When Team Seven finally reached Tazuna's house, Hitomi had grown sickly pale, her forehead covered in cold sweat, and seemed ready to pass out. Tsunami, the bridge builder's daughter, didn't let that happen: once she had Kakashi laying on a futon in the living room, she approached the young Yūhi with a serious and severe look on her face. Her movements, with the Jōnin, had been direct and sure, showing an experience in healing. A nurse, maybe? She put a hand on Hitomi's shoulder and inspected her from top to bottom with a stare. "Ribs?"

"Hm hm. A mean kick. But you should have seen the other guy…"

The woman had a brief, dry laugh, still with a trace of humour, then had her untie her kimono and helped her out of her steel fishnet shirt. Hitomi had long ago lost any notion of modesty, a luxury no one could afford during a mission except in very rare occasions. Anyway, she lived with Sasuke and Naruto. They had seen everything there was to see and hadn't manifested the faintest interest.

Tsunami's fresh and inquisitive fingers started prodding at her ribs. On the right side, an almost black bruise had bloomed under her skin and, when the young woman brushed against it, Hitomi couldn't help but stiffen with a pained moan, half-choked before it reached her lips. After a few moments, satisfied, Tsunami wrapped her ribs in bandages and helped her back into her kimono. She left the steel fishnet untouched, since the wounded girl would probably have a whole lot of trouble putting it back on. "Absolute rest for a few days, just like your sensei. Dad, go get her another futon in the attic! I'm gonna bring your meals here, and until I give you the okay, I don't want to see you train, alright?"

That no-nonsense tone wasn't the kind you disobeyed, so Hitomi nodded docilely as Tazuna unfolded a comfy-looking futon at her feet. Naruto and Sasuke helped her lay on it and made sure she had everything she needed within easy reach. Okay, she couldn't do much while staying in bed, but at least she could read. She was a bit jealous that her brothers were free to move and train, since they hadn't been wounded during this fight. With a quick gesture that lit up a fire of pain along her ribs, she stopped Sasuke before he left the room. "Train when Tazuna-san is home, but follow him everywhere. We have beaten a powerful opponent, but… Something isn't quite right here. I'm gonna try to understand what the matter is while I'm stuck here."

"Okay. Keep an eye on Kakashi-sensei and don't worry too much about us, Hitomi-nee. If we have a problem, Naruto will send one of his clones and ask that you summon your cats. Deal?"

Hitomi nodded and let him go, her eyes staying for a moment on his silhouette as he walked out of the room. She would have far preferred being amongst them, but she was paying the price of her own recklessness. If she had been quicker, or if she had fought better, she wouldn't have been wounded, it was as simple as that. She still had to train. She had survived Zabuza, but the next event in the canon, the Chūnin exam, would be far more demanding.

A small, muffled noise, close to a moan or a whine, attracted her attention to Kakashi. Under his blanket, he was shaking, and his only visible eye, still close, was twitching in pain. His hair was damp, probably in cold sweat similar to the one she had known so well in such a state. After a moment of hesitation, Hitomi put one of her hands out of her own blanket and extended her arm until her fingertips touched the naked skin of his wrist.

Ensui had explained how chakra transfusions worked. It wasn't very complicated to do, but missions rarely made that gesture doable. She had to mobilise pure chakra, not tainted by affinity nor Kekkei Genkai, and make it flow slowly from her Gates to the skin of the person she wanted to help. It was as simple as activating a seal. She closed her eyes and focused for a moment, just enough for the flow to start circulating between them. She could only help him a little – despite her training, her reserves were still too small to fill even a quarter of his – but it was still better than no help at all.

The man opened his eyes two hours later, and his first reflex was to clasp his hand around Hitomi's wrist in an iron grip. She let out a pained little whine in protestation, caught by surprise. The procedure was monotonous, repetitive, so much so that she had started to slip into a daze, pacing in her Library while still maintaining the transfusion. She hadn't expected him to wake up yet.

"What are you doing?" he growled.

"I-I didn't use a lot of chakra during the fight and you were almost dried out, sensei. You'll be on your feet sooner if I help your reserves."

A heavy silence fell between them for a few seconds then he let go of her wrist and, when she saw him relax instead of sliding out of reach, she touched him again and resumed the transfusion.

"Where are the boys?" he asked after a while.

"Training. Tazuna and his daughter Tsunami are preparing dinner."

"And what are you doing here?"

"Zabuza cracked my ribs with his fucking kick. Tsunami said I was bedridden for a few days."

"I see," he said in a softened tone. "I'm sorry, Hitomi-chan. It shouldn't have happened."

"Come on, sensei. We all know the risks we're taking when we go on missions. Zabuza is a formidable adversary. If anything, I should be proud I survived his kick. You did your best and you still won the fight. Without you, we'd all be dead."

"Is? Not was?"

"Err… Yeah. That's bad news and I'm sorry, sensei, but I really don't think Zabuza is dead."

"What's making you think that?"

"Well, the boy who stepped in… He's a Hunter Nin, right? But, in general, according to Ensui-shishou, the hunters destroy the bodies on site, so as to minimise the risk of being intercepted by enemy forces. But he took the body with him, which is the first inconsistency." He didn't protest so she continued, keeping her voice as low as possible so the civilians wouldn't hear. No need to frighten them. Fear was a shinobi's business. "Then, there's the problem of the senbon. You know I use them, and they are not commonly used for the killing blow. I would need an anatomy treaty to be sure, but I think… I think the shot could have made us believe Zabuza was dead and, in that case, it means the boy is really his ally and wanted to stop us from killing him for real."

Silence took back its place between them, this time tense and nervous. Kakashi seemed aghast to have missed something that big. He was too hard on himself, Hitomi couldn't have reached that conclusion for a long time if she hadn't known about it beforehand. She too needed time to put her finger on the inconsistencies of a situation when she was confronted by it, a weakness Kurenai had exploited mercilessly when she had taught her daughter to notice and break out of genjutsu when she was subjected to it.

"Fuck, I think you're right," the teacher sighed after a few minutes. He seemed so exhausted she wanted to hug him but refrained. Somehow, she doubted he would know how to react to a hug, even though he could definitely use one. Or ten. Or a thousand. "In that case, he'll need the better part of a week to get better. As for my own recovery… It should be faster, if you continue to help me."

"Do you want us to work on something during that period?"

"Sasuke and Naruto will have chakra control exercises. They aren't quite at the level I want to bring them to. Since you're bedridden, our options are limited. I think I'm gonna have you work on your fūinjutsu, maybe look at what you have been trying to create lately and see if I can help, or maybe give you symbols you don't know about yet, if such a thing even exists."

The girl nodded, a surge of warmth and excitement washing over her at the idea of working on her favourite subject. That choice was the best Kakashi could possibly have made, and not only because it made her absurdly happy: working on seals didn't require a lot of physical effort or chakra, which would allow her to transfuse to him more.

"You need rest as much as I do, perhaps even more since you're so young. Close your eyes and focus on the flow of chakra between us for a moment. I'll take control of it so it continues while you sleep, and I'll cut it when your reserves are half-emptied. Sounds good?"

She hummed in affirmation and obeyed his orders. She was tired, just as he had said, and the pain was slowly starting to dull, leaving her sleepy and numb. She only took a few minutes to fall asleep. Immediately, her mind floated to one of her nightmares. She dreamed of Kirigakure in the time of the Great Purge, of a woman with long, long black hair, crying and begging a man to let their son live. Hitomi only understood who said son was when ice spears pierced the house in all directions, leaving only him untouched, and the man and woman in pools of blood on the floor. Haku.

She woke up with a start, Kakashi's hand pressed on her mouth to muffle the cry of distress she was letting out. Their eyes met for a moment then he carefully let go of her and sat up. He had left his futon, but she could still see exhaustion hanging heavily off his shoulders.

"Those nightmares, you had them for how long?"

"Since… I'd say since the Uchiha Massacre? Anyway, that was the first to really hit me."

"Why that one in particular?"

"I…" She hesitated and let her voice dry out. Could she tell Kakashi about it? It was… It was dangerous, but then, she had learned to trust that man by spending so much time with him. She had never told anyone in her family; only Ensui and Gaara knew, because they had been together in Sunagakure and putting it in writing had seemed so much easier. "In that dream, I was Uchiha Mikoto, Sasuke's and Itachi's mom, and I was speaking to Hokage the Third. Fugaku was beside me. The Hokage refused to grant us guardianship of Naruto despite me being his godmother and was accusing us of the Kyūbi's attack on the village."

She saw the spark of alert in Kakashi's eye. Had he been part of the ANBU team guarding the Hokage's office that night, even as his sensei had been killed a few hours earlier? She hoped not. Even ANBU needed time to mourn.

"And you had other dreams like that after that one?"

"Sometimes. Most of the time, my nightmares are just typical nightmares, but sometimes… I find myself in other people's bodies. Some of them I can identify, some of them I can't. It's always during a significant event in their life. In one of those dreams, I was Uchiha Shisui and I was signing the Crow Summoning Contract, for example. I know I was him, because I introduced myself to the Crow I summoned. He was one of Sasuke's cousins, before…"

"I knew him, yes. And today?"

"Today, it was… I think I was on an island because there was a lot of mist and the smell of salt in the air, just like here. I saw a woman begging for her son's life. A man stabbed her to death and, as I saw her draw her last breath, I did something with ice that killed the man too, and I realised I was the little boy she had attempted to save. It was terrifying…"

"I can imagine. Do you think those dreams bear any significance?"

There, Hitomi shrugged, feigning a dismissal she wasn't feeling at all. "Those dreams with the Uchiha happened the night of the massacre and just after I got my tantō from Sasuke. It belonged to Shisui before his death. There's a connection, no doubt about it. But I think it might be my mind making it all up on its own, even though there's a chance something bigger is at play here. I really have no idea."

Kakashi nodded, a thoughtful expression on his features. He didn't look surprised about the whole thing. In this world, there were things far stranger than possibly prophetic dreams. Deep inside, Hitomi was relieved that she could tell him about it while keeping control over what she was sharing with him: she had just planted a seed that would, later, strengthen her so-called intuitions, a complex move she hadn't dared try until now. But Kakashi, who had once been a ROOT operative, wasn't very likely to spill the beans to Danzō.

"I want you to tell me about those dreams if they happen again. They could become useful." He sighed and visibly relaxed, a spark of pain gleaming in his eye for a second. "Well, since you're awake now, tell me where you keep your fūinjutsu work, I want to see what you're trying to create these days."

Hitomi gave him that information without a fuss, and infused her chakra into the storage seal when he handed it to her – it was one of the several she kept locked from any chakra but hers. After a puff of smoke, around a dozen books and notebooks filled with her neat handwriting piled up on Kakashi's lap. Not willing to wait anymore, the teacher took one of them and started reading in silence.

"Sensei?"

"Hm?"

"I wanna read. Can I have Icha Icha Paradise, please?"

She was delighted to see Kakashi choke on his own spit and lose himself in a coughing fit, his only visible eye damp and his face an interesting shade of red. When he calmed down, she hit him full force with the Stare, which she had practiced a lot to strengthen it on the very willing victim Ensui presented.

"A-alright. But please don't tell your mother. I don't want her to slit my throat and bathe in my blood."

She beamed at him and nodded as enthusiastically as she could as he handed her the first volume. A few moments later, they were both deeply immersed in their own reading, and Hitomi discovered why Kakashi loved that book so much. From the very first page on, she was drawn into the scenario and attracted by the female main character's charisma like iron to a magnet. Her eyes devoured page after page – she had always been an incredibly quick reader.

"D'you think Jiraiya-sama would be interested in reading what I write?" she asked after an hour of silent reading, her voice quiet and soft.

"You write?"

"Hm hm. Well, not erotica, but stories that are on my mind. I've already completed three novels and I started a fourth a few days after the Academy ended."

Thanks to her eidetic memory, she only had to go look for the books she had read in the Previous World and work on adapting them to the codes of her new society. She was still deeply convinced that literature shouldn't be exclusive to one universe, and if she could help it navigate her new world freely, it was a pure delight. For the time being, only Ino and Sakura had read the novels she had written, their favourite being a contemporary romance between a daimyō's daughter and a nukenin.

"The master isn't in the village right now, but I could ask him for you, if you want. I'm sure he'd be eager to discover a new Konohajin writer before anyone else in the industry."

"Thanks, sensei," she smiled before going back to her book.

Tsunami found them still reading after the sun had set, him sitting on the ground, his back against the cushions of the settee, and her still lying on her futon, the arm of her non-injured side holding the book to her eyes. The woman smiled with satisfaction as she contemplated this quiet scene, she who missed her work so dearly. She had had no choice but to quit when Gatō had started threatening her family. One day, maybe, she could get back to it, but for now this make-believe was good enough. "Dinner is ready," she announced as she stepped in the room. "Stop reading for now, I'm gonna bring you your plates. Sensei, you can help your student to sit up, but go slow and easy."

The man obeyed without objections, closing the book on the Reduction Theory heavily annotated in Hitomi's handwriting that he had been reading. His movements slow and careful, he supported her to a sitting position just next to him, her back against the settee as well. "What you wrote in your notebooks is really advanced. Your seals are Chūnin-level at the very least, which is surprising for someone as young as you are and will probably draw a target on your back if shinobi from other villages notice."

"Because Seal Masters are so rare?"

"Yeah, and because you have the potential of becoming one. You're not there yet, though, and that means I can still teach you a few things about fūinjutsu. Soon enough, however, you'll become far better than I or Ensui are in that field."

When Tsunami brought them dinner, they were busy discussing the very complex Reduction Theory, which allowed someone to create very small seals that were almost impossible to decode if they weren't safely expanded. It was the kind of seals the ROOT operatives had on their tongues, but Hitomi didn't bring that up, since she wasn't supposed to know anything about a rogue organisation inside the ANBU. She was attempting to go around the lack of stability that seals bore once that theory was applied to them, for a design she was working on that could be useful in battle. She didn't want it to fall into the enemy's hands, so she had to reduce it.

When night came, Hitomi was still exhausted enough to fall asleep almost immediately. Sasuke had insisted on spending part of the night in the living room with Kakashi and her – well, especially with her. He told her how he and Naruto had met Inari, Tsunami's son, and the certainty in the child's mind that the shinobi were going to die rather than successfully accomplish their mission. Hitomi was happy she hadn't interacted with the boy herself. She probably wouldn't have reacted well to such a discourse, and pain had always made her short-tempered and snappy.

The next day, she already felt better and well-rested, even if another nightmare had disturbed her night. It had been about her B-ranked mission this time – she couldn't wait for Kakashi to take her to his therapist. If that woman could help her get rid of her nightmares, she would be a hero in her eyes. She hated the moment of terror and confusion she had each time she woke up. The compassionate stare Kakashi had had for her that day, as if he knew exactly what was on her mind, had made her want to burst with shame.

The next two days were spent training and working. Naruto and Sasuke were trying hard to make a kunai stand up on their open palms, and Hitomi was working on her seal. It was almost done now, tested again and again on the rabbits Sasuke captured for her. At least, this way, Tsunami never lacked meat for dinner – her failed seals had a propension to burst aflame.

Five days after their first battle, Hitomi and Kakashi were back in good shape, even if Tsunami had ordered the girl to take it easy and to be careful of her ribs, still quite tender. After researching the topic at length in medicine treaties, the Yūhi heiress had discovered that chakra and convalescence were tightly linked: a shinobi with full reserves could get better up to five times quicker than a civilian, while a ninja in a state of chakra exhaustion healed at the normal speed and even risked getting sick or his wounds becoming infected, which never happened when chakra was present aplenty. By transfusing her chakra to Kakashi, Hitomi had known she was slowing down the process a bit for herself. Worth it.

When she was allowed to stand up and even leave the house, Hitomi went into town with Tsunami to protect her and help her with the groceries. She had reluctantly left her forehead protector at home: shinobi, in this little country without a Hidden Village, were rare; she didn't want to get noticed. Her Konohajin insignia made her proud, but pride couldn't justify putting a civilian and her mission at risk.

What she saw in that town shocked her, even though she had known what to expect. Misery was everywhere, carved onto the bodies of frail children whose bellies were distended on delicate bones, branded on the adults whose faces were wrinkled with worry. There were more beggars on the streets than she had ever seen, including in the Previous World. Somewhere before the horizon stood Gatō's manor, and Hitomi started to hate him, a sweet and quiet feeling that burned through her veins and weighed her mind down. Without any hesitation, she opened the purse attached to her obi and started giving money to everyone around her without them noticing, dropping it in their pockets with a brush of their fingers. She couldn't do anything more and it pained her. She prayed to the Hermit and all the deified entities the ninjas honoured that, once the tyrant fell, the country would stand back up.

Since her mood was gloomy when she came back, she decided to seek comfort in summoning her team of ninja cats. She was relieved to see that Haīro was better, the wound he had gotten against the Demon Brothers reduced to a red line under his pelt, which was already growing back. However, this wasn't her greatest surprise: a little bundle of dark grey fur was hiding between Hoshihi's paws. The girl questioned her fire-pelted familiar with a look.

"It's my new apprentice, Hai-chan," he said with a gleam of pride in his eyes. "Aotsuki-sama gave her to me yesterday. When I sensed that you were summoning us, I decided to take her with us so you could meet her."

Hai was tiny, with the scruffy pelt of a kitten and big, pale blue eyes. Hitomi extended her hand to allow her to sniff the smell of chakra, steel and ink that always mingled with her own. After an understandable moment of hesitation, the little cat rubbed her head against the offered fingers, a faint purr in her throat.

"Hello, Hai-chan. Welcome to the family."

The five other cats went to rub against the youngest to congratulate her in their own way under Hitomi's affectionate stare. Her heart did need that kind of cute scene. Even during her convalescence, she had constantly been anxious – at least her plan was ready now.

"Hokori? I'd like you to go somewhere, and for Sunaarashi to stay with me at all times. The others told you about the fight against the Demon Brothers, right?" The pair nodded and she continued. "It was just the beginning. Another powerful ninja, Momochi Zabuza, attacked us after we made shore at the Land of Waves. I was really afraid he would kill you all if I summoned you."

The cats sobered up when they heard the anxiety in her voice. Kurokumo stepped towards her then pressed his whole body against her in a gesture of comfort. He had grown, too, but he was still a bit lighter and thinner than the other, as if to mingle better with the shadows.

"Those shinobi were all hired by a man called Gatō, who oppresses the whole country, to stop the construction of a bridge between the main island of the Land of Waves and the coast of the Land of Fire. We have defeated Zabuza, but we weren't able to kill him, and there's a good chance he's gonna attack again soon. Hokori, I need you to find and watch Gatō, and to warn Sunaarashi as soon as he gets close to the bridge. Can you do that?"

The pale brown cat nodded and a knot of anxiety eased in Hitomi's mind. With the help of her trusted companions, she had a chance to prevent one of the macabre events to come. A chance was maybe all it took.