "He is now a regular jounin of Konohagakure. Team Ro will be led by Tenzou."
Kakashi, a regular jounin? But there was nothing regular about Kakashi. Although the copy-nin had given ten years of his life to ANBU, he was still relatively young to be relieved from duty. Tenzou would undoubtedly make an excellent captain – he was after all Kakashi's number one confidant and unanimously accepted deputy leader, even if he was at times easy to tease – and yet she couldn't help but feel a little mournful at the prospect of no longer working under Kakashi's leadership.
The Hokage gave her a moment to process before asking, "How is your kenjutsu?"
The question had come seemingly out of nowhere. What on earth did Yugao's swordsmanship have to do with the new leadership of Team Ro? She bowed her head again, this time slightly in embarrassment. She could handle the weapon probably as well as most jounin, but could not claim any mastery. "Average," she admitted.
The Hokage took a long drag on his pipe. "Well, we will have to remedy that, won't we?"
Yugao bit back a retort. Had he just called her here to criticize her? Most ANBU, if they weren't specialists, had equally average kenjutsu skills. Why was he picking on hers?
"You will continue to be suspended from long-term missions, while – "
She could not keep her mouth shut any longer. "For what? Hokage-sama, if there is still a question of my loyalty I can assure you I have stayed true to every mission I have been assigned. You can just ask my teammates – "
The Hokage raised his right hand, effectively cutting her off. Somehow, he was still able to make her feel like a petulant child whenever she tried to speak her mind. She bit her lip.
"I see you have not lost your habit of questioning me," he sighed, and it took all her strength not to argue once again, "but, perhaps, at times, that is exactly what I need."
He let the cryptic comment slide right past as he continued, "I do not question your loyalty, Yugao. In fact, it is just the opposite. You will be suspended from long-term missions while undergoing special training in kenjutsu. This is an order."
Another special training? It felt eerily similar to when she had been basically forced into learning medical ninjutsu. Of course now she was glad that she did, however she couldn't help but feel that the Hokage still saw her as inadequate. Did he truly think so lowly of her skills that he found it necessary to give her extra training, again? Had she not yet proven her worth?
"I have already arranged for the best kenjutsu user in Konoha, Gekko Hayate. He has agreed to take you on as an apprentice."
Seemingly out of thin air, a young handsome man appeared beside the Hokage, offering a slight bow of his head – wait, handsome?
"Tenzou has also been informed of this arrangement and will be planning missions accordingly. Yugao, Hayate, I will leave it to the two of you to arrange your own meeting times. Understood?"
"Yes Hokage-sama." Hayate's voice was like butter, smooth and low and –
"Yugao?"
"Yes, Hokage-sama."
…
Yugao and Hayate had agreed to meet three times a week: Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. The weekends, he said, he liked to reserve for drinking. Missions would, of course, take precedence over everything. Advance notice would be given as much as possible, but if one day one of them didn't show up for training, it was to be assumed that they were on a mission (or dead, but neither of them were about to voice that possibility).
They chose to meet at night, under the light of the moon and stars, after all their regular duties were done for the day. Yugao arrived in her full ANBU gear to find Hayate already waiting for her at training ground twenty-three, sitting patiently on a fallen log in his standard jounin wear. The punctuality was appreciated.
When he noticed her presence he rose to meet her. "Welcome. Good evening." A smile came easily to his pale face despite the dark circles framing his eyes. Yugao had noticed them the other day in the Hokage's office as well. Was he sick or just extremely tired?
Considering he was to be her teacher, she greeted him with a bow.
"Well, seeing as this is our first meeting," he began, "I thought we could introduce ourselves – likes, dislikes, hobbies and such." He coughed something awful, tremors wracking through his body to the core. The roughness of it was in such stark contrast to the smooth, methodical way he spoke.
Introduce themselves? What were they, genin? Yugao gave no response.
He seemed unperturbed. "Well then, I'll start. Gekko Hayate, tokubetsu jounin, master in kenjutsu. I like simplicity and I dislike mess. My hobbies include drinking and looking at things I find beautiful." She caught him glance up at the sky before fixing his gaze on her. "Your turn."
And what was she supposed to say following that? His answers had been so vague. He basically only told her that he liked swords and alcohol – the same two facts she already knew about him.
Out of politeness she decided to play his game. "Yugao, ANBU black ops…" and she stopped. She simply didn't have anything more to say. Her likes and dislikes didn't matter, and she didn't have time for any hobbies.
Cough, cough. "Oh come on, there's more than that. Yugao, ANBU since age thirteen, sensory type, specializes in tracking and capture, highly proficient in medical ninjutsu, personal guard of the Daimyo for two years."
"How did you get that information?" She made sure to let the sharpness he couldn't see on her face leak into her voice. ANBU member records were supposed to be highly classified.
"Let's just say I have a connection into the Hokage's office."
Why was he trying to be so sly? "You mean that young guy? Raido?"
Almost immediately, his sly countenance fell. Yugao could almost roll her eyes. "Young guy? Actually he's older than me, but, well," cough, "yes, I asked Raido to let me look at your file. But only yours, considering you would be my apprentice."
It seemed to Yugao like a serious breach of security, but she supposed it wasn't her place to comment. If the Hokage trusted Raido so completely as to give him top security clearance, he must be dependable, which meant Hayate was either just as trustworthy or an incredibly smooth talker.
"Before we begin, would you mind taking off your mask?"
She immediately raised her defenses. "Why?"
Yugao had never taken off her mask in front of anyone before, not even Kaya. If she was on duty, her mask was on. If she was off duty, she wore her civilian disguise. Being in her ANBU gear without her mask would feel…wrong.
Hayate only shrugged. "It seems a little unfair that you get to read my expressions but I don't get to see yours."
Ah, so he was a simple man indeed.
Yugao took some time to think; Hayate was patient. She wasn't technically on duty now, and if hiding her face did give her a slight advantage, then she wouldn't be learning as much as she could. And if he had seen her complete file, then he had already seen a picture of her face anyway.
Slowly, she reached up and peeled off the mask that felt so much like a second layer of skin. Standing barefaced in front of a person she just met, she suddenly felt disproportionately exposed. She did her best to maintain a totally blank expression – which she was quite good at, to be honest.
The man's eyes lingered for a moment over her heavy lashes and sharp jaw, and before he could help it his lips parted and out escaped a faint, whispered "wow". Her eyes flashed to meet his with the slightest hint of a question and he had to remember to close his jaw.
He cleared his throat. "Well, let's get started."
He tossed her a wooden practice sword and she looked down on it with barely hidden distain. "Wood? I have my own sword, you know."
"Ok," he complied, tossing his own wooden sword to the side and pulling his real one from the sheath on his back. "Come at me then."
Unsheathing her own standard ANBU-issued sword, she quickly calculated his height and distance before going in for a strike.
Within seconds her sword was on the ground and glinting metal was inches from her throat. In a real combat situation she would have relied on her ninjutsu to counter the attack, but she knew that would defeat the purpose of the training. Still, she wanted to wipe the satisfied smirk off of Hayate's face.
"We'll start with the wooden swords."
She could only nod in agreement.
…
With the passing of her nineteenth birthday, winter was settling into the sleepy streets of Konoha. Carts of street food changed their stocks from ice cream to baked sweet potatoes. Shop owners offered hot tea to withered visitors. Market stalls stood covered, their resilient vendors calling out from under coats and blankets to the shoppers passing by.
Every other Tuesday, Yugao made her way to the market to shop for groceries. Spending less time on field missions and more time in the village meant she could afford to cook up a decent meal every once in a while instead of survive mostly on soldier pills. She enjoyed looking through the produce that was in season as well as what was being grown in greenhouses or imported from other countries. She chatted with the vendors, many of whom had begun to recognize her as a regular customer.
And she saw the man again, the one with the almond-shaped eyes and the kind smile. He was at the market nearly every time she went. Her eyes began picking out his forest green coat from amongst the crowds even before she realized that she was looking for him. He always managed to find her as well, and they would exchange a few polite words in passing, sharing recipes or notifying each other of a new sale.
Eventually they developed a sort of game. He would slip something sweet like a candy or pastry into her basket, and she would slip some healthy vegetables into his in return. The goal was to do it stealthily enough that the other person didn't notice, and most of the time they were both quite good. There were even times when Yugao would return all the way home, only to find as she was unpacking her basket a delicately wrapped dessert sitting undisturbed at the very bottom. His dexterity was really something fascinating. Of course, being a ninja, hers was as well.
She never asked for his name. After a certain point it just felt as though they had known each other for so long that it would have been awkward to ask. Besides, she didn't really have a name that she used regularly as a civilian that she could give him. When she thought of him in her mind she just referred to him as 'the market man', and that was good enough for her. She vaguely wondered at times what name he had given to her – or if he even thought about her at all.
Without realizing it, Yugao had begun to look forward to those Tuesdays at the market, to hearing his voice, seeing his smile. They were the only times she was able to feel like a regular person, just a citizen of Konoha with a regular life and a regular friend.
It was all a façade, of course, but sometimes it was enough just to pretend.
…
After the loss of the entire Konoha Police Force, all internal investigations and peacekeeping duties had fallen to the ANBU. Being restricted from missions that took her too far out of the village, it made sense that Yugao had taken on most of the village's domestic affairs as part of her daily ANBU duties.
The investigative work in particular gave her a different kind of satisfaction than she had ever experienced on combat or stealth missions. Sure, investigations took longer, and sometimes ended inconclusively, but when she did come to a conclusion, when she did manage to fix some small hidden problem in the village or improve someone's life in the smallest way – it felt good. The work and its outcomes somehow felt less abstract.
But other times the investigations took her into a darker part of Konoha than she had ever imagined possible. Besides the Uchiha surveillance, all of her past ANBU operations had dealt with national or international affairs – keeping outside threats outside of the village. But the village had its fair share of shadows as well.
Recently there had been more and more children being taken to the hospital for injuries they had sustained at the Academy. Learning to be a ninja involved learning by doing – handling weapons, sparring classmates, experimenting with ninjutsu – so mistakes and accidents were bound to occur. But the sheer number and severity of the injuries had been increasing so rapidly that even the most hardened shinobi parents had begun to complain.
And so Yugao was sent to investigate. The most difficult part was trying to get information from the children themselves. Either out of embarrassment or some misplaced loyalty, they were reluctant to speak to her about what had happened in school. She couldn't blame them. Most of them were eleven or twelve, those students set soon to graduate, but in most ways they were children still, and they were still learning how to trust.
And for good reason. As it turned out, the entire scandal led back to a group of teachers who apparently still held some nostalgia for the wartimes. Believing that the village's children in this time of peace had gone soft, they had decided to implement their own unsanctioned training methods. The students were reportedly forced to spar each other until one lost consciousness, use each other for target practice, and not expect any intervention if they were subject to bullying. In fact, the teachers encouraged bullying, under the belief that the child being bullied was weak, lacked a strong will to defend themselves, and was therefore unfit to become a ninja. If the students didn't comply, they confessed, they would be punished.
In the end, the teachers involved were removed from the school, stripped of their rank, and thrown in jail. The principal was forced to resign for turning a blind eye. The open positions were offered to substitute teachers, and a new screening process was implemented in order for teachers to receive their credentials. The hospital and remaining school fees of the student victims were all paid for by the village.
It was cases such as this, cases involving children, that Yugao found the most difficult and yet the most important to undertake. Abuse, neglect, kidnapping, abandonment – even in peacetime these atrocities did not cease. Even in peacetime there were still rotten people who took advantage of those more vulnerable.
The world had changed. The village was changing. And somewhere in the adjustment Konoha had forgotten its children. The battles they would have to face no longer took place on open fields, but rather behind closed doors, or within their own minds. There was no one to help them prepare for these types of battles, no one to help them deal with the outcomes. And Yugao was beginning to see how, even in peacetime, children like Uchiha Itachi could come to exist.
…
Hayate was coughing again.
She had been training with him for a few months now, long enough to know that it wasn't just a temporary cold. He was able to keep his coughing at bay while they sparred, but the moment they stopped to take a break it was as though his body was punishing him.
They sat side by side on the fallen log of training ground twenty-three while he regained his breath. Whatever he had in his water bottle usually seemed to help (when he had first told her that it wasn't water, Yugao had her suspicions that it was actually sake, but he remained too sober for that to be the case).
Did these coughing fits attack him in his sleep too? Was that why dark circles permanently plagued his handsome face?
"I am a medic, you know," she offered tentatively once his coughing had subsided, "I could take a look, if you want."
"Thank you, but no."
"There could be a solution if you – "
"Again, thank you, but it's fine."
Although his words were polite, his tone was sharp, and she was afraid she might have pushed too far. It wasn't her business, she had to remind herself, what he chose to do with his life. She was here as a student, not as a medic, so she had to push those instincts aside.
When he spoke again she expected him to restart their training, but instead, his tone turned conversational, almost apologetic.
"I've had it since I was born," he explained, eyes trained on the ground. "Practically grew up in the hospital. It's just a combination of shitty lungs and a stupid immune system. Technically I shouldn't even be doing this."
He gestured towards the swords, the training ground. Being a ninja, he meant.
Yugao made sure to look anywhere but at him. Her usually smooth-talking smirk-wearing teacher was suddenly being so, so vulnerable, and she wasn't sure what to do.
"Then…why are you doing this?" She asked tentatively. She wasn't sure if she actually wanted to know the answer.
"I'm a shinobi. I endure. It's what we do." Cough.
"That's…redundant."
She could hear the smile in his voice even without looking at him. "Geez, I knew you'd be too smart for me." Cough, cough "Still, it's the only answer I have."
Her eyes automatically looked up to find the moon, as they usually did when she had something to think about. As shinobi we endure. She had heard this multiple times, both from others and from herself. But never had she imagined that simply taking each breath every day could be an act of endurance.
"So, you like looking at it too," came his soft voice from beside her. She allowed one small, quick questioning look in his direction. "The moon," he clarified.
She let her eyes focus on the bright crescent. Why weren't they getting back to training?
"Yes," she answered.
And suddenly, even though she knew it was wrong, she didn't want to get back to training.
Perhaps it was because he had opened up about himself first, or perhaps it was because the moon really looked beautiful that night, but she followed with, "It reminds me of my family."
"Why is that?"
She could feel him looking at her but she continued to keep her eyes on the moon. It was like an anchor, guiding her spirit and her words. This was uncharted territory.
"My clan used to believe the moon was a goddess. They used to pray to her and offer her gifts." She had never talked about her family or her clan out loud to anyone before. After all, she had never met them. Her only connection to them now came from her parents' stories, or the moon itself.
"Used to?" Hayate prodded gently, and she wondered why he cared to know, and still more, why she cared to tell him.
"They're all gone. Or scattered, at least."
And suddenly words she had never said, and never thought she would say, were spilling from her tongue. "My clan was destroyed in a civil war that made my parents refugees. I only know about them from the diaries my parents left behind. They wrote down everything, all the clan's history, their family traditions, the lessons they learned, almost as if – almost as if they knew they were going to die." The words, and the emotions behind them, had come without warning. Yugao had never given much thought as to why her parents had been so obsessed with documenting every single event in their lives. Had they really been so prepared to leave her behind?
Her brow furrowed. She didn't like this thought, this feeling that was creeping inside of her and threatening to take over. Did they know? Did they know that she would be an orphan? Did they accept that?
"All shinobi are prepared to die," answered Hayate after a pause, his voice low and thoughtful. "It seems like your parents just took extra care in doing so, probably because they had someone to care about."
It was true that Yugao, and every high-ranking shinobi she knew, was prepared mentally for death. She had been prepared since the first time she lost a comrade. But to be prepared physically, to make concrete plans – perhaps her parents had seen so much get destroyed, had witnessed so much loss that they wanted to make sure they left something behind. If Yugao were to die on her next mission, would she have anything to leave behind?
Still, wasn't it a selfish way to be? To bring a child into the world, entrust them to carry on your entire legacy, all your hopes and dreams and aspirations, when you knew there was a chance that you wouldn't be there to watch them grow up? She didn't blame her parents for doing it, she was glad that they had done it, but she wasn't sure if she could ever do it. It would be better as a shinobi, she thought, to live a life unattached, to not force anyone else to carry your burdens. It was the responsible thing to do.
But then, if Yugao were to die on her next mission, all her parents' knowledge and hopes and dreams would die with her.
Face still turned skyward she became aware that she and Hayate were still sitting side by side, wooden practice swords long forgotten. For some reason, she didn't mind. His eyes were on the moon as well.
"Why do you like it?" she dared to ask, wanting to shift her thoughts away from her own questions. "The moon."
She waited patiently for his response, as he had for her.
"I could always see it from my hospital rooms." He paused to swallow bitter memories. "I could always count on it to be there, to take each phase in its turn. It's like a guide, it's..."
He shifted his gaze and for a moment they were facing each other, and his hooded eyes were piercing in their directness. For a moment she was locked in – one excruciating moment when time seemed to slow down and her heartbeat with it. But then he shrugged, and he smiled, and looked up again as he answered, "It's a light that shines in the darkness."
But he was wrong, she wanted to tell him, because the brightest thing she saw that night was his smile.
Training was called off for the rest of the night.