When Hitomi came back to her senses, night had fallen on the Land of Fire. Camp had been installed not so far from the road, but the spot was different enough that she couldn't recognise it with sight alone. Without the smell of blood and water that hit her when the wind changed, she wouldn't even have guessed that they were still on the same road. Naruto was sitting next to her, a hand on her shoulder to feel for the first sign of her waking up – he beamed, so obviously relieved that she was opening her eyes. "Hitomi, finally! Kakashi-sensei told us everything was normal, but Sasuke and I, we were still worried! What happened to you after the fight?"
The girl answered with a careful shrug. She didn't want to tell her brother that she didn't know, because it would have been a lie. She was still able to recognise a panic attack when she was going through one. After sitting up, she looked around the camp. Sasuke was using his chakra to stoke the fire and work on his chakra control at the same time, Tazuna next to him staring at his sake bottle down to the last quarter with hesitation. Behind them, Kakashi was making sure his kunai were sharp. Her three cats were patrolling in the shadows of the woods surrounding the little clearing where her team had decided to settle. On her lips, Hitomi forced a smile and gestured for Naruto to help her up. "Don't worry. Whatever it was, it's over now, I feel better. You should go help Sasuke with this fire, and perhaps get started on a meal. It's your turn, isn't it?"
"Aaaah, you're right! How do you always remember?"
She let out a half-genuine chuckle then got up and stepped away from Naruto, still weak on her feet. She grabbed a blanket tossed on the ground and draped it over her shoulders. A quick whiff told her it was Sasuke's. He wouldn't mind, he who was never cold. She arrived next to Kakashi-sensei, who stared at her for a few moments before going back to checking his weapons.
For a long time, they didn't say anything, then the teacher started, in a low voice so only she could hear him. "You're not the first to have such a reaction after a real fight. It's only a problem if it becomes your systematic response, but I'm gonna watch you closely starting from now."
"It's just… The mission with you, and now this… It's a lot."
"I understand that, Hitomi-chan. That's why I think it's not a serious problem and that you can overcome it. Your mind is strong enough to take it. But, no matter if it happens again or not, I want you to see a therapist. Normally, Genin don't need it, but you're not just any Genin, are you?"
"I didn't ask for it…"
"That you asked for it or not isn't important. The village uses you as it sees fit, and in turn you use the resources laid down for you depending on your needs. It's best for you to start therapy now, when your mind is still in quite a good shape. Trust me, I'm speaking from experience here."
Hitomi didn't q. When Kakashi had been her age, he had already been drowning in his own demons, between his father's suicide and the war that hadn't allowed him to mourn properly. When would he have had time to go to therapy? She was already extremely surprised that he was bringing it up. Where was the Kakashi with no real mentoring skills from the canon?
"I wouldn't know what to say to a shrink," she mumbled.
"You don't have to speak right away. Mine started by telling me about her, to make me feel more at ease. Would you want me to make an appointment with her for you?"
For several seconds, Hitomi stared at her teacher without any visible reaction. She could only see one of his eyes now, the one so black she couldn't make out the pupil from the iris. Still quite hesitant, she finally nodded. She had seen more than her share of therapists and psychiatrists in the Previous World, to put words on some of the things that had turned her life hard, cold, tasteless. She was happy in her new life, so she hadn't thought she'd need that help again. Stupid and presumptuous, without a doubt.
"It's decided then," Kakashi said in a gentle, comforting tone. " I hope it's gonna help you, to have someone to talk to about those things. I discovered it was important for me, anyway…"
His thoughtful tone made Hitomi understand it was time to leave him to himself. After a slight hesitation, she went to sit next to Sasuke. He was done working on the fire but hadn't stepped away from it. He greeted her with a nod and shifted to make room for her.
"I was worried for you."
"I'm sorry, Sasuke. Do we know why those ninjas attacked us? This was supposed to be a C-ranked mission, but ninjas are at least…"
"B-rank, yeah. Apparently, the man who owns most of the Land of Waves' industries wants to stop Tazuna from finishing his bridge at all cost, even if he has to kill him for that, just so he keeps the monopoly over trade. The bridge would break that monopoly. We can expect other enemy shinobi, but probably not right now."
"And Kakashi-sensei decided to continue anyway?"
"He didn't want to but Naruto convinced him. He said you wouldn't want us to give up on it, and I quite agree with him. We were right, weren't we?"
"Yeah… I wouldn't want to give up on this mission, or on any mission, if I can help it. I just would have liked to not kill that man…"
"You didn't, Hitomi. Hoshihi did. And, for him, it was probably just like killing a rabbit or a rat. Okay, you summoned him, but that doesn't make you responsible for his actions, nor for your other cats' actions. They are almost adults now, aren't they?"
"Yeah. According to Kurokumo, they will soon be considered warriors, and will be able to take apprentices that will add to my summons if they want to."
"That contract is really good. I'd like to get my hands on my clan's contracts, the Rams and the Falcons, but I have no idea where they are hidden."
"Shikaku-ojisan said the Uchiha had weapons and storage hideouts all over the Land of Fire, and even outside of it just in case they had to flee. Apparently, some of those hideouts are even older than Konoha. Maybe we can go see some of them during our next missions?"
"I'd like that, yeah. I'm not even done going through everything we got from the clan lands in the village, but I'd like to get everything I can before…"
He didn't finish his sentence, but he didn't need to for Hitomi to understand what he meant: he wanted to get everything before Itachi could get his hands on those objects, books, scrolls, everything that could make the nukenin even stronger. She wasn't even sure the older Uchiha was interested in any of those things. A much more powerful adversary, armed with a Sharingan as well, haunted Hitomi's mind. She had no way of sharing that secret with anyone – how was she even supposed to know? No, the time wasn't quite right yet.
Naruto joined them a few moments later, handing them steaming bowls of food. If the blonde was the best at cooking, Sasuke was their hunter; even without his Sharingan, he was able to kill his prey with a kunai right to the eye, and more than once the three young Genin had skinned his kills and sold the hides to Konohajin civilians. It was only a small part of their income, but no one frowned upon ryōs honestly won. "Kakashi-sensei told us that in three days, at our current pace, we'll reach the beach. Have you ever seen the sea?"
Sasuke shook his head, but Hitomi nodded, her head filled with memories of the time she had spent with Ensui on one peculiar pebble beach. She had been so happy, so free, so innocent back then.
"Really, Hitomi? How is the sea then?"
"You'll know you're getting close before you can even see it if you focus on smell. It's blue or grey depending on the colour of the sky, and it looks infinite. When you bathe in it for a long time and then leave, it's like the movements of the waves follow you for a few steps, so you have to be careful not to fall."
"I really can't wait!"
Hitomi couldn't suppress a small giggle, more sincere and light this time that she had been after waking up. No one could make darkness retreat from people's minds like Naruto could. She shifted slightly, just enough to press her shoulder against his for a moment, then straightened up and started to eat the rabbit stew he had cooked. The food warmed her up from the inside just like the fire did from the outside, and she thanked Naruto with a smile.
The following morning, they got on the road again. The weather stayed merciful: summer was approaching, as shy and distant as the beautiful Does haunting the Nara forest, who only showed a flash of brown pelt in the corner of the eye before disappearing out of sight. Day after day, Hitomi looked better, even if she spent long hours in deep silence. Kakashi had given her a lot of things to think about.
As the trees grew sparser and the smell of iodine grew stronger, they had to fight off a group of bandits. After the Demon Brothers, those civilian thugs hardly were worthy opponents, so Hitomi didn't summon her cats that time. Under Kakashi's satisfied stare, the three children tied their attackers up, then they all went out of their way to drop the five men to the police station of the closest village, since it was a ninja's duty.
And then they reached the sea. That day, the sky was such an extraordinary shade of blue that Naruto's eyes almost looked dull in comparison, and that amazing colour reflected in the water. The blonde boy let out an amazed exclamation but, instead of running to the waves like he would have done a few years earlier, he was content just to look, beaming so hard Hitomi's cheek ached just glancing at him.
Tazuna had apparently prepared better than Hitomi had thought based on his initial lie: he guided them along the beach to a small fishing village – rather a group of six tiny houses than a real village – where a man who had agreed to take him back to the Land of Waves was waiting for him. They arrived at the village in the evening and were scheduled to take to the sea in the morning, which meant they had the time, around a big fire, to hear the story of the place.
"We're from the Land of Waves, too," a young woman with pale grey eyes said. "My family has always lived there, but today… It's just too dangerous." She put a hand on her belly and her companion, a sturdy man sitting on her left, wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Hitomi understood what the woman wasn't saying, and she probably wasn't the only one to make the connection.
"Everything is hard there," the woman continued. "The men are forbidden from fishing or hunting without Gatō's authorisation, and the women and children are starving. He hired rōnin from the Land of Iron, all kinds of mercenaries, and even nukenin, to make sure everyone obeys his law. If it's a man breaking the rules, he's whipped publicly or worse. If it's a woman… If it's a woman, her punishment is private, but everyone knows what happens. If it's a child, Gatō either hands him to the men who pleased him, or the child gets a public whipping."
Another man, half his face devastated by an old wound, spoke then. "My father told me before he died that our country wasn't always like that. We had efficient orphanages once, and the people who didn't have a job could feed themselves and their families without hurting anyone. Now, everything is a struggle there. What you have, you take from someone. If you live, it's at the cost of another person inching closer to death."
The three young Genin listened attentively, their face serious and sober. Those fishermen were barely a dozen, but each of them had some cruelty of the regime to add to the tale. One had to be immensely lacking in morality to push a whole country to its ruin for personal gain. For a moment, Hitomi thought about the leaders of the Previous World, who had acted that way on many occasions during her short lifetime.
"We left around a year ago. We were supposed to be twentyish, but some of us didn't make it through the guards who patrol the villages to make everyone obey the law."
"If the situation in the Land of Waves got better," Hitomi started in a thoughtful tone, "would you want to go back?"
The answers to that question were unanimous. Each of those people had left behind relatives or memories they wanted to get back to. There were terrified fugitives, broken by the horrors they had escaped. Hitomi and Kakashi shared a meaningful look. It wasn't the objective of their mission, but if they could do something about it… Ninjas weren't anything like righters of wrongs, but they had an honour code. It was different depending on the villages, more or less righteous, more or less oriented towards a particular value. Konoha's value was the Will of Fire, and Team Severn bore it high and strong, no one could doubt it.
At the first light of dawn, they took to the sea on a tiny motor boat belonging to the elder of that little community. His hands were scarred in a way that didn't fit his job, but none of the young ninjas asked about it and the adults had enough scars, psychological and physical, to know that it would have been rude. Hitomi showed Naruto how to put his hand under the water so it splashed in its wake; it kept him busy for a while. At other moments, she used her chakra to make faceless water characters rise from the waves and dance to work on her control. During a mission, one didn't try to learn new techniques, but training in other ways was fine.
The mist grew thicker each hour that went past and, when the coast of the Land of Waves appeared in sight, their little boat had become invisible and quiet, its motor shut so they wouldn't attract unwanted attention. In a silence full of respect, they went under the first part of the bridge, its piers going deep into the sea, as sturdy and full of people's hope as Hitomi had imagined. She had never really understood what the creation of wood and steel had represented for the people living on the island, but she got it now. Even before it mended their failing economy by allowing them to trade without Gatō's interference, it was a symbol of resistance and bravery, of infinite possibilities. They needed all that.
They had landed only for an hour when it happened. Naruto, more than the others, was tense and looking for traces of the enemy in every bush, behind every tree. Who could have blamed him? Hitomi barely contained her own reactions, and their nervousness was slowly infecting Sasuke too. When the blonde boy threw a kunai at a bush and the only thing to run away was a terrified snow rabbit, Hitomi knew what it meant.
"Get down!" Kakashi yelled.
He didn't give time to Hitomi, who was the closest, to obey his command before he tackled her to the ground to shield her against the attack he had felt coming before anybody else. Sasuke had done the same with Tazuna; Naruto, who was only two steps in front of them, had lost a strand of blond hair to the giant sword that was now stuck in the trunk of a tree, a menacing silhouette standing on its guard as if it had always been a perch.
Zabuza was as tall, muscular and sinister as the canon had depicted him. His skin was sickly pale, his bare torso built as though the muscles had been directly carved on it, and she could count his ribs even from where she stood. The lower half of his face was hidden under bandages yellowed by use, and his grey eyes were cold, cruel. Around him rose a blithe killing intent, promising blood and brutality.
Hitomi shivered but didn't back down, standing up next to her sensei. Already she had unsheathed her sword and blood ran down her thumb, but she didn't dare act first. She was afraid of making a mistake – terror clawed inside her belly like a harpy. Sasuke and Naruto didn't do any better: even the Uzumaki, usually so unaware of that kind of thing, had noticed how out of their league this adversary was. The enemy ninja smiled, his expression visible under his thin bandages.
"Momochi Zabuza, Kirijin shinobi turned deserter…" Kakashi's voice sounded like a bad omen and was enough to stop Naruto in his rush of stupid, stupid bravery. Naruto didn't know if it was the Demon Fox or the Uzumaki blood that made him so oblivious to danger, but it was worrying.
The blonde boy turned to his adopted sister, his perplexity not quite erasing the fear from his face. "Hitomi, who's that guy?"
"Momochi Zabuza," Hitomi repeated, her tone almost soft, "also called the Demon of the Hidden Mist. He wasn't even an Academy student yet when he massacred an entire year worth of students. They were going through their graduation exam, they were supposed to be much stronger than he was. He killed them all."
"The girl did her homework, that's good." The nukenin's voice was mocking, cruel, but this time Hitomi didn't take offense – she was too busy trying to hide her fear. She obeyed Kakashi's discreet sign and took Naruto by the arm, walking him back to Sasuke's position in front of Tazuna, taking her place at the point of their triangular formation, as she had always done before. The Jōnin straightened his forehead protector, and Hitomi felt more than she saw the Sharingan awakening inside his newly uncovered eye.
"I don't have time to fool around, Kakashi," Zabuza growled. "Give me the old man and I'll let the kids and you go unarmed."
"Aah, I'm afraid I can't do that, Zabuza. What kind of example would it show to these youngsters if I abandoned a mission at the first hindrance?"
The assassin barely looked offended by Kakashi's barb. Around him, the killing intent thickened, so intense that the three Genin started choking, an instinct inside them screaming for them to run and hide. This instinct was right: after all, Zabuza was dangerous, terrifying, deadly, bloodthirsty. He didn't know mercy and would smash them to a pulp effortlessly if they opposed him… Hitomi swallowed nervously, took control over her breathing and straightened into a guarding stance. The following moment, she felt the boys do the same behind her. If they hadn't been exposed to her own accidental killing intent, as weak as it was, they wouldn't have been able to ignore the little voice in their head that begged them to flee.
"Children, don't intervene in this fight, okay?" Kakashi ordered without looking back at them. "You are no match for him. I trust you to watch over Tazuna; it's teamwork, just like I taught you."
"Ah, Kakashi… Such a pleasure it will be to beat you. Did you know that, in the Kirijin Bingo Book, they say you have mastered over a thousand shinobi techniques? It's an honour for me to be the one to end you."
"Now, now, Zabuza, don't sell the bear's hide before you've killed it, alright? They mention you in my Bingo Book, too. They say your assassination techniques are perfectly silent. Let me warn you, they won't be any use to you today."
Hitomi, when listening to tales of older shinobi, had realised such behaviour was common when two enemy shinobi met. Unless it was a secretive or urgent mission, ninjas liked to chat before they tried to kill each other, to compare their respective strength and reputation for a bit. It was a way to show mutual respect, and to acknowledge the honour it would be to win such a fight. The ninjas had long ago walked away from the samurai lifestyle, when chakra had appeared in the heart of the world, but they hadn't forgotten everything about what they used to be.
"Enough chit chat then. Since you won't let me have it my way, I don't have a choice, Kakashi."
And in a blink, he disappeared from the tree he had been perched on, his huge sword gone with him. Standing on the water of the river that ran a few meters away from the road and that the team had planned to cross, he formed a hand seal and thick mist started to spread around him. It was colder, more oppressive and more opaque than the one Hitomi could create. She couldn't see more than three meters away – even sounds seemed to be muffled in it.
"He disappeared!" Tazuna choked.
Hitomi herself was staggered. If the mist was that different from hers, what else changed in his version of the technique? In Zabuza's hands, it seemed to exceed its D-rank with laughable ease.
"Don't panic," Kakashi intervened. "I'll probably be his first target. Stay focused and remember the assassination techniques I mentioned earlier, but remain in control of yourselves, alright?"
How could they even have the slightest chance of seeing it coming? Zabuza was a Jōnin, for fuck's sake, a former member of the Swordsmen of the Mist, and they were mere Genin – better than average, but still… He had power of life and death over them, and they all knew it.
"Eight possibilities," a discarnate voice whispered in the mist. "The pharynx, the spinal cord, the pulmonary artery, the liver, the jugular veins, the collarbone, the kidneys… And the heart, of course. Which one to pick, hm?"
The killing intent intensified, screaming in their veins that they had to run or die there, now, a quick and clean death to avoid the terrible pains to come. The kunai in Sasuke's hand slowly rose to his neck.
"Calm down, Sasuke-kun," Kakashi ordered without looking back at his team. "I'll protect you, even to the cost of my life. I'm not the kind to let my teammates die." Only then did he slightly turn his head in their direction, and the Genin could see that strange smile he could make appear only with his eye. The two boys relaxed a little, but Hitomi didn't. She knew what was coming next.
When Zabuza appeared between Tazuna and them, she reacted, not allowing fear to paralyse her body. She fell on her knees with a snarl, crawled between the nukenin's legs and tackled the bridge builder to the ground just in time to save him from a decapitating blow. In the same movement, she extended her leg and managed to kick the deserter, who clearly hadn't expected to miss, so close to the balls that his air of surprise and eyes blown wide for a second almost made her laugh.
He immediately got over it and changed target, focusing on Kakashi instead. They exchanged a few hits and, as the sensei almost had his opponent where he wanted him, a second Zabuza appeared behind his back, holding a kunai to his throat. The Copy Nin's own blade stabbed the clone in front of him, making it dissolve into a puddle of water in the grass. A second later, Kakashi was cut in half… and dissolved too. The original appeared behind Zabuza, another knife already making its way to the deserter's throat. "Don't move. It's the end."
The whole thing had happened so fast Hitomi had only really seen half of it. Next to her, Sasuke had activated his Sharingan and probably followed everything better than she did. As for Naruto, he seemed astounded and maybe a bit afraid too, his shoulders tense and his eyes wide.
"Hehe… The end, uh? Do you really think you can beat me by copying my techniques with your stupid eye? Come on, Kakashi… I admit it was well done, taking advantage of my mist to clone yourself. And those words, so convincing, perfect to attract my attention while you hid and tracked me. Clever. Alas for you, I'm not quite done yet."
One more Zabuza appeared behind Kakashi's back as the Konohajin killed the clone in front of him. This time, the Copy Nin dived to dodge Zabuza's sword, probably realising it was the real one this time. They engaged in a brutal taijutsu fight, both moving so fast Hitomi couldn't track their movements. Suddenly, Zabuza managed to kick the sensei so hard he sent him flying into the river. Hitomi, terrified, watched her fears become reality, powerless.
In an instant, Kakashi was held prisoner in a chakra-infused bubble of water.