By the time evening rolled around, I'd gotten the word out to everyone I hoped personally would show up. The rest would be down to general information dissemination. I had a feeling it was going to be a crowd. Even people who didn't go in for any excuse to party had agreed to show up, one way or another everyone in the village was in need of an outlet.
I arrived with Fuyu, having split up with Natsuki for the afternoon to change clothes and cause trouble at our respective clan compounds. I still wore my dad's formal haori, Fuyu wore an armband. Dad's haori might just end up part of my wardrobe from now on, I liked it that much. Anyway, we were on time, but when we made it to the izakaya the party was already going.
"Harukaaaaaa!" wailed Maito Gai, seizing me in a hug immediately as I came through the door. I was spun around and deposited in front of Genma, who handed me a sake cup. I shot it back as soon as I was sure I wouldn't fall over immedately. What hit my throat was not sake.
"Oh wow," I said, trying to catch my breath. "So that's how it is." Shochu, and not the low-end shit you could get in a plastic 2-liter at the convenience store, either. The kind that might evaporate out of your throat before you got a chance to swallow it. The dangerous kind, because really good shochu doesn't taste like anything at all.
Genma flashed me a thumb's up, and took my cup back to fill it up again. "Good start!" he said. "Keep going."
"Sir yes sir," I said, and ferried my cup carefully to the booth where Natsuki was waving at me. He had sat next to Ibiki, and he might also have been waving over Gai. Sitting down with my cup that full might have spilled some shochu, so I downed it first, slamming the cup into one of several empty boxes on the table before I took my seat. Gekko Hayate was already in the booth, draped in the corner with darker shadows than usual under his eyes. He lifted a hand to me, and I returned the nod of pulmonary-unit-patient solidarity.
Natsuki rounded on me immediately, shoving a finger in my face. I flinched back, and discovered that somehow, I'd lost Fuyu, just between here and the door.
"I know I'm sitting here with work friends, but no talking shop! I'm getting refills," he said, and picked up a pair of already-emptied sake carafes and disappeared with them over the back of the booth, so as not to make Ibiki get up to let him out. I had been here five minutes, I was already two drinks in, and was starting to feel the sort of wonderful that comes from standing in the eye of a storm of your own making.
"So how long has this been going?" I asked Ibiki, who was watching me with his usual smirk.
"I think Team Choza got here as soon as the memorial ended," he said. "Kind of thought you'd be here earlier, since this was your idea."
"It was everybody's idea," I said, my eyebrows high. "I just threw the first rock. This would have happened without me."
"Sure," said Ibiki, lightly, and I frowned. A dark thought crept in around the bright blurry edges of my psyche; in the next timeline over where I'd died on the 10th and stayed dead, would there have been a wake?
I didn't have to justify myself any further, with Aoba sliding into the seat next to me and Natsuki vaulting back into his seat next to Ibiki, both with more sake and cups. The chaos of pouring drinks, all the way up to the rim of the glass and over, into the bamboo boxes there for that exact purpose, crashed around me for a while.
"So, is it just Kiri, where you have a pen pal?" asked Aoba, over his glass, "or do you have contacts in other villages, too?"
"I'm working on it," I said. "I was looking forward to cranking on some of the delegates when we started the treaty process this year, but who knows when that's starting up again now."
"Guess it's hard to build an information network when you're not cleared to leave the village," said Aoba, crinkling his nose. "...Also kind of redundant, because Jiraiya."
"Jiraiya can't know everyone," I said, airily. "Everybody's information network has gaps."
"We were having such a time of it in Kiri," said Natsuki, his chin on his hand. "Other villages are so- so hard, you know? And everybody knew Konoha's presence there was just optics, they weren't even going to send the Kage even if any of us did make it to finals, so no one would talk to us! But then in the tournament qualifying rounds there's Haruka up against this kid from Kiri, a foot and a half taller than her and skinny as a rake-"
I ducked down, my face in my hands, trying not to listen. Natsuki ploughed on, enjoying my embarrassment. "And you know how they make them in Kiri, all fierce and faceless with those rebreathers, it looked like it was going to be a massacre, but then! Then Haruka punches him once, in the chest, and he goes down just immediately, like someone cut his strings! And then she yells for the medic, decides they're not getting there fast enough, and sits down to heal him herself! Tearing a strip off the ref for letting this poor lad compete with pneumonia, as she's reinflating the lung she just collapsed. And then the kid's sensei gets there, and she tears a strip off him, too!"
It hadn't just been the pneumonia, Mikan was also, as Natsuki had said, a tall, skinny, young man, the exact demographic that's prone to spontaneous pneumothorax. I'd barely had to use chakra. I'd found out later on top of that he had chronic respiratory compromise from smoking, and not just tobacco cigarettes. Hidden villages are legendarily draconian about recreational drug use, so the amount of weed Mikan smoked (and I, by extension, smoked when around him) was more than one kind of impressive.
But that's neither here nor there.
I shrugged, a bit helplessly, my head still down. "You don't understand," I said, muffled. "They kept talking shit about medics."
"Ah," said Aoba, like I've just made something line up for him. "So that's why all the proposals from Kiri have them requesting medic training packets as part of the deal."
"They were very impressed!" said Natsuki, absolutely enjoying this. "Very mad, but impressed."
"Fortunately, we were there to impress them," I said, lifting my head with a wan smile. "Course, then I had to actually go fight in the third section of the exam, stay in stupid Kiri a whole 'nother month."
"But you made friends," said Natsuki, like that had made it all right. Which, honesly, yes. It had. I would do it over again exactly the same in a heartbeat, and not just because of the weed hookup. It was just extremely unfortunate that not six months later Kiri had a new and improved, even yet more insane Kage, and I did not forsee another in-person visit with Mikan and my other Mist-nin friends anytime soon.
Ah well. At least we could still be pen pals. It was a great intellectual exercise, writing letters to someone in a hostile village. What got [REDACTED] and by which village's intel screening was the most interesting part.
"I made friends," I agreed, and raised my glass in a toast. Several others joined me with a clink. This time around it wasn't shochu, but pleasantly hot sake.
The conversation turned, ebbing away from me and around again, friends chatting together and gossiping about other friends. The clink of glasses and the noise of the crowd washed over me in a way that tingled, and when frames of other lifetimes imposed themselves over this one I hardly even minded. I couldn't stay like this forever, but these moments insulated in the warm loud heart of a party full of friends were the most anything had felt like home since the tenth.
People around me got up, and exchanged places, and vanished to be replaced entirely. I had a long lively discussion about shitty family patriarchs with Kurenai; we were pulled out of it by Fuyu, who wanted my help with something. I had to get up for that, going over the back of the booth easily. Help turned out to be shitass little Shisui from the Uchiha gate guard duty, who had turned up trailing Tonbo (who we'd actually invited.)
"I don't care he's genin," Fuyu was saying, steering me by the elbow to the bar where Shisui was perched. "He's too young for this party! He's Fugaku's nephew for pity's sake-"
I stared the kid down, met with an implacable close-eyed smile. After a moment I gave a snort, and wormed out of Fuyu's grip on me.
"What does it matter whose nephew he is, if he's not a snitch?" I said, grinning. "You're not, are you, kid? A snitch?"
"I would never!" he said with a gasp.
"Good!" I said. Fuyu opened his mouth a second time, and I cut him off with a shout.
"Oh my god, underage partying! Call the cops!" as loudly and sarcastically as I could, which was very, indeed. Got some laughs.
"Fuyu," said Natsuki, very firmly, materializing out of the crowd and sliding an arm over Fuyu's shoulder. "The only policeman here is you."
I laughed, again, at that, and clapped Shisui on the shoulder. I scooped a sake jug and cups off the bar and made to leave. "I'm going out back for a smoke," I said, the rasp in my voice making it seem like I wasn't lying.
"Can I come?" said Shisui, hopping off the barstool.
"Sure," I said, and we threaded through the crowd.
The little walled garden out back of the izakaya was lit with warm hanging lanterns, the bamboo fences and lattice overhead all overgrown with vines; sunset-pink trumpets and pale gold honeysuckle. Not enough to make the smell overpowering but enough to color the atmosphere, mingling with the scent of liquor and the hot little charcoal fire in the brazier that sat in the middle of the space. There were fewer people out here. Asuma was by the fire, having that cigarette. Gai was standing on a bench, haranguing Hatake Kakashi.
"Oh that's new," I said, sliding up beside Asuma, who was watching Gai's somewhat onesided comedy routine across from Kakashi. Something about who could do the most pull-ups? Kakashi was leaning against one of the vine-covered lattice support pillars, slumped in a boneless sort of protest.
"It isn't," said Asuma, lit cigarette dangling from his lip. He wasn't even coughing on it, which I took to mean he'd been practicing. He probably had a lot more chances, now that his mother was too dead to disapprove.
I suppressed a flinch. Oh, oof. I'd knocked that one down on myself, I didn't even have a good excuse. We'd both lost parents. That didn't mean I wanted to get maudlin at the wake.
"They've done this before?" I asked, fishing the sake gourd out of my sleeve and pouring myself a cup. I had more than one sake cup in my sleeves, but I very specifically did not offer one to Shisui. Just because I'd stood up for him didn't mean he wasn't on thin fucking ice.
"Oh, regularly," said Asuma. "They're eternal rivals, you know."
"I did not know," I said. Kakashi certainly hadn't mentioned it, among the eight or nine words he'd ever spoken to me. "...I didn't think Hatake would show up. When did he get here?"
"Dunno," said Asuma, looking lazily up at the rectangle of starry sky above us. "Ten, fifteen minutes? Some ANBU came in over the fence with him, told him not to leave until he'd made a friend, and vanished again."
"Are you sure that was a real ANBU?" said Shisui, as I started laughing. Fucksake, sensei.
"What, are special ops guys gonna somehow be less weird?" said Asuma, through a plume of smoke, as my laughter metastasized into a coughing fit.
"Well… no," said Shisui, watching me with something like perturbation. I thought I saw his eyes flash red, but as quick as that they were black again.
"Ox-t-taicho," I wheezed out, remembering at the very last second not to call him -tan in mixed company. "Gods bless. Ah." I wiped my face dry with my sleeve, and with one last giggle crossed the courtyard to Hatake and Gai.
I mean, I practically had orders.
Hatake actually looked at me when I came over, wonder of wonders. Gai looked at me too, immediately derailing himself, as he's prone to do.
"Haruka!" he declared, flinging his arms wide, avoiding backhanding Kakashi by like an inch. "The flush of your cheeks, the vigor of your movements! Basking in the warm light of companionship with our comrades has restored your health!"
I grinned, I couldn't help it. Gai does that to me. "Ha!" I said. "That's the shochu. I'll be back to looking like death in the morning."
"Surely, if you drink enough water tonight you will be spared in the morning!" said Gai, presenting me with an undimmed thumb's up. "As I do not drink alcohol, I have been matching shots with water! Five times the water, to make it more fair!"
My eyes slid over to Hatake, who miraculously had not used the opportunity to bail.
"How many times has he had to leave for the restroom so far?" I asked, directing the question at Kakashi. I was rewarded with a half shrug. Asuma had said he'd only been there about fifteen minutes.
"Say, do the two of you know each other?" said Gai, with poorly concealed excitement, even as I saw him start to fidget. Don't think about waterfalls, Gai. "Kakashi you dog, you never said! Keeping your cool about this Delightful Lady of Springtime!"
Gai loves my name, you might have guessed. He likes the puns. I liked the puns too, secretly.
"Eh," I said, cheerfully. "We met in hospital."
"Of course! Exactly so. Why, that's where I met our dear Haruka!" declared Gai. I could practically see the high water line in his eyes. He was starting to do a jig.
"Weird place to meet a medic," said Hatake, with a completely flat affect. I giggled. Gai bellowed out a laugh, and then turned white.
"I will be right back!" he yelled as he vanished at top speed. Behind me, I could hear Asuma busting a gut.
"Bless his heart," I said with feeling. And then, before Hatake could get any bright ideas about disappearing, I held up the sake jug and waggled it. "Help me kill this while we look at the moon?"
He didn't exactly look amused at the repeat of my suggestion from last night, but he didn't immediately vanish, either. And I had an advantage this time, I actually had the sake. He looked up, lazily, at the patch of sky above us in the courtyard.
"Can't see the moon here," he said. My pulse spiked in excitement. He was actually thinking about it.
I grinned full of mischief. "You can up there," I said, pointing at the izakaya roof.
There was a long moment, where I could see him considering it. I held my breath, and in the very next moment there was a rush of wind and he was gone, snatching the sake jug out of my hand. I gasped indignantly, and whirled around in time to see spiky silver hair outlined in moonglow, disappearing onto the roof.
"Together!" I hollered after him. "I meant- goddammit!" No response, but a few other shinobi besides Asuma and Shisui had turned to look at this act of the show. I rounded on Asuma, who had started coughing on his cigarette after all.
"I can't use chakra or I'll die immediately," I said, without preface. "Asuma, can you-" I cupped my hands, and mimed the action I was requesting. "Gimme a boost?" I pointed, somewhat needlessly, up at the roof.
"You can't use chakra or you'll what?" said Shisui, who I had plum clean forgot about. His eyes were red again, the little shit.
"Turn those off," I said, as Asuma shrugged and bent down with hands cupped into a stirrup shape. "It's rude and you'll get cancer."
"Listen to the lady, she's a medic," Asuma told him, muffled as I braced myself on his shoulders to get a leg up. As soon as he felt my weight center on his hands he stood up and launched me, which I was only about half ready for. I caught the eaves with both arms and my stomach, scrambled to get my boot into the gutter. Boy, it's a good thing I'm a ninja, or that would have been really ungraceful.
I tuned out the laughter from behind and below me as I scrabbled up the tiles and got my butt planted safely on the roof. Asuma, Shisui, and every other goddamn person in the courtyard were watching, so I waved and flashed a thumb's up. I didn't wait around to see if that got them to stop paying attention to me, but had a feeling it had. We were at the part of the evening where dumbass stunts didn't get much attention unless you ate shit really hard as a result.
Kakashi was on the flat square in the middle of the roof, sitting on the rounded ridge there. The sake jug was uncorked, and there was a darker blotch on his mask where his mouth ought to be. He didn't move when I sat down, but he didn't resist when I grabbed back the jug to pour myself what really probably ought to be my very last drink. I was ahead of him, it was only fair. He had to catch up now.
"It's still hot," he said, watching the steam waft off the cup I'd produced from my sleeve. I looked out the corner of my eye at the wet spot in his mask. Found that out the hard way, didn't ya.
"Course," I said, lifting up the jug and tilting it to show off the spiralling seal on the bottom. "What else's fuinjutsu good for?"
He didn't seem to have an answer for that, but took back the sake jug and accepted the cup I offered him. It wasn't the warmest night, but I was too drunk to really tell, and the breeze that ruffled the treetops felt incredible. We could still hear the party from here, but it was muted and the volume changed with the direction of the wind. It smelled like grilled leeks and beer miasma.
I slid down a little on the slope of the roof so I could lay back, and amused myself by reaching up and trying to pinch the moon between my thumb and forefinger. Game's more fun when you're pretending to squish someone's head. A delicate huff of almost laughter from just overhead told me I'd narrated that bit aloud.
"This is all Genma's fault," I said, deliberately this time. "He made sure I opened with shochu."
"I've never had shochu," said Kakashi. That bashed through some of my loopiness, because this asshole had already been orphaned and in the field for years before I even made genin, and in all that time nobody'd ever bought him a hard drink?
"...I said that out loud too," I said, after that resulted in a somewhat frosty silence. I looked up, just to make sure he hadn't vanished again.
"It's against the rules," he said, and his voice was very quiet, but he was still drinking sake.
"Oh fuck that!" I burst out, and startled laughter from the courtyard told me how loud I'd been. "Rules, are made to serve people, not the other way around. It's not an end unto itself, civilization exists to support the people inside of it! Otherwise what's the fucking point!"
And then just like that we were arguing, with Hatake Kakashi pouring straight lines from the Ninja Handbook down my throat and me not sober enough to ignore him. About if there's no rules, how would anybody know what's the right thing to do? By using their best judgement, that's how, and then I was arguing around the inherent basic goodness or badness of humanity, which I considered largely irrelevant to the discussion but somehow always came up anyway.
People aren't basically bad or good, Kakashi, they just are. They have the capacity to change and make changes and wherever they stand on your moral fucking continuum they are important. Which is why a society that fails to serve the people that make it up has failed, no matter how you want to measure the reasoning behind it. If the rules we're living by are failing us, they should change.
"You sound just like ANBU Ox," said Kakashi, crossly. At some point we had become surrounded by dogs, and the littlest one was sitting curled up in the lap formed by my folded legs.
"I hope not!" I said with a choking laugh. "He'll get sent up for sedition."
"What is he to you?" asked Kakashi, unwavering. The sake jug was empty, and there was a second one sitting next to us. I think that was why there were dogs, we'd needed someone to get us a refill.
"Ox-taicho," I said with a snort that was mostly a hiccup. "Like I'm going to just verbally confirm I'm compromising an ANBU identity. Look, I know I'm shit at infosec, but so's everybody else in this stupid village!"
Kakashi only frowned a little more, from where he was sprawled on the roof tiles, running his fingers through a large dog's fluff. "He's always comparing his team to his students," he said. "We don't measure up."
I cracked a grin at that, and the dog who was licking my cheek got a swipe on my teeth. "Aw," I said, and he gave me an unfocused, one-eyed glare. "He just wants you to be your best. When's the last time you took advice someone presented to you nicely?"
"I am the best," he said, and he was definitely whining now. "Since I was three."
"Only compared to other people," I said, and I could see the spark from that catch in his eye, but before he could start arguing there was a shout from below- the front of the Izakaya this time, not the courtyard.
"Haruka!" That was Fuyu's voice. I delicately relocated the pug in my lap and slid my way to the edge of the roof. Yep, Fuyu, down in the street below with Shisui snagged by the collar, flanked by Tonbo and a couple other Uchiha faces I probably would have recognized if I hadn't very thoroughly pickled myself. "We're going home now, you have to come down!"
"No!" I said, before I even thought it through. "I'm not done yet."
"You're as done as I've ever seen you," called Fuyu, very patiently.
"We're howling at the moon!" I said, pointing. Immediately having to adjust where I was pointing, because between now and when last I'd checked the goddamn thing had moved.
"Haruka," Fuyu began, and the rest of what he was going to say was drowned out as I started to howl. One by one, every single dog on the roof joined me, enough cacophony to make some of the dark upstairs windows on the street around us light up again. I saw Fuyu out of the corner of my eye, throw his hands up dramatically and turn to go, letting Shisui slip his lead in the process.
They were gone, but we were still howling. A mid-sized dog with very short fur was critiquing my technique. The big one was giving me pointers. I'd had to lie down again, which made it hard to project. The moon went down. Reality and flashbacks blurred together into meaninglessness. The taste on my teeth was not sake. It was victory.
-stamps big NOT ABANDONED on this story- hi i'm posting again there's still more to post. I'm not sorry about the hiatus, I have a really good excuse.
Not to overburden an author's note with details, last winter I was very abruptly widowed. I said it was a good excuse! And no, it wasn't fucking covid. There's a lot more out there that can kill you and your loved ones, there's a whole fucking cornucopia. That's all I'm willing to say on it and it's already more than y'all actually need to know. Anyway, as you may imagine I've been dealing with Some Shit IRL. This was already a deeply personal story and I kind of lost my appetite for it. Even though I had material already written- this chapter included- I just didn't feel like posting.
I never stopped writing, but I just didn't feel like putting anything up for consumption. Now I do, so here we are at the wake. I love writing about apeshit drunkfuck parties, I love being at them and I love the vibes in that moment. I had to get some distance from it to feel better about this chapter, but coming back to it now? It rings true still. Leaning hard into a support network of friends and family who love me is the only reason I'm upright and coherent. Wakes are important. Catharsis is vital. Haruka is handling herself no better or worse than I did. If she wasn't currently homeless, she'd be obsessively rearranging her house...
if isekai is about wish fulfilment, boy, do I have some wishes.